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- Working Paper
ESG: Hyperboles and Reality
By: George Serafeim
ESG has rapidly become a household name leading to both confusion about what it means and creating unrealistic expectations about its effects. In this paper, I draw on more than a decade of research to dispel several myths about ESG and provide answers to important...
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- November 2021
- Article
Corporate Strategy and the Theory of the Firm in the Digital Age
By: Markus Menz, Sven Kunisch, Julian Birkinshaw, David J. Collis, Nicolai J. Foss, Robert E. Hoskisson and John Prescott
The purpose of this article is to reinvigorate research in the intersection of corporate strategy and the theory of the firm in light of the rapid advancement of digital technologies. Using the theory of the firm as an interpretive lens, we focus our analysis on the...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Channeled Attention and Stable Errors
We develop a framework for assessing when a person will notice that a theory she has about the world is wrong, premised on the idea that people neglect information that they view (through the lens of their misconceptions) to be irrelevant. Focusing on the question of...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Employee Ownership and Wealth Inequality: A Path to Reducing Wealth Concentration
By: Thomas Dudley and Ethan Rouen
This paper examines the impact of an economy-wide shift to broad-based employee ownership on wealth concentration in the United States. Relying on government data, we show that if all private firms became 30% employee-owned, the wealth distribution would be profoundly...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Expanding the Entrepreneurial Cultural Toolkit: The Temporal Interplay of the Substantive and the Symbolic
By: Rebecca Karp and Siobhan O'Mahony
Much research shows how entrepreneurs leverage symbolic toolkits via storytelling and narratives to convince resource providers of their venture’s legitimacy. Although investors’ legitimacy concerns may be initially met with symbolic actions, it is unclear whether...
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- September–October 2021
- Article
Internalization of Advertising Services: Testing a Theory of the Firm
By: Alvin J. Silk, Birger Wernerfelt and Shuyi Yu
In 1956, a group of trade associations representing publishers and independent advertising agencies signed a consent decree aimed at ending a set of trade practices that for half a century effectively precluded advertisers from owning and operating in-house agencies....
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Shared Models in Networks, Organizations, and Groups
By: Joshua Schwartzstein and Adi Sunderam
Why did the market rise yesterday? What are the implications of the latest school shooting? Why did a particular employee get promoted? To answer such questions, we often exchange models, stories, narratives, and interpretations with others. This paper provides a...
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- 2017
- Working Paper
Does Financial Misconduct Affect the Future Compensation of Alumni Managers?
By: Boris Groysberg, Eric Lin and Georgios Serafeim
We explore how an organization’s financial misconduct may affect pay for former employees not implicated in wrongdoing. Drawing on stigma theory we hypothesize that although such alumni did not participate in the financial misconduct and they had left the organization...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
'Just Letting You Know…': Underestimating Others' Desire for Constructive Feedback
People often avoid giving feedback to others even when it would help fix a problem immediately. Indeed, in a pilot field study (N=155), only 2.6% of individuals provided feedback to survey administrators that the administrators had food or marker on their faces....
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Keywords:
Feedback;
Helping;
Prosocial Behavior;
Relationships;
Social Psychology;
Theory;
Perception
- 2021
- Working Paper
The Asymmetric Mispricing Information in Analysts’ Target Prices
By: Jeremiah Green, John R. M. Hand and Anywhere Sikochi
We study the mispricing information in U.S. and international analysts’ target prices. We hypothesize that asymmetry in the value-relevance of information that firms supply to analysts, and asymmetry in how analysts convert such information into their target prices,...
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Keywords:
Analysts;
Target Prices;
Mispricing;
Cost Of Equity;
Valuation;
Price;
Cost;
Analysis;
Theory
- 2021
- Working Paper
Passive Ownership and Price Informativeness
By: Marco Sammon
I propose three new empirical measures of price informativeness motivated by a theoretical model. I find average price informativeness declined over the past 30 years and passive ownership is negatively correlated with price informativeness. To establish causality, I...
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- July 2021
- Article
Discovering Auctions: Contributions of Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson
By: Alex Teytelboym, Shengwu Li, Scott Duke Kominers, Mohammad Akbarpour and Piotr Dworczak
The 2020 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel was awarded to Paul R. Milgrom and Robert B. Wilson for “improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats.” In this survey article, we review the contributions of the...
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- June 2021
- Technical Note
Introduction to Linear Regression
By: Michael Parzen and Paul J. Hamilton
This technical note introduces (from an applied point of view) the theory and application of simple and multiple linear regression. The motivation for the model is introduced, as well as how to interpret the summary output with regard to prediction and statistical...
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- June 2021
- Article
Cognition and Emotion in Extreme Political Action: Individual Differences and Dynamic Interactions
By: Leor Zmigrod and Amit Goldenberg
Who is most likely to join and engage in extreme political action? While traditional theories have focused on situational factors or group identity attributes, an emerging science illustrates that tendencies for extreme political action may also be rooted in...
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- May 2021
- Case
The International Space Station, Principal-Agent Problems, and NASA's Quest to Keep Humans in Space
By: Matthew Weinzierl and Mehak Sarang
In building the International Space Station (ISS), NASA opened the door to the development of a robust in-space economy in low-Earth Orbit, and yet the decision to build the station, and continue to extend its lifetime, placed a huge burden on NASA’s Human Spaceflight...
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- May 24, 2021
- Article
What Makes an Online Marketplace Disruptive?
By: Clifford Maxwell and Scott Duke Kominers
Platforms like Airbnb, eBay, and Angie’s List have changed how markets work. But while many are innovative and make life easier for consumers, which are truly disruptive? Hewing to Clay Christensen’s theory of disruption, platforms—which operate as online...
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- Article
Emotional Acknowledgment: How Verbalizing Others' Emotions Fosters Interpersonal Trust
By: Alisa Yu, Justin M. Berg and Julian Zlatev
People often respond to others’ emotions using verbal acknowledgment (e.g., “You seem upset”). Yet, little is known about the relational benefits and risks of acknowledging others’ emotions in the workplace. We draw upon Costly Signaling Theory to posit how emotional...
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- April 2021
- Background Note
HEAD vs. LEAD: Disruptions Originating at the High- vs. Low-End of the Market
By: Elie Ofek, Olivier Toubia and Didier Toubia
Twenty five years after it was initially proposed, Clay Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation continues to be a major reference for entrepreneurs, corporate innovators, and investors. However, the term “disruptive innovation” is often used in ways and contexts...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Companies' Responses to Social Activism: A Resource Reconfiguration Perspective
By: Yanhua Bird, Jodi L. Short and Michael W. Toffel
Private politics scholarship portrays companies’ organizational vulnerabilities as opportunities for social activists because they signal openness to change. But meaningful organizational change requires not only openness to change, but capacity to mobilize resources...
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- Article
How History Shaped the Innovator's Dilemma
By: Tom Nicholas
In 1993, four years prior to the publication of Clayton Christensen’s highly influential book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, the Business History Review (BHR) published an article by Christensen titled “The Rigid Disk Drive Industry: A History of...
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