Abstract Research Summary Scholars often examine how entrepreneurs' existing ties predict resource acquisition. We investigated the reverse: How does the act of pitching generate new ties with investors? Using the context of the Slow Money community, we analyzed social entrepreneurs' pitches to impact investors. Rather than identify a single strategy that benefited all firms, we found that “stage-appropriate framing” facilitated resource acquisition by aligning with investors' expectations. Late-stage entrepreneurs who emphasized financial process framing acquired more financial capital. Conversely, early-stage entrepreneurs who emphasized social process framing developed more investor ties. By shifting attention from the importance of pre-existing networks to the potential of entrepreneurial pitches, our research explains how pitch framing can facilitate the acquisition of both financial capital and investor ties, thereby mitigating liabilities for early-stage firms. Managerial Summary Entrepreneurs know that pitches help raise money, but we discovered that they also foster investor ties. In studying pitch competitions in the Slow Money community, we found that different messages resonated with investors depending on a firm's stage. Early-stage entrepreneurs gained more investor ties when their pitches highlighted a willingness to collaborate and engage in true partnerships. Late-stage entrepreneurs attracted more funds when they focused on their business track record. In both cases, matching the pitch framing to the firm stage—and using engaging behavioral cues—helped founders attract stage-appropriate resources. Our research shows that entrepreneurs can raise not just financial capital but also build investor ties without relying on pre-existing networks—when their pitch aligns with their stage.
Administrative Science Quarterly · 2026-10-01T10:02:55+00:00 · Elmira van den Broek, Natalia Levina
Administrative Science Quarterly, Ahead of Print. The increasing datafication of work has become a pervasive theme within organizations, particularly with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies that rely on data and machine learning to generate insights and decisions. Prior research has ...
Strategic Management Journal · 2026-10-01T09:07:50+00:00 · Ron Adner
Abstract Research Summary Grand challenges are ecosystem challenges: success depends on aligning a multilateral set of public and private sector actors whose interdependent contributions determine whether a mission is achieved. This study examines how government can orchestrate ecosystem alignment by leveraging distinctive capabilities to deliver solutions at scale with urgency. Using an ecosystem-as-structure analytic approach, it draws on Operation Warp Speed, the U.S. government COVID-19 vaccine initiative, to surface mechanisms and dynamics of ecosystem transformation. The analysis introduces coordinative fiat as a mode of coordination distinct from hierarchy, coercion, or market signals; considers the choices involved in designing a purpose-built orchestrating entity; links orchestration of the external ecosystem to reconfiguration of the orchestrator's own internal ecosystem; and identifies orchestration capacity as a key constraint on ecosystem strategy. Managerial Summary Grand challenges are ecosystem challenges: success depends on aligning a multilateral set of public and private sector actors whose interdependent contributions determine whether a mission is achieved. The Operation Warp Speed COVID-19 vaccine initiative demonstrates how government can drive alignment at speed and scale to address such challenges. The analysis highlights four lessons for leaders: (i) the use of coordinative fiat to align independent actors without relying on hierarchy or coercion; (ii) the design of orchestrating entities; (iii) linking transformation of external ecosystems to the transformation of internal ecosystems; and (iv) strategizing orchestration capacity as a key constraint on scope. While the discussion is anchored in the public sector, it holds clear implications for private-sector initiatives as well.
The Journal of Finance · 2026-10-01T04:24:54+00:00 · TODD A. GORMLEY, MANISH JHA, MENG WANG
ABSTRACT Institutional investors are less likely to support shareholder proposals on environmental and social issues for firms headquartered in Republican-led states. The decline in support has become more pronounced in recent years, aligning with politicians emphasizing companies’ social responsibility efforts, and among firms receiving state-level subsidies and tax breaks. Investor support also varies with shifts in state leadership, dropping by 12 percentage points in the same state when Republicans are in control instead of Democrats. The findings indicate that institutional investors prioritize maximizing shareholder value and that politicians can influence investor votes by altering the value implications of shareholder proposals.
Journal of Accounting Research · 2026-09-30T15:43:03+00:00 · MINJAE KIM
ABSTRACT Bank regulators use peer information for bank evaluations and publicly disclose this information. This study investigates whether the regulatory use and disclosure of peer information induce herding behavior in banks' regulatory capital ratios. I examine this question using a 2004 peer group reform that introduced class-of peer groups for newly chartered banks, grouping them exclusively with their cohorts, while established banks continued to be compared with similar-sized banks. The results show that, post-reform, banks exhibit heightened herding behavior in their regulatory capital ratios. Depending on their relative capital position, banks either become more sensitive to changes in the peer group average or converge toward it. Additionally, I find that under-capitalized banks adjust loan portfolios to manage their capital ratios, and this gap-closing behavior is associated with worse subsequent loan quality, higher bank failure rates during the financial crisis, and, at the bank holding company level, larger systemic-risk contributions. These findings highlight significant implications of regulatory disclosure for bank behavior and stability.
The Journal of Finance · 2026-09-30T07:19:52+00:00 · MIKHAIL CHERNOV, LARS A. LOCHSTOER, DONGHO SONG
ABSTRACT We document that the nature of aggregate consumption dynamics changes when the bond-stock correlation switches sign. We identify three regimes in a real-time, sequential learning framework: two highly persistent regimes where permanent or transitory consumption shocks are more dominant, and a largely transitory disaster regime. We study the implications for asset prices. The transition from the second to the first regime in the late 1990s makes the correlation between equities and real bonds switch from positive to negative as in the data, providing an explanation from the perspective of real consumption dynamics. The findings extend to the international setting.
The Journal of Finance · 2026-09-30T07:18:43+00:00 · CARLO ALTAVILLA, MIGUEL BOUCINHA, MARTINA JASOVA, JOSÉ‐LUIS PEYDRÓ, FRANK SMETS
ABSTRACT Using a novel data set of multi-country credit registers and an institutional change from national to supranational supervision, we show that supranational banking supervision can increase credit supply while mitigating excessive risk-taking. Supranational supervision increases credit supply only in financially stressed countries while reducing the credit supply to the riskiest (zombie) firms. These improved lending effects stem from weaker national institutions, differential national supervisory incentives, lower national supervisory abilities, and weaker national insolvency laws. Moreover, improved access to external finance from wholesale and bond markets as well as lower risk-weighted assets allow supranationally supervised banks to expand the supply of credit. Overall, despite some supranational supervisory arbitrage, supranational supervision decreases firm-level credit to the riskiest firms while increasing firm-level credit availability in stressed countries without reducing it in nonstressed countries.
The Journal of Finance · 2026-09-30T07:02:10+00:00 · YARON LEVI, SHLOMO BENARTZI
ABSTRACT We study whether easier monitoring of personal finances affects consumer spending. We use transaction data from an account aggregation company to study consumers who installed the mobile app after using the same service on a personal computer for several months. We utilize the staggered release of the apps on different devices (iPhone, iPad, and Android) to identify a causal effect conditional on adoption of the mobile app. Consumers decrease their discretionary spending following the installation of the mobile app. The decrease is larger during evening hours and among individuals with lower proxies of self-control, patterns consistent with a monitoring/self-regulation channel and with benchmark models of costly self-control.
The Journal of Finance · 2026-09-30T06:32:44+00:00 · J. ANTHONY COOKSON, EMILY A. GALLAGHER, PHILIP MULDER
ABSTRACT Person-to-person crowdfunding is an increasingly important form of disaster relief, yet its distribution is poorly understood. Linking GoFundMe campaigns from a major wildfire to property and household credit records, we find that higher-income households are 12 pp more likely to have campaigns and raise over 25% more, holding property losses constant. These disparities reflect unequal access to social capital: broader donor bases, more nonlocal ties, greater advocacy by friends, and more generous donors. Donors appear influenced by social pressure in online crowdfunding. These mechanisms mirror national patterns and underscore crowdfunding's limitations as a tool for equitable disaster relief.
Journal of Accounting Research · 2026-09-30T06:25:46+00:00 · João Granja, Erica Xuewei Jiang, Gregor Matvos, Tomasz Piskorski, Amit Seru
ABSTRACT We document that as interest rates rose in 2022, banks largely left long-duration assets exposed to interest rate risk while shielding the accounting value of their balance sheets. Call report and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) data show that only about 6% of U.S. banking assets were hedged with derivatives, and even the heaviest users hedged only a small share of their portfolios. Rather than hedge market-value risk, banks relied on held-to-maturity (HTM) accounting to shield book capital, reclassifying about $700 billion of securities as HTM during the tightening period, more than twice the amount reclassified beforehand. Cross-sectionally, banks with lower capitalization, more fragile uninsured funding, and greater long-duration asset exposure were less likely to expand hedging during tightening and more likely to rely on HTM accounting. More vulnerable banks, especially those overseen by less stringent state regulators, were also more likely to shift into HTM. We develop a stylized model showing how higher interest rate risk, through its effects on bank solvency, run risk, and regulatory capital, shapes banks’ incentives to hedge, recapitalize, or rely on HTM accounting. While HTM accounting can help well-capitalized banks avoid excessively tight capital constraints, it can also weaken hedging incentives among weaker, moderately capitalized banks by allowing them to window-dress capital ratios while remaining exposed to runs. Our evidence suggests that this latter channel dominated during the tightening episode. Incorporating deposit franchise value into regulatory capital without accounting for run risk may further weaken the effectiveness of capital regulation. These findings carry important implications for regulatory capital accounting and bank risk-management practices.
Journal of Consumer Research · 2026-09-30T00:00:00+00:00 ·
Abstract Repeated measurement is common in both marketing research and practice. For example, experimenters often ask participants to evaluate multiple similar products, and service providers regularly check in to see how customers are doing. Such practices rest on the assumption that collecting more data simply reveals consumers’ experiences and preferences as they evolve over time. We find that repeated measurement also shapes them. Specifically, repeatedly probing consumers about an experience draws attention to how it is changing, prompting consumers to notice incremental differences more than if they were probed less or simply left alone. This process has important consequences for hedonic adaptation and enjoyment. In contexts of negative change, repeated ratings exacerbate adaptation by making incremental declines more salient, accelerating boredom and disengagement. In contexts of positive change, repeated ratings enhance experiences by making incremental improvements more salient. Sixteen studies ( N = 16,311), spanning diverse hedonic stimuli (including games, foods, songs, videos, and artwork) and methodological approaches (including mediation and moderation), highlight this core idea that change is amplified when ratings draw attention to it. We discuss how repeated measurement may thereby distort understandings of hedonic decline and consumer preferences, and how to harness these insights to promote longer-lasting consumer enjoyment.
Journal of Accounting Research · 2026-09-29T04:46:24+00:00 · VIVEK PANDEY, JOANNA S. WU, YUANZHE ZHANG
ABSTRACT We examine whether firms apply partisan standards when responding to employee financial misconduct. Using detailed individual-level data on financial advisers, we find that advisers who are in the political minority at their firm (political minority advisers) are no different from their colleagues at the same firm and time in the incidence and severity of misconduct, yet following misconduct, they are significantly more likely to depart—a pattern we term “partisan punishment standards.” This pattern is especially pronounced at firms with lower internal information quality (IIQ), proxied with (1) lower external reporting quality (for public firms only), (2) private firms (relative to public firms), and (3) not hiring an independent public accountant to create an internal control report (for both public and private firms). We also document “partisan reporting standards”: Firms are more likely to publicly disclose misconduct by political minority advisers while remaining relatively silent in other cases. Firms that exhibit partisan punishment practices subsequently experience slower growth.
The Journal of Finance · 2026-09-28T13:57:16+00:00 · CHRISTOPHER J. PALMER
ABSTRACT I develop a control function methodology robust to endogenous or mismeasured regressors in hazard models. Applying the estimator to the subprime mortgage crisis, I quantify what caused the foreclosure rate to triple across the 2003 to 2007 subprime cohorts. To identify the elasticity of default to housing prices, I use various home price instruments including historical variation in home price cyclicality. Loose credit played a significant role in the crisis, but much of the increase in defaults across cohorts was caused by price declines unrelated to lending standards, with a 10% price decline increasing subprime mortgage default rates by 50%.
Administrative Science Quarterly, Ahead of Print. In nascent industries, uncertainty about which regulatory agency has jurisdiction is often a major challenge for pioneering ventures. Yet, much of the literature on new ventures’ nonmarket strategy takes for granted the existence of a designated ...
Abstract Research Summary Users often discover new uses for products that firms may later commercialize, which we call community-led exaptation. We examine how product attributes shape users' discovery of new functions versus new functionalities. Using 1925 IKEA product hacks, we find that modularity increases the likelihood of new functions. This effect strengthens when product components are compatible across product lines but weakens when esthetic product variants exist. Visual simplicity, conversely, increases the likelihood of new functionalities. These findings suggest that firms can structure the opportunity space for discovery through product design. Exploratory analysis of archival data and interviews further illustrates how IKEA responds to these discoveries. We contribute to exaptation, user innovation, and design research by showing how product attributes shape the types of new uses communities discover. Managerial Summary How can firms design products to facilitate community-led exaptation? We find that product attributes can shape what users discover. Modular products enable users to find new functions (i.e., applications), while visually simple products enable users to find new functionalities (i.e., new product capabilities). Firms' decisions to offer components that are compatible across product lines and esthetic product variants can influence the likelihood of new functions. Additionally, firms can capitalize on these new uses by showcasing promising community-discovered functions on official channels or incorporate them as complements to existing product lines. However, functional modifications can raise safety concerns and may require additional development. Firms should therefore design for intended use, and for the kinds of new uses they are willing to seed and commercialize.
Journal of International Business Studies · 2026-09-28T00:00:00 ·
Han, Kang, Allen and Pan’s (2026) meta-analysis integrates human capital resources (HCR) theory and institutional theory to examine how educational systems and labor market institutions jointly influence the effectiveness of high-investment human resource practices (HIHRPs). Contrary to their theoretical prediction, low–low educational system and labor market configurations relate to firm performance as positively as high–high configurations do, and that puzzle remains unresolved. This combination describes the institutional profile of many host economies, which makes it an international business problem: should multinational enterprises transfer their HIHRPs abroad or adapt to local practice? This commentary outlines substitution effects, drawn from the institutional voids literature and organizational support theory, as an alternative mechanism that may better account for its effect. We reflect that theoretical parsimony, while elegant, could oversimplify and obscure complex phenomena that span multiple levels of analysis, the types of topics that strategic international human resource management (SIHRM) aims to research. We then propose a people–places–practices (3P) lens to note the theoretical directions Han et al.’s work addresses and those it leaves for future work. The commentary illustrates how deliberate theory integration, guided by the specific research question and institutional context, can enhance explanatory power in SIHRM research.
Administrative Science Quarterly · 2026-09-25T09:31:42+00:00 · Rellie Derfler-RozinRobert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, College Park, MD
Strategic Management Journal · 2026-09-24T22:56:22+00:00 · Jack Fraser, Elizabeth J. Altman, Pinar Ozcan
Abstract Research Summary Despite growing interest in platform transitions, limited research examines how firms navigate challenges of building platform businesses alongside existing products. Through a longitudinal case study of a financial services firm launching a platform, we develop a process model revealing how data bottlenecks shape platform development. These bottlenecks arise from the interplay of technological limitations and control tensions over data aggregation, sharing, and usage. We identify five sequential bottlenecks, where resolving one reconfigures constraints, giving rise to the next. We theorize how data heterogeneity, variation in strategic sensitivity, and actors' absorptive capacity create opportunities for platform sponsors to capture value without competing with complementors. We extend resource dependency theory by showing how peripheral units overcome power imbalances by demonstrating value creation potential with limited data. Managerial Summary When established firms launch platforms alongside existing product businesses, they face significant data-related obstacles. Drawing on a four-year study of a financial services firm building a platform connecting SMEs with lenders, we show how firms must navigate challenges in collecting data from internal units and customers, making incompatible data sources work together, and persuading partners to share and use data in new ways. We find that these obstacles emerge in sequence, where resolving one creates the conditions for the next. We also find that not all data is equally useful to all partners, and that these differences can open market segments the platform sponsor can serve without competing with its own partners. Managers can maintain momentum by combining short-term data workarounds with longer-term structural solutions.
The Review of Financial Studies · 2026-09-24T00:00:00+00:00 ·
Abstract We highlight the role of duration and exchange rate risks on portfolio flows by using a unique and comprehensive database of U.S. investor flows into emerging market government bonds denominated in local currency. Borrowing long-term mitigates rollover risk but amplifies valuation changes that further interact with currency movements. Our analysis highlights the double-edged nature of long-term borrowing and draws attention to market stress dynamics due to strategic complementarities among mutual fund investors.
The Review of Financial Studies · 2026-09-24T00:00:00+00:00 ·
Abstract This paper shows that high market concentration in the U.S. manufactured home loan market allows lenders to charge markedly higher interest rates than in the mortgage market for site-built homes. Borrowers in counties with higher lender concentration face significantly higher rates, and evidence from bunching at a regulatory rate threshold, an instrumental variable analysis, and a difference-in-differences analysis suggests a causal link. Integrated lenders, which play an outsized role in this market, charge particularly high rates, and we provide evidence suggesting that these lenders exploit their market power over borrowers. We discuss factors that may explain limited lender entry.
The Journal of Finance · 2026-09-22T12:53:35+00:00 · MAHYAR KARGAR, BENJAMIN LESTER, SÉBASTIEN PLANTE, PIERRE‐OLIVIER WEILL
ABSTRACT Customers in over-the-counter (OTC) markets must find a counterparty to trade. Little is known about this process, however, because existing data consist of transaction records, which only reveal the outcome of a search. Using data from a trading platform for corporate bonds, we unpack the search process. We analyze how long it takes customers to trade and how dealers' offers evolve across repeated inquiries. We estimate that it takes two to three days to complete a transaction after an unsuccessful attempt, with substantial variation across trade and customer characteristics. Our analysis offers insights into the sources of trading delays in OTC markets.
The Journal of Finance · 2026-09-22T12:53:35+00:00 · VITO D. GALA, JOAO F. GOMES, TONG LIU
ABSTRACT We propose a new method to estimate the marginal value of capital under minimal assumptions. By combining asset prices with fundamentals, our method provides a quasi-model-free marginal q together with a simple correction for measurement error in (average) Tobin's Q using linear regressions. Marginal q yields plausible and robust estimates of adjustment costs and investment sensitivities to fundamentals. The widening gap between marginal q and Tobin's Q is driven primarily by market power and intangible capital. Our novel findings strongly support the neoclassical theory of investment and challenge the widespread use of Tobin's Q as proxy for investment opportunities.
The Journal of Finance · 2026-09-22T12:53:35+00:00 · MICHAEL EWENS, NADYA MALENKO
ABSTRACT We explore the dynamics of venture capital (VC)-backed startup boards using novel data on director entry, exit, and characteristics. At formation, a typical board is entrepreneur-controlled. Independent directors join the median board after the second financing and hold a tie-breaking vote. Their presence is particularly likely when potential VC-entrepreneur conflicts are larger. At later stages, control switches to VCs and independent director characteristics change. These patterns align with key financial contracting theories, but also highlight unique roles of independent directors over the life cycle: mediation followed by advising. Independent directors thus represent another potential source of value-add to startup performance.
The Journal of Finance · 2026-09-22T12:53:35+00:00 · SPYRIDON LAGARAS
ABSTRACT Mergers are associated with large and persistent earnings declines for incumbent employees in target firms. Linking employer-employee administrative data with information on merger activity in Brazil, I find the negative effects concentrate on employees who exit target firms and reflect displacement in the short run and wage declines in the long run. Low-skilled, managerial, and older employees fare worse. Overall, I conclude that mergers are followed by substantial reallocation costs reflecting losses of firm-specific wage premiums, matching inefficiencies, and industry-specific human capital depreciation, with employees transitioning to lower paying firms considered to be of lower productivity and employment value.
The Journal of Finance · 2026-09-22T12:53:35+00:00 · CHEN LIN, THOMAS SCHMID, MICHAEL S. WEISBACH
ABSTRACT How does demand uncertainty affect firms' investment decisions? We examine this question in the context of electricity-producing firms' planned investments in new power plants. We measure uncertainty about future electricity demand using plausibly exogenous variation in temperature projections across scientific climate models. The results show that uncertainty increases investment in power plants with flexible production technologies, while reducing investment in less flexible technologies. Overall, the net effect of uncertainty on investment is positive when firms have access to flexible investment opportunities. These findings are consistent with models in which production flexibility shapes the investment response to demand uncertainty.
The Journal of Finance · 2026-09-22T12:53:35+00:00 · EMILY BREZA, MARTIN KANZ, LEORA KLAPPER
ABSTRACT We present results from a field experiment that introduced digital payroll accounts to unbanked factory workers to examine how inexperienced consumers learn to use a new financial technology. We find that exposure to payroll accounts leads to increased account use, accelerated learning, and avoidance of common consumer protection risks. Those receiving electronic wage payments gradually build trust in the technology, learn to use accounts without assistance, and avoid illicit fees. Using experimental variation in assignment to bank versus mobile money accounts, we show that these impacts are concentrated in mobile money accounts, the newer, more complex, and less trusted financial technology.
The Journal of Finance · 2026-09-22T12:53:35+00:00 · LAURENT E. CALVET, JOHN Y. CAMPBELL, FRANCISCO GOMES, PAOLO SODINI
ABSTRACT This paper estimates the cross-sectional distribution of Epstein-Zin preferences using the wealth and risky portfolio shares of a large panel of Swedish households. We find modestly heterogeneous risk aversion (standard deviation 0.97, median 7.50) and a meaningfully heterogeneous and right-skewed time preference rate (TPR; standard deviation 7.31%, median 4.08%) and elasticity of intertemporal substitution (EIS; standard deviation 3.17, median 0.70). Risk aversion and the EIS are only very weakly negatively correlated. We estimate lower risk aversion for households with riskier labor income, and a higher TPR and lower EIS for households that enter our sample with low wealth.
The Journal of Finance · 2026-09-22T12:53:35+00:00 · CATERINA MENDICINO, KALIN NIKOLOV, JUAN RUBIO‐RAMIREZ, JAVIER SUAREZ, DOMINIK SUPERA
ABSTRACT We examine optimal capital requirements in a quantitative general equilibrium model with banks exposed to nondiversifiable borrower default risk. Contrary to standard models of bank default risk, our framework captures the limited upside, but significant downside risk of loan portfolio returns. This helps to reproduce the frequency and severity of twin defaults : simultaneously high firm and bank defaults. Hence, the optimal bank capital requirement, which trades off a lower frequency of twin defaults against restricting credit provision, is higher than under default risk models which underestimate the impact of borrower default on bank solvency.
The Journal of Finance · 2026-09-22T12:53:35+00:00 · RICARDO CORREA, AI HE, CHRISTOPH HERPFER, UGUR LEL
ABSTRACT Banks adjust loan spreads after observing natural disasters linked to climate change. We isolate this updating process by identifying loans to borrowers at risk of, but not directly affected by, such disasters. Loan spreads for these borrowers spike in both primary and secondary markets, while no such updating occurs for non–climate-related disasters. Evidence suggests a heightened perceived credit risk, which nonetheless cannot fully explain the increase in rates. Taken altogether, increased spreads are explained primarily by salience bias, as they are short-lived and amplified by media attention. This salience impacts financial decisions at bank-dependent firms.
The Journal of Finance · 2026-09-22T12:53:35+00:00 · BOAZ ABRAMSON
ABSTRACT I propose a dynamic equilibrium model of rental markets that endogenously gives rise to defaults on rents and evictions. In the model, eviction protections make it harder to evict delinquent renters, but higher default costs to landlords increase equilibrium rents. I quantify the model using micro data on evictions, rents, and homelessness. I find that stronger eviction protections exacerbate housing insecurity and lower welfare. The key empirical driver of this result is the persistent nature of risk underlying rent delinquencies. Rental assistance reduces housing insecurity and improves welfare because it lowers the likelihood that renters default ex ante.
The Journal of Finance · 2026-09-22T12:53:35+00:00 · PAYMON KHORRAMI, FERNANDO MENDO
ABSTRACT Why do fire sales occur if many risks are hedgeable? We study a version of Brunnermeier and Sannikov (2014, American Economic Review 104, 379–421) in which all fundamental risks can be hedged frictionlessly. Our analysis shows that fire sales are inherently self-fulfilling. Fundamental shocks can never cause fire sales, and an efficient, safe equilibrium exists. On the other hand, there exists an equilibrium in which agents coordinate fire sales on nonfundamental shocks. A simple refinement based on vanishingly small perceived fundamental risk eliminates the safe equilibrium and selects the fire-sale equilibrium as the unique outcome.
The Journal of Finance · 2026-09-22T12:53:35+00:00 · XIAO YIN
ABSTRACT Combining a randomized controlled trial with administrative and survey data, this paper shows that credit limit extensions significantly increase total spending and income expectations. By controlling for changes in personal income expectations, the spending response to credit limit extensions weakens by approximately 30%. For financially unconstrained consumers, expectation changes account for around two-thirds of the spending responses to limit extensions. These findings are consistent with consumers inferring future income from credit supply.
The Journal of Finance · 2026-09-22T12:53:35+00:00 · EDITH HOTCHKISS, BENJAMIN IVERSON, XIANG ZHENG
ABSTRACT A majority of small U.S. businesses attempting to reorganize in bankruptcy fail to do so. Subchapter V of Chapter 11 (SubV) streamlines bankruptcy for small firms by reducing bankruptcy costs and negotiation frictions, and enables entrepreneurs to retain ownership. We show that many businesses reorganize under SubV that otherwise would liquidate. Creditor recoveries and postbankruptcy survival rates are at least as high in SubV as in traditional Chapter 11s. Our results show the increase in reorganizations is not associated with continuation of unviable firms, and that creditors are not harmed by a shift in bargaining power toward small business owners.
The Journal of Finance · 2026-09-22T12:53:35+00:00 · KASPER MEISNER NIELSEN
ABSTRACT This study examines the income loss following forced CEO turnovers using income data from the official records at the Danish Tax Authority. We find that dismissed CEOs’ personal income is 40% lower in the five years following forced turnovers. The decline is driven by labor market outcomes: labor and entrepreneurial incomes decline, while other sources of income increase. We find larger declines in income for executives with poor performance during their tenures, consistent with the executive labor market being the main channel for the lower income. Overall, the findings suggest that executives face significant personal costs from forced turnovers.
The Journal of Finance · 2026-09-22T11:42:38+00:00 · NIKLAS HÜTHER, KRISTOPH KLEINER
ABSTRACT The random assignment of judges promotes fairness and underpins causal identification across the social sciences. Analyzing Chapter 11 bankruptcies, we find sophisticated parties “judge-shop”: relative to secured hedge fund creditors, cases involving unsecured hedge fund creditors and equity holders are assigned judges with lower past conversion rates and higher unsecured recovery rates. Experienced legal counsel similarly influences assignment. Because judges are not assigned consecutive large cases, knowledgeable parties can judge-shop by timing the filing date. We develop a method to measure the resulting bias and demonstrate the need for controls and bounded instrumental variable specifications in judge/examiner designs.
Production and Operations Management · 2026-09-22T11:03:43+00:00 · Ciwei Dong, Xi Li, Xiutian Shi
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Retailers incur price-adjustment costs called menu costs when changing the prices of their products over time. These products are often sourced from upstream suppliers, who endogenously determine wholesale prices, which have cascading effects on retail ...
Strategic Management Journal · 2026-09-22T08:26:09+00:00 · Young Hou
Abstract Research Summary The prevalence of dual tracking, in which upstream manufacturers simultaneously produce branded and private-label products for downstream retailers, has increased substantially in recent years, driven by growing consumer demand for private-label products. This paper examines the implications of manufacturer dual tracking by exploiting a setting in the ready-to-eat breakfast cereal industry where a leading branded manufacturer began supplying both products to retailers. We find that, because of this change in the vertical relationship, private-label product introductions and advertising declined for products that directly imitated the dual-tracking manufacturer's branded products. Changes in retailer behavior suggest that retailers accommodated the dual-tracking manufacturer by selectively adjusting their private-label portfolios. Dual tracking can therefore improve a manufacturer's bargaining position against retailers and reduce downstream imitation. Managerial Summary Manufacturers have increasingly produced not only their own branded products but also private-label products for retailers that compete with those brands. This phenomenon, known as dual tracking, carries benefits and risks for manufacturers. While producing private-label products can utilize excess capacity, these products directly compete with the branded counterpart. We study the implications for firms engaging in dual tracking and show that doing so gives manufacturers greater bargaining power in their relationships with retailers. Firms can leverage this change in bargaining power to reduce imitation by retailers' private-label products, lessening competition concerns. Our results show that retailers reduced the introduction and advertising of private-label products that directly compete with the dual-tracking manufacturer.
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management · 2026-09-22T07:00:00+00:00 · Siddharth Prakash Singh, Mohammad Delasay, Mehmet Berat Aydemir, Mustafa Akan
Strategic Management Journal · 2026-09-22T03:23:30+00:00 · Christoph Grimpe, Karin Hoisl, Myriam Mariani, Wolfgang Sofka
Abstract Research Summary Firms often celebrate accidental inventions that lead to major breakthroughs, yet little is known about how the value of serendipitous inventions materializes. Using data from 8530 patented inventions across 23 countries, our research shows that these inventions differ from planned R&D outcomes. Serendipitous inventions are less likely to have a strong technological impact, be turned into marketable products, or serve as effective blocking tools in patent strategy. However, they are more likely to generate value through licensing, indicating that while they may not fit the originating firm's strategy, they can succeed elsewhere. Hence, serendipitous patented inventions represent “option-like” assets that offer external channels to capture value rather than relying on internal use. Managerial Summary Accidental breakthroughs like microwaves, penicillin, or Velcro are often celebrated, but their potential to create value in practice remains unclear. Analyzing data from 8530 patented inventions across 23 countries, we find that such serendipitous inventions differ fundamentally from planned R&D outcomes. They are less likely to yield major technological impacts, products, or strategic patents but more likely to generate value through licensing, functioning as “option-like” assets that are valuable externally more than internally. Thus, relative to planned inventions that benefit from downstream complementary assets, serendipitous patented inventions pay off more for firms with strong licensing or technology-selling capabilities.
Journal of Accounting Research · 2026-09-21T04:16:01+00:00 · ERIC W. CHAN, MACKENZIE K. FEINBERG, MARTIN WIERNSPERGER
ABSTRACT Professional development and training are essential for organizational growth and success, but resource constraints often force managers into a dilemma: Should they train their lower performing or higher performing employees? While lower performers with greater skill gaps can benefit more from training than higher performers, managers must also consider employees’ fairness concerns. Using an interactive experiment, we predict and find that how employees react to their manager's allocation of training resources depends on the prevailing fairness norms in the work environment. When egalitarian norms dominate, such as when employees have little control over their job tasks, lower performers take the receipt of resources for training for granted and react negatively when the manager allocates those resources to higher performers instead. In contrast, when meritocratic norms dominate, such as when employees have more control over their job tasks, higher performers react more negatively than lower performers to not receiving training resources. Additional experiments suggest that these fairness-norm–dependent reactions are most pronounced under tournament incentives and may disappear under individual performance-based pay. Overall, our study highlights the importance for managers to consider both employee productivity and the prevailing fairness norms of the work environment when allocating scarce training resources.
Journal of International Business Studies · 2026-09-21T00:00:00 ·
International supply chains are essential for linking global markets but face persistent challenges. While regulatory frameworks are crucial for supporting international business operations, fragmented oversight across jurisdictions often undermines supply chain resilience. We examine how cooperation among securities regulators, through the adoption of the Multilateral Memorandum of Understanding (MMoU), affects global supply chain contracting. Using a stacked difference-in-differences model, we find that relative to domestic firms, foreign firms listed in the U.S. experience increases in both new contracts and new customers from MMoU signatory countries after their home countries sign the agreement. This positive effect is more pronounced among firms facing higher agency costs and tighter financial constraints, as well as in countries with greater barriers to contract enforcement. The MMoU strengthens suppliers’ financing capacity and lengthens supply chain relationships and contract durations. We further show that the expansion in supply-chain contracting is driven primarily by customers from non-U.S. MMoU member countries. Overall, our findings demonstrate that cross-border regulatory cooperation generates positive spillovers in fostering global supply chains.
Production and Operations Management · 2026-09-19T04:01:26+00:00 · Onesun Steve Yoo1UCL School of Management, 4919University College London, London, UK
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Business norms have shifted markedly toward sustainability and social responsibility, placing increasing pressure on firms and investors to conduct comprehensive due diligence on sustainability impacts across entire value chains, as well as on regulators ...
The Review of Financial Studies · 2026-09-19T00:00:00+00:00 ·
Abstract Many economic questions require estimating the price effect of demand shifts (multipliers) in the bond market. Corporate bonds have salient characteristics that distinguish between close and distant substitutes. We show that accounting for heterogeneous substitutability between bonds is critical for correctly estimating multipliers. We find that security-level multipliers are very small. In fact, an order of magnitude smaller than the estimate ignoring heterogeneous substitutability. Nonetheless, portfolio multipliers are substantially larger and monotonically increase with the aggregation level. Furthermore, we find that the multiplier is larger for high-yield bonds, longer-maturity bonds, and bonds with greater arbitrage risks.
The Review of Financial Studies · 2026-09-19T00:00:00+00:00 ·
Abstract In a dynamic setting, high-quality firms may tolerate current adverse selection when raising financing because they expect future opportunities to profitably acquire assets from failed lower-quality firms. But search frictions in asset trading impede efficiency, inviting government intervention. Anticipation of such intervention affects ex ante adverse selection and project investment because it reduces buyers’ ex post trading profits. Depending on parameter values, this anticipation can have either pernicious or salutary effects. The pernicious effect reduces participation by high-quality firms, worsens adverse selection, and depresses project investment, potentially triggering investment-enhancing government assistance (an “intervention trap”). The salutary effect mitigates adverse selection and increases project investment.
Strategic Management Journal · 2026-09-18T11:09:54+00:00 · Paolo Carioli, Christoph Grimpe, Karin Hoisl, Wolfgang Sofka
Abstract Research Summary Prior research documents that firms often collaborate with advocacy groups to mitigate stakeholder contention. Integrating stakeholder theory into a performance model of collaborative innovation, we propose an overlooked explanation for such collaborations: to enhance the adoption of firms' innovations. We argue that advocacy groups influence the adoption of innovations through a distinct, role-based legitimacy mechanism. Because advocacy groups are expected to scrutinize firms' conduct, their willingness to collaborate provides a credible signal that a firm's innovation is socially appropriate. These signals become particularly valuable when firms have previously faced media criticism for socially irresponsible products or services and in industries characterized by high variation in corporate social performance. Using a unique dataset on firms' innovation collaborations in Germany, we find support for our conjectures. Managerial Summary Research indicates that firms collaborate with advocacy groups to avoid boycotts or protests. We introduce a largely overlooked additional rationale for such collaborations: to enhance the adoption of a firm's innovations. We suggest that advocacy groups can lend legitimacy to innovations and argue that firms benefit most from such collaborations when their products and services received bad press in the past and when there is considerable variation in corporate social performance across firms in the industry. Based on unique data on innovation collaborations between firms and advocacy groups, we find that these conditions matter in determining when firms can significantly benefit from involving advocacy groups in their innovation projects.
Production and Operations Management · 2026-09-18T10:07:33+00:00 · Dipak C Jain1China Europe International Business School (CEIBS), 66454CEIBS Social Security and Aging Finance Institute, Pudong, Shanghai, PR China
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. The world today is undergoing massive business transformations driven by geopolitical uncertainty, aging demographics and a vibrant digital economy. Furthermore, global competition is pushing business leaders to think outside their comfort zone and have ...
Strategic Management Journal · 2026-09-18T07:00:00+00:00 · Danyang Li, Michael Jensen
Abstract Research Summary We examine the effects of category erraticism, that is, having moved across socio-cognitively distant industry categories over time, on status mobility. We argue that it is not the breadth of the categories that a firm spans or the overall distance among those categories, but whether its movement across categories forms a coherent or incoherent trajectory, that hinders upward status mobility by creating commitment and capability concerns among external audiences. We further argue that these concerns are more problematic for higher status firms and more experienced firms because they are subjected to stricter expectations of trajectory coherence. Using a comprehensive longitudinal sample of 1413 venture capital firms (VCs) in the U.S. VC industry from 1980 to 2012, we find that category erraticism reduces upward status mobility. This effect is partly mediated by the extent to which external audiences are concerned about the commitment and capability of the VCs, and is stronger for higher-status and more experienced VCs. Managerial Summary This study shows that how venture capital firms (VCs) move across industries over time shapes their status position in the VC industry. VCs that move across distant sectors in ways that appear incoherent, often described in the industry as thesis drift, strategy drift, or tourist VC behavior, raise concerns about their long-term commitment and ability to add value to the firms in which they invest. These concerns make it harder for such firms to form syndication relationships with high-status partners, limiting their ability to improve their status position. In contrast, VCs that expand across industries in a more consistent way, where moves build on prior experience and reflect a clear investment thesis, are more likely to be viewed as committed and capable, which facilitates upward status mobility. Using three decades of data on U.S. VC investments, we find that the downsides of erratic investment paths are especially pronounced for higher-status and more experienced VCs, which are held to stronger expectations of strategic coherence over time.
Journal of Consumer Research · 2026-09-18T00:00:00+00:00 ·
Abstract An extensive, independent replication study ( n = 2,374) of the Mere Urgency Effect (MUE) (Zhu et al. 2018) is reported. The MUE is a surprising tendency for individuals to be lured into suboptimal time allocation by the framing of a dominated option that makes it appear “urgent.” This effect arises even though the apparent urgency is illusory. The MUE is replicated in a base design closely following the procedures of Zhu et al. (2018) but with new participants. Across further replications, the base design is varied to control for putative confounds that would explain the MUE as an artefact of the base experimental setup. A new (“fresh eyes”) setup provides an additional test, alongside a meta-analytic synthesis across replications. Although the MUE is attenuated by adding controls to the base design, a significant MUE is found in all tests designed to control for confounds, including the new setup. Hence, the existence of an MUE that is robust to variations in experimental design and to controls for the mechanisms conjectured as potential confounds is confirmed. At least within the paradigm studied, a tendency to prioritize tasks seen as urgent can lead to suboptimal decision-making, even when the urgency is illusory.
Strategic Management Journal · 2026-09-17T00:00:39+00:00 · Tingyu Du, Ulya Tsolmon
Abstract Research Summary This study examines how divisionalized firm structures shape the gender gap in internal chief executive officer (CEO) promotion. We argue that divisionalized firms may narrow the gender gap in CEO succession by generating more individually attributable performance information about senior managers. In contrast to firms in which candidates' contributions are difficult to isolate, divisionalized firms create profit-and-loss (P&L) accountability that makes managerial performance more visible and comparable. Using longitudinal data on over 616,000 managers in 49,135 US firms, we find that women are more likely to be promoted to CEO in divisionalized firms. We also find that the gender gap is smaller among managers with prior P&L-accountable experience. Among managers in divisionalized firms, stronger unit performance relative to within-firm peers is more positively associated with promotion to CEO for women than for men. The results highlight organizational structure as a potential source of variation in gender inequality in executive advancement. Managerial Summary Why do so few women become CEOs? Part of the answer lies in how firms are organized. When a company is structured into divisions with their own profit-and-loss responsibility, the results of the managers who lead those units are easier to observe, compare, and credit to the individual. This leaves less room for subjective judgments through which gender bias often enters promotion decisions. In data on more than 600,000 managers at roughly 49,000 US firms, we find that women are more likely to be promoted to CEO in divisionalized firms. The pattern is strongest for women who have led a business unit, and strong unit results count for more in women's promotion prospects. For boards seeking greater gender equity in CEO succession, structures and evaluation systems that give senior leaders clear, comparable performance records may matter as much as diversity initiatives.
Journal of International Business Studies · 2026-09-17T00:00:00 ·
Migration and remittances now shape entrepreneurial ecosystems across the developing world, yet their effects remain contradictory: financial remittances sometimes spur new ventures and sometimes suppress them, and emigrant stocks produce inconsistent outcomes across contexts. We help to resolve this puzzle by theorizing nonlinear relationships and institutional contingencies. Drawing on transnational social capital theory and institutional theory, we introduce Social Connectivity Capacity (SCC), the structural capacity of transnational networks to transmit entrepreneurially relevant knowledge, operationalized as the product of emigrant stocks and internet penetration. Panel analyses of 85 migrant-sending countries (2006–2020) show that financial remittances exhibit a convex, accelerating relationship with new business creation, while SCC follows an inverted U-shape. Formal institutional quality moderates both relationships: stronger governance amplifies remittance-driven entrepreneurship and shifts SCC's optimum rightward. Results are robust across GLS and panel-corrected-SE estimators and to log-transformation. These findings account for prior mixed evidence and show that migration's entrepreneurial effects depend jointly on remittance intensity, digital connectivity, and institutional context. Policymakers in migrant-sending countries can therefore strengthen entrepreneurial outcomes by calibrating diaspora engagement strategies to their specific combination of remittance intensity, digital infrastructure, and governance quality.
Production and Operations Management · 2026-09-16T08:36:05+00:00 · Kangning Jin, Ying-Ju Chen, Yong-Wu Zhou, Xiaogang Lin
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Recently, more manufacturers have embraced peer-to-peer product sharing by complementing their traditional sales channels with direct cooperation with sharing platforms to supply products for rental. Unlike prior studies, this article considers a ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-09-16T08:34:10+00:00 · Gloria Urrea, Sebastián Villa, Eric Quintane
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Nonprofit organizations (NPOs) typically adopt either a focused or diversified operations strategy to deliver their services. While the operational implications of these strategies are well studied, their effects on fundraising outcomes remain unexplored. ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-09-16T08:33:00+00:00 · Rong Liu, Zihan Chen, Denghui Zhang, Feng Mai, Xuying Zhao
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. AbstractThis article proposes ForecastClickGraph, a deep learning framework that extracts cross-product relationships and demand information from clickstream data for probabilistic sales forecasting. ForecastClickGraph models stages in consumer shopping ...
Academy of Management Review · 2026-09-15 · Elizabeth H. Eley
Job titles communicate occupational role and status in a form readily understood within and across organizations. However, popularization of a new class of job titles challenges the extant theoretical understanding of job titles as standardized categorization tools. Titles such as “chief storyteller” or “happiness hero” raise questions about why organizations would assign such titles. In this paper, I take a strategic human resource management perspective and develop theory to explain how organizations use unconventional job titles to signal: (a) the re-bundling of new tasks into novel roles, and (b) the rebranding of a role to reflect the organization’s symbolic attributes. Drawing on these two signals, I differentiate four types of titles: “conventional,” “elastic,” “semantic,” and “transfigured.” I then link these job title types to both intended and unintended outcomes in the hiring process. I identify two downstream signal cost mechanisms—(1) legibility costs at attraction and (2) verification costs at selection—that reveal the costs organizations bear when they deploy signals outside established institutional infrastructure. As a whole, I seek to revitalize dormant theory on job titles and offer a timely lens into how titles function as some of the first signals of a broader human resource management system in a dynamic labor market environment.
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-09-15 · Sarah R. Chase, Sally Maitlis, Dean A. Shepherd
We challenge the assumption that individuals strive to cope with ambiguity to move forward from it. Indeed, some sensegivers benefit from simultaneously facilitating and obstructing meaning-making to maintain people’s engagement in the sensemaking process. Specifically, we examine conspiracy entrepreneurship—constructing and exploiting a potential opportunity for commercial gain by crafting and disseminating a counternarrative to the official narrative of a negative public event while prolonging the audience’s sensemaking to preserve the opportunity over time. Through an inductive qualitative approach, we develop a theoretical model of conspiracy entrepreneurship. Our study, utilizing multimodal data sources, focuses on the 2022 Lafferty et al. v. Jones et al. court case, in which Alex Jones was sued by relatives of those killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. We find that conspiracy entrepreneurship hinges on perpetuated sensegiving—a process whereby an actor continually introduces new cues and questions interpretations to shape and sustain others’ efforts to make sense of an event and prevent narrative closure. We elucidate how entrepreneurs can mobilize stakeholders through identity-based engagement sustained by ambiguity rather than alignment around a clearly defined outcome, and offer insight into how ambiguity can become a source of influence for actors who lack formal authority yet shape others’ sensemaking through communicative and socio-material practices.
Journal of Consumer Research · 2026-09-12T00:00:00+00:00 ·
The Journal of Consumer Research editorial team and Policy Board are deeply saddened by the passing of Professor Giana M. Eckhardt, who stepped down as Co-Editor in March 2026. She passed away in May 2026, surrounded by her family, including her husband of 22 years, Worth Wagers.
Strategic Management Journal · 2026-09-10T23:54:53+00:00 · Eunkwang Seo, Christopher P. Dinkel
Abstract Research Summary Strategy scholars have theoretically explored the relationship between legal knowledge protection and modularity of innovation activities in firms, but this relationship has yet to be empirically tested in the literature. Leveraging state-level changes in US trade secrecy law and using a network modularity measure, this paper examines how trade secret protection affects the modularity of firms' innovation activities. Analyzing intrafirm inventor collaboration patterns in US patent data from 783 high-tech firms between 1976 and 2017, we find that increased trade secret protection is negatively associated with the modularity of innovation activities within firms. This effect is more pronounced for firms with superior technologies and those geographically collocated with competitors—factors that enhance firms' knowledge appropriability concerns—and less pronounced for firms in industries where alternative appropriability mechanisms are highly effective. Moreover, our findings suggest that the increased betweenness centrality of new hires (skilled and junior) serves as an important underlying mechanism for the treatment effect. These results contribute to the literature by illuminating how firms strategize their internal innovation activities for knowledge protection and by underscoring its underlying mechanism. Managerial Summary Firms often modularize innovation activities to safeguard proprietary knowledge, but this approach can undermine innovation performance by restricting knowledge integration within organizations. This study demonstrates that stronger legal mechanisms alleviating firms' knowledge protection concerns, such as increased trade secret protection, encourage firms to adopt a less modularized, more integrated innovation system. Furthermore, we find that under such protections, firms are more likely to position new hires, including both skilled and junior employees, in central roles to connect innovation communities within the organization. These findings offer valuable insights for managers, illustrating how knowledge protection concerns can shape the structure of firms' innovation activities.
Journal of Operations Management · 2026-09-09T00:35:00+00:00 · Jie Han
ABSTRACT This study investigates the implications of common analysts covering both sides of a buyer–supplier dyad for suppliers' operational efficiencies. Drawing on the knowledge sharing perspective, we consider a positive association between common analysts and supplier operational efficiency. Using 20,359 buyer–supplier dyads collected from Compustat during the period 1994 to 2017, we empirically find that the existence of common analysts significantly enhances suppliers' operational efficiencies. Additionally, the positive association is amplified when the supplier's bargaining power is lower or the buyer's demand uncertainty is higher. We further examine the underlying mechanisms through which common analysts improve supplier operational efficiency by showing that common analysts transmit buyer-related information to suppliers via both private and public channels and help suppliers reduce bullwhip effects. Finally, compared with other relational ties, common analysts uniquely mitigate suppliers' bullwhip effects and, in turn, have a stronger positive impact on their operational efficiencies. Collectively, our evidence highlights the distinctive and important role of common analysts in transferring operational information along supply chains and improving supply base outcomes.
Journal of Operations Management · 2026-09-09T00:35:00+00:00 · Sunil Tiwari, Ashish Kumar Jha, Jan C. Fransoo, Jason Bennett Thatcher, Karthik Ramachandran, Jan Recker, Gregory R. Heim, Merieke Stevens
Journal of Operations Management · 2026-09-09T00:35:00+00:00 · Blair Flicker, Olga Perdikaki, Mark Ferguson, Su‐Ming Wu
ABSTRACT A hierarchical structure over product attributes is a central input to many product assortment and inventory optimization models, yet no existing method can recover such structures from the aggregate sales data that retailers routinely collect. We introduce HASTERAD (hierarchical attribute substitution tree estimation via recursive attribute discovery), which recovers a substitution tree from standard SKU–store–week scanner data. Leveraging variation in prices and promotions, HASTERAD compares attribute-based substitution patterns and then recursively partitions the product space to recover a candidate hierarchy of attribute-level substitution. Applied to the IRI Marketing Data Set, it recovers a stable and economically interpretable tree. To quantify its economic value, we execute a three-step optimization process on synthetic data with known ground truth: we recover a tree with HASTERAD, estimate demand parameters on that tree, and optimize assortments. HASTERAD's chosen assortments forgo less than 11% of the profit available to a clairvoyant planner, even in demanding settings where a traditional flat demand model forgoes almost 100%. Performance remains strong whether the method is applied to a multi-store panel, where stockouts are unobservable, or to a single store's internal records, where data are sparse but stockouts are observed. These findings are robust across several alternative specifications. Our central empirical finding concerns model selection. A tree chosen by best in-sample fit, from an exhaustive search over simple hierarchies, fits the observed sales nearly as well as HASTERAD's recovered tree, yet prescribes assortments whose expected profits are substantially lower. Fit evaluates observed purchases, but assortment optimization depends on predicting demand under assortments not yet observed.
Journal of Operations Management · 2026-09-09T00:35:00+00:00 · Sunghun Chung, Siddharth Bhattacharya, Chul Ho Lee, Subodha Kumar
ABSTRACT Revenue-based lending (RBL) has emerged as a prominent alternative to traditional fixed-term debt for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), whose survival often depends on operational resilience, defined as the ability to maintain essential business functions under demand volatility, liquidity shocks, and external disruptions. Because SMEs frequently face severe credit frictions, short cash-to-cash cycles, and limited access to traditional operational buffers, timely and predictable financing can create financial slack that helps them absorb short-term disruptions. In RBL, repayment is tied to realized revenue, but the resilience benefits of this model depend on a stable and responsive supply of investor capital. Drawing on behavioral operations, investor psychology, and OM research on financial slack, we examine whether investor-directed digital nudges can increase investor engagement and, through more timely and reliable capital flows, strengthen SME operational resilience. Collaborating with a major RBL platform in Asia, we conduct a large-scale randomized field experiment in which investors are randomly assigned to one of five messages: (i) cooperative social-value message (ii) competitive social-value message, (iii) precommitment message designed to mitigate time-inconsistent preferences, (iv) ease-and-convenience message designed to reduce perceived cognitive costs, or a plain message control that accounts for attention effects. Our results show that the ease-and-convenience-framed nudge significantly increases investor engagement, leading to more timely and predictable funding aligned with SMEs' operational needs. These improved capital flows reduce delinquency and shorten payoff durations, suggesting that investor-side nudges can strengthen borrower resilience by creating financial slack that helps SMEs maintain operational continuity under cash-flow pressure. Our empirical evidence combines an investor-side online experiment, a borrower-side mechanism experiment, and semi-structured interviews with SME borrowers. Together, these analyses show that ease-and-convenience messaging is especially effective for long-tenured, risk-averse, institutionally affiliated, and urban-based investors, while borrower-side evidence suggests that financial slack is the most strongly supported borrower-side mechanism through which timely and predictable funding helps SMEs absorb short-term shocks, meet urgent operating obligations, and maintain repayment continuity. By documenting how investor-side nudges generate cross-side benefits for SME borrowers through financial slack and buffering, this study advances behavioral operations research on context-dependent nudging, extends OM work on platform-mediated resilience, and offers guidance for fintech platforms seeking to stabilize capital flows to vulnerable SMEs.
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-09-08 · Matthew Hurst, Davide Nicolini, Rene Wiedner
Creating a compelling organizational purpose that motivates employees and resonates with stakeholders is a key responsibility of top management teams (TMTs). While much is known about how TMTs seek employee commitment, little is understood about the exact process through which TMTs develop and commit to an organizational purpose themselves. In this ethnographic study, we examine and theorize the mechanisms that promote the emergence of commitment to an organizational purpose for those who craft it. Through analysis of both successful and failed instances of facilitated purpose creation in companies across various industries, we show that emotional dynamics play a central role in the process. Diverging from traditional perspectives, we highlight the importance of negative emotions and the crucial role of coexisting conflicting positive and negative emotions. We also demonstrate that maintaining discomfort by preventing premature closure, carefully managing emotional transitions, and strategically using timing, spacing, and materiality can significantly enhance the emergence of commitment.
Administrative Science Quarterly · 2026-09-07T12:00:07+00:00 · Allen Hicken, Edmund J. Malesky, Songkhun “Sunny” Nillasithanukroh, Markus Taussig
Administrative Science Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Theory indicates that inclusive regulatory co-creation between firms and their governments activates a procedural justice mechanism that improves firms’ views of state legitimacy and leads to rules that better fit the full spectrum of real-world operating ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-09-07T11:56:57+00:00 · Zhiqiang Chen, Wei Xu, Caihua Chen, Jingshi Cui, Qian Hu1School of Management and Engineering, 12581Nanjing University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. We study a joint wind farm planning and operational scheduling problem under decision-dependent uncertainty. Geographic heterogeneity in wind power resources induces stochastic fluctuations that can partially offset one another—a phenomenon known as the ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-09-07T11:56:40+00:00 · Yushan Zhou, Suvrat Dhanorkar, Jinbo Song
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Unforeseen events such as accidents and disasters cause substantial economic losses to firms worldwide each year. It is, therefore, crucial for firms to make targeted adjustments to their processes to effectively manage operational risks from such events. ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-09-07T11:55:51+00:00 · Jindong Qin, Pan Zheng, Xiaojun Wang, Yusen Xia
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Online reviews offer valuable insights for service improvement, especially with the increasing availability of multimodal data (e.g., text and images). However, most existing research has primarily focused on industry- or group-level analyses, often ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-09-07T11:54:40+00:00 · Amy Louise Cochran, Sebastian Alejandro Alvarez-Avendaño, Fernando Acosta-Perez, Keith Eric Kocher, Brian William Patterson, Gabriel Zayas-Cabán
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Observational studies in operations management (OM) increasingly guide managerial, clinical, and policy decisions in healthcare. To strengthen their rigor, empirical OM research has turned toward causal inference. However, reliably attributing specific ...
Abstract Research Summary We examine variation in high-technology startups' performance based on founders' pre-entry experiences by developing a formal model and using confidential employee-employer linked microdata from the United States to examine the empirical consistency of the model propositions. The model posits that relative to insiders, a lack of industry-specific experience creates greater epistemic uncertainty regarding optimal business models at time of entry for outsiders and thus, higher post-entry adjustment costs associated with necessary pivots. Consequently, outsiders have a higher selection threshold for the value-creation potential of the underlying technical ideas. Together, these mechanisms yield propositions that relative to insiders, outsiders have lower odds of survival on average, but higher growth and probability of being acquired. The empirical results indicate strong and robust support for these propositions. Managerial Summary Our paper showcases that individuals contemplating entrepreneurial opportunities outside their industry of employment face higher uncertainty in configuring their business model at time of entry relative to those with industry-specific experience. This results in higher adjustment costs for implementing pivots resulting from post-entry learning and a higher likelihood that they will terminate operations. To offset these higher risks, individuals venture outside their industry only if their technical ideas have higher value-creation potential. This implies that outsider startups are more likely to exit (including through acquisitions), but if they survive, they will experience higher growth relative to insider startups. We provide empirical evidence in support of these propositions.
Strategic Management Journal · 2026-09-07T03:30:51+00:00 · Jaegoo Lim, E. Geoffrey Love, Michael K. Bednar
Abstract Research Summary CEO dismissal is a high-stakes governance decision, yet its implications for corporate reputations remain underexplored. We develop theory explaining how dismissals damage corporate reputation through perceptual processes that arise from features of and reactions to the practice itself, distinct from effects attributable to dismissal's (much studied) economic and strategic consequences. Drawing on expectancy violation theory, we argue that dismissals become salient and generate negative reactions because they deviate from the preferred norm of planned succession and also highlight firm-level problems, and these factors prompt reputational reassessment. The findings support this prediction: dismissals significantly damage corporate reputation even after controlling for financial performance. This damage intensifies when dismissed CEOs have won awards, received extensive media coverage, or led high-performing firms. Managerial Summary Firing a CEO is one of the most consequential decisions that boards make, yet we know little about how this action affects a firm's reputation. We find that CEO dismissals meaningfully damage corporate reputation, even after accounting for the firm's financial situation. This damage appears to occur for two reasons: dismissals deviate from the preferred approach of a planned leadership transition, and they draw attention to underlying problems at the firm. The reputational harm intensifies when the dismissed CEO had won industry awards, received extensive media coverage, or led a firm that was performing well. These findings suggest that boards should consider the potential reputational costs of dismissing a CEO alongside the anticipated strategic benefits.
Strategic Management Journal · 2026-09-07T03:30:51+00:00 · Julia Mokhtar, Mirjam Knockaert, Tom Vanacker, Paul Bliese
Abstract Research Summary Academic spin-off (ASO) performance has been studied in relation to either specific university-level or regional-level characteristics. However, ASOs originate from universities, which are embedded in regional ecosystems. This nested structure can create an attribution problem when either level is studied in isolation. Consequently, the relative importance of these two different levels for ASO performance has remained ambiguous. To address this ambiguity, we rely on multi-level modeling and use a novel, hand-collected dataset of 3164 ASOs founded between 2010 and 2019 from 212 universities nested within 99 European regions. We find that the region effect matters for about 27% for Return on Assets and 16% for Sales, whereas the university effect is negligible. Our study contributes to research at the nexus of academic entrepreneurship and variance decomposition in strategy. Managerial Summary Academic spin-offs (ASOs) bring innovations from the university to the market, thereby potentially generating new sales, employment, and value. However, once formed, their performance prospects vary significantly, and understanding this variance is important for entrepreneurs and policymakers alike. Our findings from a new European dataset reveal that the region effect matters for ASO performance, but the university effect is negligible. This evidence does not imply that universities lack importance; rather, it suggests that universities in a region may have a collective impact that diffuses into regional resources and networks. Our evidence highlights the importance of fostering a supportive regional ecosystem.
Strategic Management Journal · 2026-09-07T03:30:51+00:00 · J. Daniel Kim, Matthew Lee
Abstract Research Summary Social responsibility-oriented (SRO) employers are widely understood to enjoy advantages in recruitment and hiring, yet most evidence comes from temporary or hypothetical employment contexts. We test for such advantages using microdata on a structured recruitment process in which startups hired full-time employees. We find that SRO employers attract greater initial interest, especially among female candidates, and are more likely to have their job offers accepted. Among candidates with multiple offers, we estimate that they are willing to forgo 13%–18.5% of annual salary for SRO employment. However, employees hired by SRO employers exhibit neither greater retention nor higher job satisfaction. These findings validate the appeal of SRO employers in a full-time recruitment setting and document the boundary between substantial pre-hiring advantages and limited post-hiring effects. Managerial Summary Employers that claim to have a positive social impact are widely believed to enjoy advantages in attracting employees, yet most evidence comes from temporary or experimental settings. We study whether these advantages hold in consequential, full-time hiring decisions using data from a structured recruitment process in which startups hired recent college graduates. Candidates are significantly more likely to express interest in and accept offers from mission-driven employers and are willing to forgo 13%–18.5% of annual salary to do so. This recruiting advantage is driven largely by female candidates at the initial attraction stage. However, mission-driven employers show no advantage in retaining employees or in employee job satisfaction, suggesting that advantages may be concentrated at the front end of the employment relationship.
Abstract Research Summary Digital platforms provide arenas for global knowledge diffusion, but their underlying architecture often relies on synchronous exchange, inadvertently siloing users into distinct “time pockets” based on time zones. Using proprietary data from StackOverflow, we implement a regression discontinuity design to causally estimate that a 1-h increase (decrease) in the temporal distance between two regions leads to a 13.6% decrease (9.5% increase) in views and a 20.9% decrease (21.0% increase) in votes between those regions. These temporal frictions disproportionately penalize interactions in niche knowledge communities (e.g., sudo, slack-api) over those in popular ones (e.g., Python, JavaScript). Importantly, we show that a platform can mitigate temporal barriers by shuffling content representation. This paper contributes to our understanding of platform strategy, temporal distance, and global knowledge diffusion. Managerial Summary While digital platforms deliver global connectivity, time zone differences create invisible barriers that stifle user interactions and knowledge exchange. Our research shows that temporal distance between regions on StackOverflow, a global knowledge community for computer programming, significantly reduces cross-region views and votes. These temporal silos disproportionately harm niche communities, where valuable content is less likely to be shared among users who are not online simultaneously. Popular communities, however, remain largely unaffected. For platform designers, relying solely on chronological feeds inadvertently fragments their global user base. To unlock cross-border exchange and support specialized communities, managers could adjust algorithms to “shuffle” content representation based on dynamic triggers rather than just the posting time. Doing so bridges temporal gaps and connects out-of-sync users.
Strategic Management Journal · 2026-09-07T03:30:51+00:00 · Travis Howell, Todd A. Hall
Abstract Research Summary The conventional wisdom both in research and in practice is that entrepreneurs need co-founders, as they bring crucial resources to new ventures. Yet, this same work also suggests that co-founders introduce destructive conflict, potentially creating as many problems as they solve. Surprisingly, little work examines the counterfactual—that is, the conditions under which solo-founding is a viable approach. In this paper, we address this gap. We perform two studies; one using data from Y Combinator's renowned accelerator program, and another using large-scale data from Crunchbase. Across these studies, we find that the solo founder disadvantage is partially attenuated when the founder has either broad or deep experience, or both (i.e., “T-shaped skills”). Overall, our paper contributes to the literatures on founding teams and strategic human capital. Managerial Summary Co-founders are beneficial to startups because they bring needed skillsets, knowledge, connections, and other resources. At the same time, however, co-founders also introduce the potential for interpersonal conflict between the entrepreneur and co-founders. Thus, in some cases, co-founders may create as many or more problems as they solve. Surprisingly, very little research examines solo founders. In this paper, we examine the conditions under which solo founding is a viable approach. We find evidence of multiple ways in which solo founders can begin to overcome their performance disadvantages and achieve performance closer to that of co-founded ventures.
Abstract Research Summary Organizations have become increasingly ethnically diverse, and this diversity often brings together distinct technological competencies. Understanding how firms can leverage such diversity to produce valuable innovations therefore becomes essential. This study investigates how ethnic integration within inventor collaboration networks, and its interaction with ethnic diversity, influence the economic value of innovation. Using patent and co-inventor data from 890 publicly traded U.S. firms (1990–2015), we construct a network-based index of ethnic integration, defined as the ratio of cross-ethnic to within-ethnic co-invention ties, and link it to stock market reactions surrounding patent grants. We find that ethnic integration significantly enhances patent value, particularly in firms that are both ethnically diverse and engaged in technologically complex innovation. These findings are robust to an instrumental-variables strategy addressing potential endogeneity concerns. By distinguishing between workforce composition and collaborative structure, our study advances the literature on diversity and innovation and underscores the critical role of integration mechanisms in unlocking the full potential of diverse organizations. Managerial Summary Organizations have become increasingly ethnically diverse, and this diversity brings distinct technological competencies; yet many still struggle to translate diversity into measurable innovation outcomes. This study shows that how diverse talent collaborates is just as critical as who is on the team. Analyzing over 20 years of patent data from 890 U.S. public companies, we find that firms where inventors frequently collaborate across ethnic lines—what we call ethnic integration—generate significantly more valuable innovations. This effect is especially strong in firms tackling complex technologies, where integrating diverse knowledge is crucial. Importantly, diversity without integration offers limited returns. For leaders, the key takeaway is clear: investing in diverse talent is not enough. Organizations must also build collaborative cultures and structures—from inclusive leadership and cross-ethnic mentorship to team design and onboarding practices—that enable integration. In high-tech and R&D-intensive industries, integration is not optional; it is a strategic lever for innovation performance.
Administrative Science Quarterly · 2026-09-05T10:20:47+00:00 · Sienna Helena Parker-Waldern, Paul M. Leonardi
Administrative Science Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Workers face a cold start when entering new work contexts in which their reputations do not precede them. Cold starts are a particularly challenging problem for late-career workers who leave decades-long careers in formal organizations to pursue ...
Administrative Science Quarterly · 2026-09-05T10:18:37+00:00 · Ahmadreza Mostajabi, Aldona Kapacinskaite, Keyvan Vakili
Administrative Science Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Digitization has enabled modern firms to expand at unprecedented rates, but there are downsides to rapid expansion. Prior research has highlighted how digital platforms facilitate mass-market expansions by resolving frictions associated with market entry. ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-09-05T05:59:21+00:00 · Chenxi Li, Aiqi Zhang, Sheng Liu, Wei Qi, Lun Ran, Peng Wu
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. How should retailers and sellers distribute inventory across a large network of (potentially hundreds of) distribution centers? Motivated by the emerging challenges of inventory allocation facing volatile demand, we develop distributionally robust network ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-09-04T12:40:00+00:00 · Xiangjie Zhao, Yichuan Ding, Dongdong Ge, Xiaoqing (Kristine) Xie
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. In this study, we examine a scenario where each customer strategically selects their arrival time at a queue, aiming to minimize their total costs, which include waiting, tardiness, and earliness costs. Building on the mixed strategy framework studied by ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-09-04T12:39:47+00:00 · Xiaole Wu1School of Management, 12478Fudan University, Shanghai, China
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. The SPOT framework integrates supply (S), product (P), ownership (O), and technology (T) networks to offer a holistic and dynamic lens for supply chain analysis. Its construction relies on diverse data sources such as supplier–customer relationships, ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-09-04T12:39:31+00:00 · Ravi Bapna, Zhuojun Gu, Alok Gupta
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Sniping—the practice of placing the initial bid in the final seconds of an online auction—is widely observed on eBay, yet its causal impact on bidder welfare remains contested because of the endogenous and strategic nature of bidding in real markets. We ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-09-04T12:39:17+00:00 · Yuhan Liu, Jin Qi, Hai Yang, Yili Tang
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Understanding passengers’ waiting behavior is crucial in the ride-sourcing market, as it offers valuable insights into customer preferences, tolerance thresholds, and decision-making processes. During the waiting period, passengers receive updated delay ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-09-04T12:39:03+00:00 · Xin Zhang, Hong Xu, Wei Thoo Yue, Yugang Yu
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. User data is central to the operations of many online platforms, enabling personalized services for users and targeted advertising for advertisers. However, as users become increasingly aware of privacy issues associated with platform usage, they may ...
Abstract Research Summary Firms seeking competitive advantage need both internal fit and a distinctive market position, yet strategy research says little about how the search for the two is related. We develop a model of strategic search that integrates an NK landscape with differentiated Cournot competition, allowing a firm's position to shape both its internal fit and distinctiveness. We show that, under low complexity, competition constrains search, locking firms into resource configurations and creating a trade-off between internal fit and distinctiveness. Conversely, under high-complexity competition drives distant search, so that internal fit and distinctiveness go hand-in-hand. We further show that competitive lock-in constrains search by early leaders, while distant search drives the emergence of new leaders, thus offering a search-based theory of market disruption. Managerial Summary How does the search for operationally effective configurations of resources and capabilities affect the distinctiveness of a firm's offering, and vice versa? Our work suggests that the need for distinctiveness may constrain search close to rivals but also enable the discovery of effective configurations far away from them. In relatively simple environments, where firms tend to converge on the same relatively obvious configurations, the search for distinctiveness is constraining, but in more complex environments it may enable the discovery of superior configurations. Further, early leaders may be constrained in their search as rivals cluster around them, while early followers may benefit more from distant search, potentially leading to a disruption of the market as early success proves constraining.
The Journal of Finance · 2026-09-04T06:27:23+00:00 · KERRY BACK, BRUCE I. CARLIN, SEYED M. KAZEMPOUR, CHLOE L. XIE
ABSTRACT Discretionary announcement timing generates high conditional risk premia of stock returns and a pattern of negative drifts followed by positive jumps. Average announcement returns are much larger than unconditional risk premia. Capital Asset Pricing Model alphas turn negative when conditioning on nondisclosure because betas rise faster than risk premia prior to disclosures, but average announcement returns may appear to be too large relative to market risk when betas are estimated from past returns. The effects are amplified when multiple firms exercise discretion over the timing of correlated announcements. We present evidence that firms time earnings announcements in a manner consistent with our model.
Journal of International Business Studies · 2026-09-04T00:00:00 ·
Populist politicians employ rhetoric and policy actions aimed at disrupting a country’s institutional environment that undergirds private investors’ assets. In this study, I describe how governments led by populists interfere in countries’ institutional environments and how this may affect the viability of firms’ investments. I suggest that populists’ “interference capacity” to disrupt institutions may increase with weaker constraints on executive power and with more time in power, and the capacity to disrupt organizations may increase with government ownership sharing with private investors. Interference weakens the quality of institutions upon which contractual agreements are established and then enforced, increasing the likelihood that infrastructure projects (projects) will face distress or cancellation. Analyses of 2913 projects across 19 developing countries initiated between 1990 and 2018 (allowing until 2022 for distress or cancellation to occur) are largely consistent with this proposition. Projects are more likely to be distressed or canceled if located in a country with a populist-led government. This likelihood is magnified with weaker constraints on executive power and if projects share ownership with governments led by populists. This study outlines the mechanisms through which populist government interference may disrupt project success and provides supporting evidence of such populist “interference capacity”.
Journal of International Business Studies · 2026-09-04T00:00:00 ·
Governments push firms to internationalize not only through diplomacy and material incentives but also by shaping the environment in which investors, host governments, and local communities form judgments about cross-border opportunities. We conceptualize this process as government-pushed internationalization and examine how, in the Brazilian case (2003–2015), historical narratives became a central instrument for pursuing such strategies—and ultimately contributed to their failure. Drawing on a longitudinal historical case study of ProSAVANA, a flagship Brazilian agricultural cooperation scheme in Mozambique that eventually collapsed, we show how government-constructed narratives initially built broad support but also generated two strategic risks for enrolled firms: backfiring, as peripheral actors mobilized counter-narratives that transformed presumed advantages into liabilities, and blinding, a previously unidentified mechanism whereby reliance on historical narratives led policymakers to overlook institutional differences, alternative collective memories, and mounting risks. We reveal internationalization as a multi-stakeholder process in which diverse actors may contest official narratives and reframe opportunities as threats, thereby shaping the success or failure of government-pushed internationalization. We advance international business research by showing how governments use rhetorical history to enroll diverse stakeholders while explaining the risks such strategies create and why presumed historical advantages may ultimately become liabilities.
Administrative Science Quarterly · 2026-09-03T11:30:23+00:00 · Elisa Giuliani, Andrew Spicer
Administrative Science Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Workers in many industrial settings remain in jobs that expose them to life-threatening harm, occupying a dual position as insiders within the firm and victims of its consequences. We examine how workers make sense of organizational wrongdoing from this ...
Journal of International Business Studies · 2026-09-03T00:00:00 ·
Longstanding debates persist about the impact of new technologies on firms, particularly as it relates to internationalization. Some scholars suggest that digitalization will enhance the benefits of export activity by facilitating connections with partners and customers. Others, however, suggest that digitalization will simply fail to live up to the hype—or perhaps even worse. This debate is especially relevant for SMEs given that export activity is the primary route to global markets for such firms. We propose that digitalization will exert dual effects on SMEs: on the “bright” side, larger investments in digital technologies will lead to greater export activity (i.e., higher export sales); on the “dark” side, however, digitalization-induced export activity will generate fewer learning opportunities from export partners (i.e., smaller productivity gains). The proposed hypotheses were tested and supported using detailed firm-level panel data from 20,133 Portuguese firms from 2010 to 2019. Additional analyses and case studies corroborate the proposed mechanisms and point to hybrid approaches as one possible way to balance these dual effects of digitalization. Taken together, the findings shed new light on the debate about the role of digitalization in internationalization efforts.
Journal of International Business Studies · 2026-09-03T00:00:00 ·
Recent work in international business views supply base international diversification (SBID) as an important strategy for strengthening multinational enterprises’ (MNEs’) resilience to country-level disruptions. However, it remains unclear how this resilience-oriented strategy relates to MNEs’ parallel efforts to improve supply base sustainability performance (SBSP). Drawing on transaction cost economics and the literature on supply chain governance, we argue that increasing SBID lowers MNEs’ costs of switching away from suppliers with poor sustainability performance, while simultaneously raising the costs of monitoring sustainability across heterogeneous supplier-country contexts. Together, these countervailing mechanisms suggest an inverted U-shaped relationship between SBID and SBSP. We further argue that this relationship is moderated by an MNE’s own sustainability performance, its relational embeddedness with its suppliers, and the institutional distance between its home country and supplier countries. Our analyses of 320 U.S. firms listed in the S&P 500 over the period 2010–2019 support our hypotheses. Our findings highlight the tension that MNEs face in simultaneously enhancing the resilience and sustainability performance of their supply base and indicate that SBID should be optimized rather than maximized to balance these dual objectives.
Strategic Management Journal · 2026-09-02T12:05:41+00:00 · Daniel Albert, Martin Ganco
Abstract Research Summary Modular systems play a central role in technological innovation. Such systems emerge when interdependencies among modules in a complex system are isolated through interfaces. While early seminal work highlighted the importance of interface design, subsequent research on modularity has largely overlooked it. We develop a model that treats interfaces as a set of design choices, separate from module choices. This model elucidates the mechanisms through which interface design influences system performance and identifies novel strategies for sequencing the search of interface and module designers to improve outcomes. The framework has implications not only for standalone innovations but also for the design of standards in platforms and ecosystems. Ultimately, it demonstrates that interface design is as much a strategic challenge as it is a technical one. Managerial Summary Managers increasingly rely on modular designs to enable innovation, yet often overlook interfaces as a strategic lever. This study shows that actively designed and periodically updated interfaces can coordinate interdependencies without constraining decentralized search, enabling modular systems to approach the performance of integrated designs. Crucially, sequencing matters: allowing modules to evolve before introducing interfaces improves long-run performance, as early experimentation generates knowledge that interfaces can later build upon. Finally, infrequent interface redesign is sufficient to sustain coordination, reducing the need for continuous adaptations. Overall, interfaces should be treated as evolving strategic choices that shape innovation trajectories in products, platforms, and ecosystems.
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-09-02 · Toby X. Li
Firms can achieve competitive advantage by performing activities faster than rivals, but less understood is how firm speed impacts the environment. This study examines the inherent environmental consequences associated with this key source of competitive advantage in strategy. The basic premise is that pressing operations to go faster, which creates time compression diseconomies, is associated with more environmental accidents. Firm and labor market factors that mitigate the speed–accidents trade-off are examined—specifically, greater adoption of automation and exposure to thicker labor markets—which drive firm heterogeneity in this relationship and explain how some firms compete with speed while minimizing environmental harm. Support is found for these ideas using fine-grained data from oil and gas drilling projects in Pennsylvania.
Academy of Management Review · 2026-08-31 · Amnah Ameen, Alexandra Rheinhardt Beer, Kyoungjo (Jo) Oh
Workplace envy is a socially embedded experience with important personal and relational implications. Yet, not all workplace relationships provide the same context for experiencing and regulating envy. In contemporary organizations, work is increasingly carried out within multiplex relationships that span both professional and personal domains. These relationships broaden the dimensions along which social comparisons occur and heighten the self-relevance of others’ successes, advantages, and favorable life circumstances, making envy especially likely. At the same time, friendship obligations, professional norms, and ongoing work responsibilities can constrain how envy is managed and expressed. Drawing upon emotion regulation theory and research on workplace relationships, we develop a theoretical model that explains how individuals regulate envy within multiplex relationships. We argue that envy simultaneously makes salient personal and relational motives—the desire to reduce the sting of envy and the desire to preserve a valued workplace relationship. These motives, in turn, activate a dual-motive appraisal process through which individuals arrive at key decision points that culminate in one of three regulatory pathways—experience-, situation-, or expression-level regulation—with each pathway producing distinct emotional and relational trajectories. In laying out this model, we seek to advance research on workplace envy and multiplex relationships.
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-08-31 · Remzi Gözübüyük, Steffen Burkert, Aino Tenhiälä, Carl J. Kock, Jukka Partanen
Theoretical perspectives provide conflicting predictions regarding how firms adjust risk-taking in response to performance–aspiration gaps. The behavioral theory of the firm attributes increased risk-taking to problemistic search under negative gaps, whereas threat–rigidity theory predicts a reduction in risk-taking. Under positive gaps, the behavioral theory of the firm’s satisficing logic implies decreased risk-taking, while slack search theory indicates the opposite effect. We integrate these competing theoretical logics through trait activation theory by introducing CEO psychopathy as a source of heterogeneity in responses to performance feedback. We argue that performance–aspiration gaps function as situational cues that activate differences in CEOs’ sensitivity to threat and reward cues, generating distinct emotional responses. The relationship between performance–aspiration gaps and risk-taking shifts from negative at lower levels of CEO psychopathy to positive at higher levels. Using fixed effects models on a longitudinal dataset of Finnish firms and a population-scale psychometric measure of CEO psychopathy collected independently of firm outcomes, we find empirical support for these predictions. Our theory reconceptualizes satisficing, threat–rigidity, problemistic search, and slack search as conditionally activated behavioral regimes rather than competing predictions tied solely to the valence of the performance–aspiration gap.
MIS Quarterly · 2026-08-27T23:17:39+00:00 · Xiaoli Yang et al.
Declining circulation and advertising revenue have led many newspapers to cut costs by reducing in-house staff and relying more on wire content. In-house production provides unique content, while wire (non-exclusive) content offers broad coverage at a lower cost. Using data from a regional U.S. newspaper, we examined how the mix of in-house and wire content affects subscription decisions. To address reader-side selection bias, we used local precipitation as an excluded variable to indirectly randomize readers’ exposure to the content mix. We found that a 1-percentage-point increase in the share of in-house articles raised daily subscriptions by 0.024 percentage points (≈9% of baseline) and by another 0.009 percentage points (≈4% of baseline) under a paywall. Against this overall trend, wire business and sports articles also increased conversion, suggesting opportunities for selective sourcing. Effects were weaker for local readers and for visitors from social media. Finally, readers from aggregators responded to in-house content and paywalls much like direct visitors, indicating that differentiation and paywalls remain effective even as readers turn to aggregators to discover news.
MIS Quarterly · 2026-08-27T23:17:39+00:00 · Michael Rivera et al.
As more organizations recognize the importance of providing real-time feedback to enhance performance, a common challenge arises: Employees often lack the incentive to contribute enough high-quality feedback to their colleagues. Our study examines the use of digital nudges to encourage employees’ active participation in feedback applications. Building on cognitive load theory and job characteristics theory, we designed two key dimensions to enhance the effectiveness of digital nudges: timing of delivery and task significance messaging. We propose that the timing of digital nudges (morning vs. afternoon) influences employees’ cognitive load, while task significance messaging enhances motivation by emphasizing the meaningfulness of the task. Through a field experiment, we examined the effects of these two dimensions, individually and in combination, on feedback quantity and quality using a real-time feedback application. Our results show that digital nudges with task significance result in more feedback contributions and higher-quality feedback than generic message prompts. Moreover, timing amplifies these effects by lowering cognitive load, but only when task significance messaging is present. Through a follow-up randomized online experiment, we unpacked the mechanisms associated with the various digital nudge impacts. We found that timing reduces employees’ intrinsic and germane load while task significance increases employees’ germane load and external motivation. These findings indicate that while task significance serves as the primary motivator for feedback contribution, optimal timing enhances its effectiveness. We also found that nudge effectiveness varies with employees’ roles (i.e., managers vs. associates) as feedback givers and receivers. This study provides valuable theoretical insights and practical implications.
MIS Quarterly · 2026-08-27T23:17:38+00:00 · Abhijith Anand et al.
Hospitals are increasingly investing in healthcare analytics systems to improve the performance of clinical processes and patient care. However, the impact of these investments varies significantly across hospitals. The challenge for hospital managers lies in determining which clinical processes will be most beneficial, how long it will take to see returns, and how long these investments should be sustained. Such uncertainties can make it difficult to assess the returns on analytics investments, potentially slowing down future investments. In this study, we examine when and how analytics investments impact clinical process performance. We introduce the complexity of clinical processes into the discourse on the value of analytics investments. We hypothesize that the magnitude, latency, and trajectory of the performance impacts of analytics investments depend on clinical process complexity, resulting in different return patterns for clinical processes. Analyses of proprietary longitudinal monthly data from 11 U.S. hospitals over a five-year period support our hypotheses. We found that within our observed time frame, analytics investments yielded, on average, nearly 1.75 times (75%) higher returns in clinical process efficiency and 1.93 times (93%) higher returns in clinical process productivity when directed towards high-complexity clinical processes compared to less complex ones; however, these effects took about five times longer to emerge. Our contribution lies in explaining how process complexity shapes the performance impacts of analytics investments that vary over time, when managers can expect such impacts, and whether the impacts will show a rising or declining trajectory. Knowing when and how value from analytics investments emerges is essential for managers to set realistic expectations and to adopt an investment strategy that allocates resources to clinical areas where analytics can be most impactful.
MIS Quarterly · 2026-08-27T23:17:37+00:00 · Ben Liu et al.
Racial discrimination in crowdfunding is a significant barrier to equitable access to capital, as racial minorities face greater challenges in achieving their fundraising goals. While prior research has documented discriminatory patterns in crowdfunding outcomes, the underlying mechanisms driving this discrimination remain unclear. This is a critical gap that must be addressed to develop effective interventions. Drawing on economic theories of taste-based and statistical discrimination, we examine how discrimination mechanisms vary across crowdfunding types. We posit that donation crowdfunding primarily exhibits taste-based discrimination, while investment crowdfunding manifests statistical discrimination. We tested these predictions through three preregistered randomized experiments. Confirming our prediction, the first experiment revealed taste-based discrimination against Black fundraisers in donation crowdfunding. The second experiment demonstrated statistical discrimination in investment crowdfunding. However, contrary to prior research showing negative discrimination against minorities, our second experiment revealed positive statistical discrimination toward Asian fundraisers. We posit that this positive discrimination is due to the decision frame participants adopt, and this explanation is supported by Experiment 3: The direction of discrimination is reversed when task instructions are modified to elicit a negative decision frame. Our research advances both the crowdfunding and the racial discrimination literatures while providing insights for platform design and debiasing interventions.
MIS Quarterly · 2026-08-27T23:17:36+00:00 · Gang Chen et al.
The trade-off between recommending specific versus diverse information to users has long been a challenging issue in recommendation systems. In this study, we probe into a novel problem—mixed-grained recommendation (MGR)—to address this challenge. MGR involves determining the optimal recommendation granularity that aligns with users’ needs for item exploitation and exploration. To this end, we propose a novel deep chain-of-preference learning strategy to infer a user’s choice across mixed-grained categories and items, based on category-aware demand-perception alignment in a top-down manner. Specifically, we design a chain-of-preference-empowered deep learning method (CoPDL) that can infer a user’s (1) dynamic and interrelated mixed-grained demands along a multigranularity item tree, (2) self-adapted perception along the item tree, and (3) choice regarding mixed-grained nodes in the item tree by virtue of top-down category-aware inference. Empirical evaluation results demonstrate the superior performance of CoPDL over state-of-the-art deep learning alternatives for fine-grained, coarse-grained, and mixed-grained recommendations. Further explanatory investigations provide insights into how CoPDL fulfills MGR in effectively balancing the trade-off between recommendation specificity and diversity.
MIS Quarterly · 2026-08-27T23:17:35+00:00 · Pan Li et al.
Optimizing multiple objectives simultaneously is an important task for recommendation platforms seeking to improve their performance. However, this task is particularly challenging since the relationships between different objectives are heterogeneous across different consumers and dynamically fluctuate according to different contexts, resulting in a Pareto frontier for recommendation results, where the improvement of any objective comes at the cost of others. Existing multi-objective recommender systems do not systematically consider such dynamic relationships; instead, they balance these objectives in a static and uniform manner, resulting in suboptimal recommendation performance. In this paper, we propose a deep Pareto reinforcement learning (DeepPRL) method, where we (1) comprehensively model the complex relationships between multiple recommendation objectives, (2) effectively capture personalized and contextual consumer preferences for each objective, and (3) optimize both the short-term and the long-term recommendation performance. Our method achieved Pareto frontier dominance over the state-of-the-art baselines across four offline experiments. Furthermore, we conducted a controlled experiment on Alibaba’s video streaming platform, where our method simultaneously and significantly improved three conflicting business objectives over the latest production system, demonstrating its tangible economic impact in practice.
MIS Quarterly · 2026-08-27T23:17:34+00:00 · Ali Vedadi et al.
Securing information assets against cyberattacks requires organizations to bolster employees’ security behaviors, including compliance with information security policies (ISPs). A strong information security climate (ISC) has been found to be a powerful determinant of such behaviors. However, the ISC does not exist in isolation, and its effect on ISP compliance can be impacted by other (in)congruent organizational climates that coexist within an organization, as simultaneously perceived by employees. Drawing on the competing values framework, this research investigates the joint influences of the ISC and coexisting climates on ISP compliance. Specifically, we analyze the interplay between the ISC and other coexisting climates, considering their complementary or competing nature, and the extent to which employees perceive these climates to have similar (i.e., aligned) or discrepant (i.e., misaligned) magnitudes of intensity within the organization. Using polynomial regression and response surface analysis, we examine how each (mis)aligned condition is associated with ISP compliance. The results highlight the interplay of the ISC with coexisting climates and provide nuanced insights into complex and nonlinear relationships among these climates.
MIS Quarterly · 2026-08-27T23:17:34+00:00 · Wei Du et al.
Corporate fraud detection is attracting renewed research interest in the era of internet connectivity due to its increasing complexity, concealment, and long-term duration. Previous fraud detection methods have heavily relied on financial statements and demonstrated limited detection power. While network analysis has emerged as a promising technique, its full potential in corporate fraud detection remains largely untapped, thus missing out on the potential improvement of fraud detection power. Recognizing this significant research gap, we devised a novel framework, NetDetect, to jointly learn structural information and temporal changes in dynamic heterogeneous networks for effective and interpretable corporate fraud detection. NetDetect consists of two new modules—meta-path-based static network feature extraction (SNFE) and temporal network feature extraction (TemFE). We rigorously evaluated each module and the entire framework against state-of-the-art baselines using a unique dataset of Chinese listed companies with a 561K node network. Experiment results and a case study demonstrate that our framework detects corporate fraud more accurately compared to baselines and offers good early-warning capability, as well as results interpretability. Our research results have important implications for various stakeholders (e.g., auditors, investors, and regulators) seeking to understand and contain corporate fraud risk. We also discuss contributions to the IS knowledge base with two design principles to guide the development of similar IT artifacts.
MIS Quarterly · 2026-08-27T23:17:33+00:00 · Romilla Syed et al.
Building on theories of social movements and social networks, this study examines how participants at the core and periphery of a network mobilize a social movement across different temporal stages. To explore the mobilization potential of participants in terms of their network activity (the number of messages sent by core or peripheral participants) and network reach (the number of potential users a participant can expose to messages through their connections), we used the case of the 2017 Women’s March and adopted a computational theory construction (CTC) approach to identify the emergent patterns in network activity and network reach of core and peripheral participants before, during, and after the protest. Our results challenge the notion of “slacktivism” associated with peripheral participants and suggest that peripheral participants make meaningful contributions to social movements by generating and exposing distinct meanings and keeping the movement momentum alive, especially when core participation wanes. Based on empirical results and theoretical assumptions, we formulated a set of propositions to explain the dynamics of peripheral mobilization. This study contributes to the digital activism literature, which has thus far underestimated the mobilization potential of peripheral participants. At the practical level, our findings can help organizers strategize framing appropriate movement messages and activating the critical periphery to increase the audience of their messages. Finally, our research approach may be of interest to other scholars interested in the CTC paradigm.
MIS Quarterly · 2026-08-27T23:17:32+00:00 · Haoyu Yuan et al.
The online gaming industry increasingly incorporates virtual agents to enhance player experiences. Although prior literature has explored the provision of virtual agents in gaming, research on technological advancements remains limited. In this study, we investigate how introducing artificial intelligence (AI) powered agents as virtual opponents (versus rule-based opponents) influences human players’ engagement and performance. Leveraging a large-scale quasi-field experiment in a multiplayer online racing game, we employed difference-in-differences analyses with matching strategies. We show that the introduction of AI opponents can have “discouragement effects” on players, resulting in reduced player engagement and decreased performance. In addition, our mechanism exploration revealed that introducing AI opponents increases competition intensity and immersion in the game, and these two factors exhibit opposing influences on players’ subsequent behavior. Specifically, heightened competition hinders players’ further engagement and performance progression, whereas a more immersive experience encourages more gaming participation and better performance. Further, we found that the effects of AI opponents on player engagement and performance vary by player motivation and skill levels, such that competition-oriented and highly skilled players are more receptive to AI opponents. Moreover, our findings indicate that optimal engagement and performance outcomes occur when players compete against opponents with comparable and low competence levels, respectively. Lastly, we observed an inverted U-shaped relationship between the proportion of AI opponents and players’ engagement and performance. Our study contributes to the literature on human-AI interactions by offering novel empirical evidence on the impact of AI opponents on human players’ experiential and instrumental outcomes and disentangling the underlying mechanisms. This work also offers practical implications for game designers and policymakers regarding the design of AI-integrated competitive environments.
MIS Quarterly · 2026-08-27T23:17:31+00:00 · Tianyi Li et al.
Participants on tokenized platforms (i.e., platforms with blockchain implementation) can simultaneously take multiple roles, such as user, investor, and laborer, and draw income from the last two roles. Unlike traditional markets that typically prioritize one means of profitable participation, participants on such platforms need to allocate their efforts on the platform to increase revenue. We developed a decision framework for determining participants’ strategic participation on tokenized platforms to maximize earnings from investment and labor. Individual participants were distinguished from the platform-average participant, and decision-making is cast into two subproblems: (1) ignoring individual actions’ impact on platform state, we constructed strategies based on metrics that characterized model projections of future platform development and derived the metrics from Monte Carlo ensembles; (2) considering individuals’ actions as explicitly influencing the platform state, we formulated the control problem as a Markov decision process and solved it via reinforcement learning (RL). The framework addresses parameter uncertainty from model estimation, system uncertainty in model projection, and input uncertainty during participant-platform interaction. We compared metric-based and RL strategies from the two solution approaches using historical token price series; the results suggest good performance of our decision framework.
MIS Quarterly · 2026-08-27T23:17:30+00:00 · Shuang Geng et al.
Online healthcare consultation in virtual health is an emerging industry marked by innovation and fierce competition. Accurate and early prediction of healthcare consultation success can help online platforms proactively address patient concerns and improve retention rates. However, this prediction task is inherently challenging due to several factors: Patients’ needs often remain unclear until they explicitly articulate them, and their questions may evolve throughout the consultation process. Additionally, the task involves processing multimodal input information, including consultation dialogues and the complex network of various stakeholders in a patient’s healthcare journey. To address these issues, we propose the “dynamic knowledge network and multimodal data fusion” framework with a dynamic knowledge graph and multimodal data fusion, which enhances the predictive power of online healthcare consultations. Our work has important implications for new business models where specific and detailed online communication processes are stored in the IT database, and at the same time, latent information with predictive power is embedded in the network formed by stakeholders’ digital traces. It can be extended to diverse industries and domains, where the virtual or hybrid model (e.g., integration of online and offline services) is emerging as a prevailing trend.
MIS Quarterly · 2026-08-27T23:17:29+00:00 · Franck Soh et al.
How does participation in platform-enabled user data sharing affect the performance of third-party apps (TPAs) in mobile ecosystems? While data sharing has become increasingly prevalent, its implications for TPA performance remain ambiguous. This study theorizes and empirically examines four competing pathways through which data sharing can influence TPA performance: (1) focal TPA feature diversification, (2) rival TPA feature diversification, (3) focal TPA feature differentiation, and (4) rival TPA feature differentiation. Drawing on the logic of sequential innovation, we argue that data sharing facilitates diversification into adjacent markets but may erode differentiation within focal markets due to shared access to user data. We tested these pathways through a novel quasi-experimental design using the rollout of Apple’s HealthKit as an exogenous shock, analyzing panel data from 724 free iOS health and fitness apps. Our results reveal that data sharing reduces both focal and rival TPA feature differentiation and increases rival TPA diversification—each negatively impacting TPA performance. However, focal TPA feature diversification increases, which enhances TPA performance. Together, the findings reveal that while data sharing can broaden strategic scope, it simultaneously threatens competitive distinctiveness. This study advances our understanding of platform openness, intra-platform competition, and innovation in digital ecosystems.
MIS Quarterly · 2026-08-27T23:17:28+00:00 · Wendy A. Günther et al.
In this methods article, we unpack how researchers can foster trustworthiness in dimensionalization and category surfacing (DCS), a key method family within the genre of computational theory construction (CTC). Information systems (IS), management, and organizational scholars are increasingly leveraging DCS tools such as topic modeling, word embeddings, and clustering to surface latent categories and dimensions from textual data for theory construction. Yet they struggle because evaluations of such research often default to transparency, operationalized as replicability and accountability, which obscures the analytical choices that actually make DCS research rigorous. In this study, we recast transparency as a means toward fostering trustworthiness. We treat researchers’ analytical moves as the primary unit of methodological reasoning in how they design, conduct, and disclose their choices across research phases. We develop a framework that authors, reviewers, and editors can use to construct and evaluate DCS research. The framework specifies how trustworthiness arises from the interplay of two research design choices: giving primacy to theoretical versus practice lexicons, and whether the content of texts or the structure of the corpus carries the theoretical load. We articulate expectations for conduct and disclosure across these design choices, clarifying how proportionate reasoning anchors trustworthiness. We conclude with implications for advancing trustworthiness within the broader CTC community and across other computational approaches to research.
MIS Quarterly · 2026-08-27T23:17:27+00:00 · Arun Rai et al.
Artificial intelligence (AI)-automated decision systems encounter persistent, interdependent, and dynamic fairness tensions that traditional one-off interventions cannot resolve. Because these tensions persist due to interdependence and dynamic interaction, organizations require both a theory of the problem to explain their persistence and a theory of the solution to prescribe how they can be managed. Our design theory, FAIR (fairness adaptation through AI-augmented responsiveness), provides a theory of the problem by reframing AI fairness as a sociotechnical paradox constituted within AI artifacts that automate decision tasks, through interdependent organizational, technical, and governance choices and their interaction with regulatory mandates and societal norms. Synthesizing four fairness perspectives (ethics, organizational justice, economic fairness, and Rawlsian justice), we identify three metatheoretical dimensions (principles, goals, foci) and show that the interdependence within and among these dimensions is the root, endogenous source that constitutes paradoxical fairness tensions. Building on this diagnosis, FAIR provides a theory of the solution by specifying an organizational capability grounded in three design foundations. First, the paradox lens motivates iterative adaptive cycles (surfacing and resolving) to continually surface and resolve AI fairness tensions. Second, design science in information systems and computer science distinguishes AI artifacts (the “what”) from the actors (the “who”) responsible for adapting them, establishing the basis for complementary human-AI agent collaboration in the adaptive cycles: AI agents execute monitoring to surface and refinement to resolve tensions, whereas human agents specify objectives, adjudicate trade-offs, and exercise contextual judgment and oversight. Third, the managing-with-AI literature informs how this human-AI agent collaboration should be governed. These foundations yield two reinforcing mechanisms: (1) artifact-level adaptation, achieved through structured human-AI agent collaboration, within and across the layers of the AI decision pipeline—representation (data), learning (model), and calibration (decision); and (2) portfolio-level, risk-tiered federated governance that structures how human-AI agent collaboration scales across tasks and artifacts, balancing process standardization with configuration choices and human control with AI autonomy based on task risk. Enabled by organizational “fairness complements”—namely, human skills to work with AI agents and structured stakeholder feedback—this sociotechnical design provides organizations with a sustained capability to harmonize global coherence and local flexibility in the responsive adaptation of AI fairness.
The Journal of Finance · 2026-08-26T05:37:56+00:00 · PIERRE‐CARL MICHAUD, PASCAL ST‐AMOUR
ABSTRACT Annuities, long-term care insurance, and reverse mortgages remain puzzlingly unpopular to manage post-retirement longevity, health, and housing price risks. We use a flexible life-cycle model structurally estimated with a unique stated-preference survey experiment of Canadian households to understand why. Key factors include high risk aversion, concern over long-run risks, strong discounting of valuation in disability states, imperfect housing substitutability, and bequest motives. The remaining disinterest is accounted for by information frictions and inertia. We also document evidence of public insurance crowding out, spousal co-insurance, and responsiveness to product bundling.
Journal of International Business Studies · 2026-08-26T00:00:00 ·
When geopolitical tensions pit home and host audiences against each other, how do multinational enterprises (MNEs) respond? We examine MNEs’ organizational identity work directed at external audiences under bilateral geopolitical tensions, where efforts to gain acceptance from one side may provoke backlash from the other. Focusing on MNEs’ national identity rhetoric—how firms use language to emphasize or downplay national affiliation—we analyze longitudinal data (2001–2020) from the public communications of two Taiwan-originated MNEs, Foxconn and TSMC, which operate amid the geopolitical dynamics of the Taiwan Strait. Our analysis identifies four rhetorical strategies—augmenting-localizing, augmenting-globalizing, ambiguating, and affirming—through which MNEs manage tensions associated with the expression of national affiliation. We theorize how the deployment of these strategies varies according to two key contingencies: the level of bilateral geopolitical tension and the MNE’s resource dependence on the host economy. We find that rising geopolitical tensions increase pressure on firms to actively calibrate their home identity, while host-country resource dependence shapes the extent to which firms accommodate host audiences. By highlighting rhetoric as a mechanism through which MNEs strategically manage national identity, this research contributes to the literature on MNEs’ responses to increasingly polarized geopolitical environments.
Journal of International Business Studies · 2026-08-26T00:00:00 ·
Digital platforms often expand internationally faster than public institutions can evolve, raising the question of how they sustain operations in weak institutional environments. I theorize governance capability, defined as the firm-level ability to design, implement, and enforce rules regulating participant behavior, as a dual institutional substitute. When home-country institutions are weak, platforms develop governance capability to fill domestic institutional voids (substitution at home), establishing order and trust where public enforcement is limited. Once developed, this capability becomes transferable across borders, enabling platforms to navigate weak host-country institutions during internationalization (substitution abroad). Its effect is conditional: it is stronger when home country institutions are stronger than those of the host country, and for broker platforms whose governance routines can be replicated globally at lower cost. Using a longitudinal sample of 50 digital platforms from China and the United States entering 61 host countries between 1996 and 2023, I find support for these predictions. These results position governance capability as a portable institutional infrastructure, offering a capability-based alternative to structural responses such as diversification in institutionally weak contexts, and highlighting its role as a supply-side driver of platform internationalization that complements demand-side forces such as network effects.
Abstract Research Summary We study the impact of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) tools on product-level innovation outcomes in the context of software products. Specifically, we illustrate how GAI can alter the direction of innovation by shifting the activities of developers away from generational innovation and toward original innovation, which may be new to the market but not necessarily more novel than previous innovations. We argue that this shift is driven by GAI's ability to facilitate tasks in both the ideation and implementation of software products, which enables some developers to create software products that were previously beyond their reach, while allowing others to reallocate their effort with respect to different activities. Our analyses in the context of browser add-ons provide empirical evidence for these arguments. We discuss implications for innovation research and the generalizability of our findings to other domains. Managerial Summary Generative AI tools are changing how organizations innovate. Studying the Firefox browser add-on ecosystem, we find that after ChatGPT's release, the number of new add-ons increased by 34%, driven by both existing and first-time developers. However, developers simultaneously reduced improvements to their existing add-ons by 20%, redirecting effort toward new projects. While new add-ons drew on a broader set of knowledge domains, they were not substantially different from what already existed. This suggests that generative AI helps developers efficiently combine existing knowledge rather than produce truly novel ideas. For platform managers and business leaders, these findings highlight that although Generative AI can democratize product creation and accelerate new product launches, it may require new strategies to maintain product quality and encourage genuine novelty.
The Journal of Finance · 2026-08-25T10:17:37+00:00 · EHSAN AZARMSA, JOEL SHAPIRO
ABSTRACT We present a model of competition between environmental, social, and governance (ESG) raters who acquire information about multiple unrelated categories and sell ratings. Raters specializing in different categories maximize the amount of information transmitted and surplus, and can be an equilibrium outcome. When investors place a high value on ESG performance across multiple categories, the unique equilibrium is for the raters to generalize—splitting their effort among the categories, resulting in less informative ratings. Greenwashing by firms can make generalization the only equilibrium. We also demonstrate that specialization maximizes ratings disagreement, and thus empirical measures of disagreement may be poor measures of surplus.
Journal of Accounting Research · 2026-08-25T07:00:00+00:00 · MATTHEW BOLAND, KHIN PHYO HLAING, PETRO LISOWSKY
ABSTRACT This study examines the relation between taxes and business investment using the setting of an unexpected and economically significant federal corporate income tax rate increase in Canada known colloquially as the Halloween Massacre of 2006. This tax increase only applies to firms organized as income trusts, but not corporations. Using a difference-in-differences design, we find that investment by income trusts decreases about 0.67% for each 1 percentage point increase in the tax rate, translating into over $10 billion in reduced aggregate investment. In decomposing total investment, our results reveal that capital expenditures exhibit an immediate decrease while there is a delayed decrease in acquisition activity. Our results are concentrated in high-investment income trusts that are most sensitive to the link between investment and taxes. Our study helps resolve conflicting prior results by providing robust evidence that tax increases have an economically significant and negative causal effect on business investment.
Journal of International Business Studies · 2026-08-25T00:00:00 ·
The internationalization of innovation is critical for multinational enterprises (MNEs), yet foreign subsidiaries often struggle to gain headquarters support for their innovations, while knowledge from subsidiary-country contexts remains underused in headquarters’ R&D. This study examines how directors with professional experience in a subsidiary country help boards govern these challenges. Drawing on boundary-spanning theory, we argue that such directors improve headquarters’ evaluation of subsidiary innovations and expand the scope of knowledge that headquarters draws upon. Using 8,264 firm-country-year observations for U.S.-headquartered MNEs from 2000 to 2021, we find that headquarters-based directors with experience in subsidiary countries are positively associated with both subsidiary innovations patented in the home market and headquarters’ use of subsidiary–country knowledge reflected in patent citations. Both relationships are amplified by knowledge distance, the divergence between home and subsidiary-country innovation systems, because directors are most consequential when headquarters’ cognitive frameworks are most misaligned with the subsidiary context. The findings contribute to international business, corporate governance, and innovation research by showing how board composition shapes where innovation is supported and which foreign knowledge enters headquarters-led R&D. Practically, MNEs can improve global innovation governance by matching directors’ international experience to the countries in which their subsidiaries operate.
Academy of Management Review · 2026-08-25 · Dirk Lindebaum, Natarajan Balasubramanian, Mehreen Ashraf, Patrick Haack
Managerial phronesis involves first-hand experience that helps managers make moral and context-specific judgments at work in pursuit of the common good. Yet, as managers increasingly rely on generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) at work, many of these first-hand experiences are replaced by synthetic outputs. While past research has investigated how human–AI interactions alter managerial agency, we do not know why, how, and under which conditions GenAI affects the development of managerial phronesis. Answering these questions is important because phronesis underpins much of knowledge use in organizations. Consequently, we develop a baseline model that advances our understanding of how phronesis emerges in the absence of GenAI, introducing conceptual innovations that explain how new experiences are generated. We then extend this model by explaining why and how GenAI shapes the development of phronesis. Specifically, we theorize how GenAI can shift the development of phronesis toward what we term epistemic de-skilling, when conditions of perceived time pressure prompt cognitive offloading of tasks, and toward epistemic up-skilling, when conditions of accountability activate managerial reflexivity. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our model, and articulate an agenda for future research.
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-08-25 · Jean-François Soublière
Gaining and maintaining the support of audiences, such as investors, analysts, or critics, is a fundamental challenge for entrepreneurial actors, who often encounter setbacks as their endeavors come to fruition. However, initially supportive audiences can react in surprisingly different ways to the same setback, leaving open the question of how and why such divergence occurs. To examine this puzzle, I conducted a process study of “backers”—a resource-providing audience—who followed the first highly successful crowdfunding campaign, from its launch in 2012 to its delivery in 2015. Although backers offered overwhelming support at first, they developed different stances as events unfolded, and diverged more drastically after an important setback. Analyzing the change trajectories of backers, I advance a model that explains how and why supportive audiences responded differently to setbacks, based on the early expectations they set (experiencing resonance), how close they felt to changing realities (cultivating consonance), and in reaction to the expectation–reality gaps that others perceived (resolving dissonance). Complementing prior insights, which emphasize collective or individual differences, the model theorizes how relational differences develop as audiences engage with entrepreneurial actors.
Production and Operations Management · 2026-08-24T06:30:58+00:00 · Yipu Yao, Li Ding, Yanlu Zhao
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. We study dynamic routing in an agricultural machinery repair network where mobile repair teams travel to spatially dispersed breakdowns and both travel and on-site repair times are stochastic and comparable. We formulate a finite-horizon Markov decision ...
Abstract Research Summary This study investigates client tie diversification, where firms enter markets with existing clients. Recognizing the theoretical basis for both positive and negative performance implications, the paper adopts a question-driven approach and discovers a strong negative correlation between client tie diversification and firm performance. Using data from the US federal lobbying industry during the creation of the Homeland Security issue market post-9/11, I find that lobbying firms entering the new market with existing clients underperform compared to other firms. This underperformance is associated with over-embeddedness with clients and agency costs from dispersed client tie ownership among lobbyists. These findings challenge the notion that client ties are readily fungible and highlight relational and agency-related complexities that can lead firms to pursue value-destroying diversification. Managerial Summary Do firms perform better when they diversify into new markets with their existing clients, or by pursuing new opportunities independently? This study found that firms that enter new markets alongside their current clients often underperform compared to those that do not. While it might seem beneficial to leverage existing client relationships, this approach can push firms into areas where they lack capabilities, create inefficiencies, and complicate relationships with other clients, leading to weaker performance. Managers should be cautious about letting client needs drive diversification decisions. Prioritizing current clients may offer short-term gains but can limit the firm's ability to explore new markets and achieve long-term growth. Strategic choices should balance client requests with the firm's own strengths and future prospects.
The Journal of Finance · 2026-08-22T07:03:17+00:00 · JESS BENHABIB, ZHAORUI LI, XUEWEN LIU, PENGFEI WANG
ABSTRACT This paper studies asset pricing under expectations-based reference-dependent preferences in a general equilibrium framework. We show that reference-dependent preferences can generate self-fulfilling risk panics, producing sentiment-driven asset price fluctuations through a feedback loop between current prices and perceived future downside risk—dynamics impossible under standard expected utility. The model helps explain empirical puzzles including (i) excess volatility, (ii) asymmetric volatility, (iii) asymmetric sentiment over the business cycle, (iv) excess asset price comovement, and (v) weak correlations between stock returns and economic fundamentals, alongside a sizable equity premium. Additional empirical evidence based on closed-end fund discounts and quantitative analysis support the theory.
The Journal of Finance · 2026-08-21T13:08:29+00:00 · MARINA GERTSBERG
ABSTRACT How did #MeToo alter collaboration between women and men? I show junior female researchers start fewer projects after #MeToo. A decrease in collaborations with male coauthors—especially new senior male coauthors at the same institution—largely explains the decline. The decrease is larger at universities with higher perceived harassment accusation risk and smaller where both women and men publicly express greater awareness of gender issues. I find no evidence that reduced collaboration improves research outcomes for junior female researchers. The results suggest that #MeToo led to a breakdown in trust that came at a cost for junior women's career opportunities.
Journal of Marketing · 2026-08-21T07:32:25+00:00 · Adithya Pattabhiramaiah, Martin Mende, Huachao Gao, Shrihari Sridhar
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. AI agents now search, negotiate, and transact for firms and customers, reshaping how marketing relationships form and evolve. This article introduces business-to-agent-to-customer (B2A2C) marketing, a triadic exchange structure in which firms and their AI ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-08-21T02:45:15+00:00 · Maureen Canellas, Joyce Luo, Dessislava Pachamanova, Georgia Perakis
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. The management of diagnostic services is a challenging and important task for hospital systems. Suboptimal scheduling of diagnostic services increases patient wait times and reduces the availability of overnight beds that could otherwise be utilized by ...
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-08-21 · Stefan Berger, Hendrik J. Van de Brake, Heike Bruch, Gerben S. Van der Vegt
Organizations rely on team-based structures to promote connectivity and performance. Yet, recent research suggests that increasingly flexible team arrangements, characterized by multiple team membership (MTM) and fluid team membership (FTM), may simultaneously foster and undermine social capital in organizations. To address this connectivity paradox of flexible team arrangements, we integrate research on MTM and FTM and develop multilevel theory linking these practices to social capital and performance at the firm and individual levels. We test our theory in two complementary studies. Study 1 uses fine-grained data from a knowledge-intensive organization (n = 3,690 employees) to examine our individual-level predictions. Study 2 tests the full model with multi-source data from 106 organizations (n = 15,342 employees). Across both studies, MTM is positively related to individual social capital and indirectly to individual performance, whereas FTM shows negative associations. Study 2 further shows that flexible team arrangements (i.e., firm-level structures based on MTM and FTM) are related positively to organizational social capital and indirectly to firm performance. Our findings contribute to research on teams in general and flexible team arrangements in particular, and hold important implications for social capital theory.
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-08-21 · Hui Liao, Yasha Spriha, Qiang Feng, Li Zhu, Zhengyi Zhao
As remote work has become a persistent feature of contemporary work, critical questions arise about how it reshapes workplace dynamics. Our research examines remote work’s implications for employee–manager collaboration by developing a unified, dual-perspective framework grounded in signaling theory and integrated with research on workplace anxiety and interpersonal trust. We theorize that remote work, compared to in-person work, heightens employees’ invisibility anxiety—distress arising from concerns that their work ability and effort may go unseen and unacknowledged by managers. This anxiety motivates an observable and costly signaling behavior: remote employees become more responsive to managerial collaboration requests to signal their work ability and effort. Further, managers interpret collaboration responsiveness as a positive signal, increasing their ability- and benevolence-based trust in responsive employees and, subsequently, their willingness to provide career-enhancing opportunities. We test this framework using a multimethod approach, yielding convergent support across a natural experiment leveraging 1,758,540 archival collaboration records before, during, and after a work-from-home mandate, an employee survey, two preregistered vignette experiments, and a preregistered two-part yoked behavioral experiment. Together, our findings advance remote work research by revealing an employee-side psychological cost, a manager-facing signaling behavior, and trust-based managerial interpretations, offering practical insights for remote collaboration.
Strategic Management Journal · 2026-08-20T11:00:14+00:00 · John Joseph, Alex James Wilson, Jay Park, Daniel Chow
Abstract Research Summary Prior research predicts that information technology (IT) decentralizes decisions by increasing access to information relevant for decision-making. Yet this view underestimates the coordination challenges and communication costs created by interdependent work. We argue that while an IT system with its accessibility and standardization of information may facilitate the decentralization of decisions, decentralization also requires uniform interpretation and utilization of the information. Using a quasi-natural experiment based on the staggered introduction of electronic health records (EHR) in a large US hospital system, we find EHR implementation increases decentralization, but this effect is amplified when care team members exhibit mutual understanding of other team members, task-related processes, and the clinical problem-solving context. We contribute to theories of information processing, organization design, and coordination in healthcare. Managerial Summary Organizations often adopt information technology (IT), expecting that better access to standardized information will allow frontline employees to make more decisions independently. Our study shows that IT alone does not increase decentralization. In highly interdependent environments, such as hospitals, decentralized decision-making also requires that team members interpret and use information more uniformly. Using the staggered rollout of electronic health records (EHR) in a large US hospital system, we find that EHRs increase decentralization, with substantially stronger effects when care team members share a mutual understanding of each other, of core work processes, and of the clinical context. In practice, this means routine decisions move down to nurses and other care team members, freeing physicians' time for work that requires specialized clinical expertise. Our study demonstrates that organizations should pair technology investments with efforts to build shared knowledge and common practices across teams to better ensure changes to the design of hospital care teams.
Abstract Research Summary Abduction offers a mode of scientific inquiry that focuses on formulating explanations for unexplained phenomena. By building a bridge between philosophy of science and strategic management research, this article offers a pluralistic view of abduction, highlighting abductive triggers as the starting point in seeking explanations and the essential role of both creative and selective abduction in formulating explanations. Additionally, this article provides practical guidance for the design, execution, and evaluation of abductive research, including the usefulness of abduction for studies not designed as abductive. We offer orienting considerations about abduction's steps and elements, illustrate with examples, and outline potential missteps. Abduction does not lend itself to a fixed template, and we aim to lower the barriers to using abduction in strategic management research. Managerial Summary Abductive inquiry develops explanations for unexplained observations. This article connects philosophy of science with strategic management research to highlight the variety of forms abduction can take, including generating explanations in creative abduction and adjudicating explanations in selective abduction. By providing strategic management researchers with greater clarity about abductive inquiry, the article contributes to the development of explanatory insights that can help managers identify the causes underpinning organizational outcomes and make informed strategic decisions. This contribution is relevant because strategy is concerned with how interdependent organizational choices and actions influence outcomes, requiring managers not only to predict what may happen, but also to explain why outcomes occur so that they can intervene effectively.
INFORMS Journal on Computing · 2026-08-20T07:00:00+00:00 · François Vanderbeck, Guillaume Marques, Ruslan Sadykov, Vitor Nesello, Natacha Javerzat, Artur Pessoa, Teobaldo Bulhões, Cristiana Bentes, Vinicius L. de Lima, Anand Subramanian
Journal of Accounting Research · 2026-08-20T06:03:41+00:00 · Devin Shanthikumar, Il Sun Yoo
ABSTRACT We examine how analysts’ information acquisition and processing differ when analysts have access to AI resources, focusing on investment banks’ AI investments. We propose and test a two-step framework, which is informed by in-depth interviews with analysts. First, consistent with AI facilitating automation-assisted public information processing, we show that AI investments are associated with more timely earnings forecasts following 10-K filings, particularly after the implementation of iXBRL, which increases the machine readability of filings. Second, we show that analysts reallocate the time and capacity freed by automation toward acquiring and incorporating private information, supported by several sets of evidence: AI investments (1) are associated with higher quality and bolder earnings forecasts, particularly when private information is more important and accessible to analysts; (2) are associated with an expansion of analyst coverage to new firms and industries; and (3) are associated with higher information-seeking efforts, particularly greater participation in earnings conference calls. Additionally, exploiting the launch of AskResearchGPT at Morgan Stanley, an in-house generative AI designed for research, we find results consistent with our main analyses. Overall, our study provides insights into the potential for AI to reshape the human value of sell-side analysts.
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-08-20 · Ting Zhang
People often seek advice from those with more expertise. However, expertise can create a barrier to providing useful advice as it limits advisers’ ability to communicate concretely, yielding advice that may fall short of its potential value. In this paper, I examine how rediscovering a beginner’s mind—defined as a process of experiencing one’s former novice state of development in a focal domain—enables advisers to give more useful advice to novices. Because every adviser was once a novice, this former self can be a valuable resource when giving advice. Building on construal theory, I test whether rediscovering a beginner’s mind helps advisers communicate more concretely, generating advice that novices view as more useful and worthy of adoption. Across three main studies featuring managers and musicians, including one correlational study and two experiments (with 656 advisers and 571 advisees, generating 3,762 unique pairs), I find the predicted patterns and demonstrate how rediscovering a beginner’s mind operates beyond recalling past experiences or learning new skills more generally. I discuss how these findings contribute to our understanding of how advisers can be better equipped to provide developmental advice.
Strategic Management Journal · 2026-08-19T07:46:59+00:00 · Miguel Espinosa, Hyunjin Kim, Sergio Prada
Abstract Research Summary Recent technological advancements have enabled more data-driven decision-making across firms. While prior literature highlights the value of using more data, there is less insight on the impact of information speed, particularly how quickly decision-makers can access it. We study how faster information access influences how decision-makers acquire information and make decisions, using data from healthcare. We examine a technology that visually displayed when test results became available, accelerating information access for 64,152 decisions by 387 physicians. Faster access allowed decision-makers to gather less but more targeted information, resolving uncertainty earlier and speeding up decisions, while ultimately improving decision outcomes by supporting more effective information processing. Our findings show that investing in data velocity can yield significant benefits through both faster and better decisions. Managerial Summary Our research shows that the speed at which decision-makers access information can be just as important as the amount of data available. Studying the introduction of a real-time dashboard in a hospital emergency department, we find that simply reducing delays in seeing lab results-without changing the information itself-led physicians to order fewer and more targeted tests (cutting charges by 25%), reduce patient length of stay by 13% (about 75 minutes), and improve outcomes, with lower hospitalization rates and higher patient satisfaction. The biggest gains occurred under high workload and in less common cases, where early signals are especially valuable. The key insight for managers is that faster information access does not just accelerate decisions; it improves how decisions are made by enabling more focused information gathering and better use of early signals. Investing in tools that reduce friction in accessing data can therefore increase efficiency and quality simultaneously, creating advantage not just through speed, but through better decision-making.
Academy of Management Review · 2026-08-19 · Daniel Albert, Felipe A. Csaszar
Organizations increasingly pursue multiple objectives, yet we know little about how boundedly rational firms search for better strategies when performance is multidimensional. We use corporate social responsibility—pursuing social and financial outcomes simultaneously—as a motivating context. We distinguish multi-objective decision-making (choosing among known alternatives) from multi-objective search (discovering alternatives through path-dependent local moves), and argue that preferences matter through the heuristics that implement them during search. In a dual-landscape NK simulation, we compare five prominent heuristics: Maximize (improve financial performance only), Combine (raise the sum of financial and social performance), Alternate (pursue one goal until stuck, then switch), Penalize (maximize financial performance while deducting shortfalls below a social threshold), and Satisfice (prioritize financial performance only after meeting a social threshold). Across varying complexity, goal correlation, and thresholds, these heuristics produce systematically different trajectories and joint outcomes. Importantly, by escaping local financial optima, Alternate often discovers “oblique” strategies that match or exceed the financial performance achieved by profit-only local search while also improving social performance. We conclude that implementing the same multi-goal preferences through different search heuristics steers firms toward different regions of the social–financial frontier, shaping both the compromises they reach and the opportunities they discover.
Production and Operations Management · 2026-08-18T12:58:02+00:00 · Hongyu Chen, Hanwei Li, David Simchi-Levi, Michelle Xiao Wu, Weiming Zhu
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Online platforms often expand their seller base to offer greater product variety and serve heterogeneous consumer preferences. However, a larger seller base can also intensify price competition among sellers and reduce platform revenue. Building on the ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-08-18T12:57:42+00:00 · Junyi Liu, Qihang Sun, Jinxing Xie, Shilin Yuan
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Advertising and pricing are two important marketing decisions that promote demand and increase a firm’s market share. However, it is often costly or even impossible for a company to accurately estimate the advertising system’s state and select appropriate ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-08-18T12:57:03+00:00 · Ruina Yang, Yingdan Zhang, Zelong Yi, Yulan Wang, Yu Pan
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. This article explores the interaction between demand expansion and information sharing in competing supply chains, where each supply chain consists of one manufacturer and one retailer. Retailers compete on quantity and decide whether to share their ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-08-18T12:56:43+00:00 · Erbao Cao, Zhenghua Zhang, Gangshu (George) Cai
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. This paper investigates the informed retailer's demand-information sharing problem within a supply chain characterized by production economies or diseconomies of scale and downstream competition. Using a game-theoretical model, we analyze multiple ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-08-18T12:56:22+00:00 · Jaachinma Okafor, Russell R Barton, Paolo Letizia, Gilvan C Souza
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Energy access remains a critical challenge in developing countries due to the unreliability of the power grid. This article studies a servicizing framework in which a third-party firm, distinct from the grid provider, installs and operates a solar–battery ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-08-18T12:55:53+00:00 · Tianqi Song, Biying Shou, Pengfei Guo
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. We consider the information design and inventory management problem in the context of consumer stockpiling under supply chain disruption risk. Employing a Bayesian persuasion framework, we characterize consumers’ rational stockpiling behavior and examine ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-08-18T12:50:42+00:00 · Jiajia Qu, Raj Sharman, Indranil R Bardhan
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Patient navigation (PN) programs have been widely implemented to improve healthcare access and reduce avoidable healthcare utilization through care coordination and preventive care management. However, evidence regarding their effectiveness and economic ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-08-18T12:50:21+00:00 · Xiao Huang, Reza Nazari Khanmiri, Georges Zaccour
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Digital platforms expose customers to product fit uncertainty, which may inhibit online purchases. As a result, firms may encourage online orders through influence tools such as influencer posts and promotional reviews, which can raise product awareness ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-08-18T12:49:57+00:00 · Max Ji, Suvrat Dhanorkar, Kevin Linderman, Suresh Muthulingam
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. A growing body of work has examined how workplace policies promoting fair treatment influence workplace culture and the work environment. Much less is known about whether such policies spill over to facility-level environmental outcomes in manufacturing. ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-08-18T12:49:36+00:00 · Jing Wu, Hsiao-Hui Lee, John R Birge
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Trade credit is a dominant source of short-term financing in supply chains, yet little is known about how firms repay trade credit in practice because data on realized payment timing are rarely available. Using a unique dataset from Dun & Bradstreet that ...
Academy of Management Review · 2026-08-18 · Vern L. Glaser, Jennifer Sloan, Rodrigo Valadão, Evelyn R. Micelotta
Organizational scholars have long recognized that espoused values diverge from enacted values. Large language models (LLM)-based AI agents—autonomous software systems capable of perceiving environments, making decisions, collaborating, and taking actions to achieve defined goals—create a novel form of this classic problem. Unlike traditional technologies where humans retain interpretive control, AI agents autonomously navigate value trade-offs, and enacted values may differ from those espoused. How does the interaction of humans and AI transform espoused organizational values? Drawing on assemblage theory, we trace values transformation across three stacked assemblages (the LLM assemblage, the AI agent assemblage, and the algorithmic routine assemblage) through three transformation moments. During configuration, inherited orientations become explicit parameters; during embedding, parameters are integrated into organizational routines; and during performance, values are enacted through the interplay of algorithmic pathways and improvised responses. Recursive feedback connects enacted outcomes to subsequent configurations, producing ongoing transformation rather than stable alignment. Our framework extends scholarship on espoused and enacted values by specifying technologically mediated transformation mechanisms produced through the interaction of humans and AI. We also extend research on values work by showing how AI agents enact values without recognizing when those values no longer fit, leaving human improvisation to diagnose where value translation has faltered.
Journal of Accounting Research · 2026-08-17T05:10:03+00:00 · John M. Barrios, Jung Ho Choi, Yael V. Hochberg, Jinhwan Kim, Miao Liu
ABSTRACT We examine the spillover effects of local initial public offerings (IPOs) on new business formation. An IPO in a local area is associated with a 1%–4% increase in new business registrations, and this effect is particularly pronounced in counties facing higher economic uncertainty. New business registrations are significantly influenced by the extent of EDGAR downloads related to the IPO firm's public disclosures and the information in the IPO firm's S-1 disclosure. The findings highlight the role of IPOs in conveying crucial information through signaling of potential success prospects and additional provision of information through disclosures. A field survey of 503 entrepreneurs further supports these conclusions.
Journal of Accounting Research · 2026-08-17T05:04:30+00:00 · AJ YUAN CHEN, MATTHEW A. PHILLIPS, REGINA WITTENBERG‐MOERMAN, TIANGE YE
ABSTRACT Prior studies predominantly examine fundamental performance-driven explanations of loan renegotiations. We contrast with this work by investigating the improvement in secondary loan market trading conditions as a non-fundamental driver of loan renegotiation. Exploiting a regression discontinuity design around the LSTA 100 Index reconstitution, we find that index-included loans are around five times more likely to receive interest-rate–reducing amendments than comparable loans just below the index inclusion threshold. Within-loan-package tests confirm that these renegotiations are not driven by changes in the borrower's fundamental performance. The threat of refinancing likely drives this effect, as the results are more pronounced when such threats are more credible.
Academy of Management Review · 2026-08-17 · Natalie Holzaepfel, Olga Hawn, Timothy Werner
Organizations face mounting pressure from stakeholders to change practices and policies, yet scholarly understanding of how organizations manage this pressure remains incomplete. While existing research has examined various organizational responses to stakeholder pressure—including acquiescence, neglect, collaboration, and resistance—these responses have been predominantly reactive and discrete, with research overlooking a more systematic approach organizations can employ to neutralize stakeholder pressure before it emerges, and end it if it materializes. To address this gap, this paper introduces organizational repression as an integrated strategy aimed at preventing, controlling, or constraining stakeholder collective action from evolving. Drawing on the social movements and state-based repression literatures, we theorize how organizations can effectively undermine collective action by targeting its enabling conditions across three distinct phases: emergence, coalescence, and formalization. We propose five key repressive tactics—manipulating threat perceptions, closing opportunity structures, restricting resources, selectively disincentivizing recruits, and fragmenting coalitions of members and allies—and explore how organizations can implement each. Ultimately, this paper contributes to the social movements and nonmarket strategy literatures by theorizing organizational repression as a stakeholder management strategy and revealing how organizations can undermine stakeholder efforts to produce organizational and societal change.
Production and Operations Management · 2026-08-13T05:40:49+00:00 · George P Ball, Ruth Beer, Rodney P Parker, Gloria Urrea, Sebastián Villa
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. When an automotive manufacturer recalls a defective vehicle, federal law requires the manufacturer to send a recall notification letter to affected consumers using standardized language. Regardless of whether the recall was initiated voluntarily by the ...
Journal of Operations Management · 2026-08-12T07:00:00+00:00 · Fu Jia, Yingjie Ju, Robert D. Klassen, Lujie Chen, Tobias Schoenherr
ABSTRACT Carbon emissions trading schemes (CETS) are a prominent market-based instrument for addressing climate change, yet their effects on corporate disclosure remain insufficiently understood. Drawing on institutional theory, we develop a pressure–capability–cognition framework to examine how CETS influence firms' environmental and social (E&S) disclosure and how institutional pressures and internal organizational factors shape heterogeneous disclosure responses. Exploiting the staggered implementation of China's CETS between 2013 and 2024 as a quasi-natural experiment, we employ a multi-period difference-in-differences design using 16,348 firm-year observations from 1682 listed firms between 2010 and 2024. We report three principal findings. First, CETS significantly increase the level of firm E&S disclosure, indicating that the influence of CETS extends beyond environmental reporting to social responsibility disclosure. Second, institutional pressures generate distinct disclosure strategies. Under coercive participation, CETS exhibits a marginally significant positive effect on social disclosure but no significant effect on environmental disclosure, consistent with a legitimacy compensation mechanism whereby firms offset environmental legitimacy deficits through low-cost, highly visible symbolic reporting. By contrast, under non-coercive participation, CETS significantly promotes both environmental and social disclosure, suggesting that firms use disclosure as a strategic signaling device. Third, operational efficiency negatively moderates the CETS–disclosure relationship, whereas managerial environmental focus positively moderates this relationship, revealing that internal capabilities and managerial cognition condition the effectiveness of institutional pressures in shaping disclosure outcomes. These findings contribute to sustainable operations management research by demonstrating how institutional pressures interact with operational capabilities and managerial cognition to shape corporate sustainability disclosure.
Production and Operations Management · 2026-08-10T03:56:30+00:00 · Hongseok Jang, Janice E Carrillo, Kyung Sung Jung, Young Kwark
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Recent press coverage of piracy and digital goods touts the practice of subscription (as opposed to selling) as a “piracy killer.” However, the effectiveness of digital goods subscriptions remains controversial in terms of the profitability for different ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-08-10T03:55:56+00:00 · Yingru “Ruby” Han, Luv Sharma, Pelin Pekgün
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Nonprofit organizations (NPOs) rely heavily on fundraising activities to generate the resources necessary to fulfill their missions and sustain their programs and services. While fundraising is inherently labor-intensive, current research often overlooks ...
Journal of International Business Studies · 2026-08-10T00:00:00 ·
Acculturation is a critical yet insufficiently theorized process underlying expatriates’ and migrants’ cross-cultural adjustment. A central assumption in acculturation research is that adjustment depends on the fit between individuals and their environment, yet the concept of fit and its temporal development remain underdeveloped. We develop a dynamic conceptual model of acculturation by integrating person–environment (P–E) fit theory with acculturation research, and conceptualize acculturation as a continuous interaction between individuals’ abilities and needs, environmental demands and supplies, and cultural value congruence. We theorize two forms of acculturation fit, expected–performed (demands–abilities) and preferred–enabled (needs–supplies), that jointly shape cross-cultural adjustment and acculturative stress. The model unfolds in three phases: initial acculturation conditions defined by P–E fit and value congruence; stress-triggered fit adaptation; and longer-term value alignment. Within this framework, acculturative stress is reconceptualized as a conditional motivational force that can drive adaptive or maladaptive responses depending on value congruence. We further introduce structural (over- vs. under-misfit) and temporal (short- vs. long-term) asymmetries to explain how misfit conditions generate immediate behavioral adaptation and longer-term value change. The framework offers greater theoretical precision for understanding acculturation dynamics and provides actionable insights for managing globally mobile professionals in international business.
Management Science · 2026-08-07T07:00:00+00:00 · Hemant K. Bhargava, Sarah H. Bana, Zhe Zhang, Laura Brandimarte, Vidyanand Choudhary, J. Frank Li, Pantelis Loupos, Daniel Zantedeschi
Journal of Accounting Research · 2026-08-07T06:45:44+00:00 · Richard Crandall, Shannon Garavaglia, Cassie Mongold
ABSTRACT Operating cash flows are a critical input to valuation activities. Research and practice indicate that the most common method of presenting operating cash flows, the indirect method, is viewed as overly complex. We experimentally examine whether two theoretically motivated factors represent shortcomings of the indirect method: (1) inadequate linking of related components of net income and changes in working capital accounts, and (2) inconsistent income statement labeling between components of net income and their corresponding working capital changes. Drawing on causal reasoning theory, we predict and find that these factors hinder the decision usefulness of the operating section of the statement of cash flows. The results of our study are informative to the academic literature and standard setters, as we examine underlying reasons why the indirect method may be viewed unfavorably.
Administrative Science Quarterly · 2026-08-07T01:27:32+00:00 · David M. WaguespackProfessor, Management & Organization Dept., Robert H Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, College Park, MD
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-08-07 · Adrian Marrison, Jaco Lok, Mark de Rond
Drawing on a 12-month immersive ethnography of prison officers in an English prison, we explore the relation between security work and atmosphere. We show how prison security hinges on officers becoming proficient in “atmospheric work,” or a bundle of practices purposively oriented at sensing and modulating atmospheres in situationally adaptive ways to prevent violence. Colloquially known as “jailcraft,” these practices involve sensing the prison’s atmosphere for signs of rising tension, amplifying atmospheric tension as a means of control, and dampening tension if actual violence is deemed imminent. Our conceptualization advances organization research that has tended to cast atmosphere as either a target object of aesthetic work or as a diffuse affective background to sensemaking. We show empirically that these approaches miss something crucial, and especially in the world of security work. This is because here atmosphere is neither a backdrop nor an embellishment but actively sensed and “worked” in real time. This means that security workers’ “atmotechnic” interventions reveal a form of agentic atmospheric engagement that is strikingly purposive, yet curiously non-aesthetic in orientation.
Journal of International Business Studies · 2026-08-05T00:00:00 ·
This article examines whether circular economy (CE) strategies enhance firm resilience after systemic shocks. Building on the natural resource-based view, we argue that CE investments made before COVID-19 can strengthen resilience by converting sustainability-oriented capabilities into absorptive and adaptive capabilities. Yet this conversion is not automatic: it depends on firms’ ability to manage three tensions between efficiency and redundancy, continuity and reconfiguration, and strategic flexibility and coordinated commitment. We test these arguments using survey data on Italian firms matched with administrative financial records and estimate ordered probit models of post-shock recovery. The results show that pre-pandemic CE investments are positively associated with firm resilience. This relationship is strongest among multinational enterprises, weaker among other firms engaged in international activities, and not statistically significant among domestic firms. We also find that upstream CE strategies are more strongly associated with resilience than downstream strategies, particularly for multinational enterprises. Overall, the findings suggest that CE contributes to resilience when firms possess the organizational and international capabilities needed to govern, integrate, and reconfigure circular practices under disruption.
Abstract Research Summary This study examines whether training entrepreneurs to apply systematic approaches to strategic decision-making influences their self-perception of ability. Using a field experiment in which 151 entrepreneurs in Tanzania were randomly assigned to two different versions of entrepreneurial training (an evidence-based vs. a theory-and-evidence-based approach), we find entrepreneurs in the theory-and-evidence-based condition experience a larger and more persistent increase in their self-perception of ability to deal with challenges compared to the evidence-based condition. Additionally, entrepreneurs across the two conditions respond differently to the training depending on their initial levels of perceived ability. By integrating insights from social cognitive psychology, this study contributes to research on entrepreneurial experimentation by uncovering the effect of strategic decision-making training on individuals themselves, not just their ventures' outcomes. Managerial Summary Entrepreneurs' self-perceptions of ability are critical for how they engage with learning opportunities and respond to challenges that arise as they develop their businesses. To explore how different versions of training on strategic decision-making impact entrepreneurs' self-perceived abilities to deal with such challenges, we conducted a field experiment with Tanzanian agribusiness entrepreneurs. Results show that entrepreneurs who learn to develop a theory-of-value before engaging in experimentation experience a larger increase in self-perceived ability compared to those who experiment without such a theory-of-value, and this effect persists for longer. Our results have practical value for entrepreneurs and support organizations offering training programs and point to self-perception of ability as an important factor to help entrepreneurs follow the behavioral advice they receive during those trainings.
Strategic Management Journal · 2026-08-04T01:34:35+00:00 · Shipeng Yan, Fan Zhang, Zhengyu Li
Abstract Research Summary Can environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investors hold businesses accountable for their environmental impact? Extending institutional theory and analyzing a global sample of firms from 2006 to 2019, we argue that, in response to ESG investors' institutional pressures, firms may intensify pollution outsourcing to suppliers as a sophisticated form of corporate decoupling. We further theorize and find suggestive evidence that this effect is less salient and sometimes reversed when ESG investors can help firms access green technologies and when they have more direct purview of firms' suppliers. We employ investor-level acquisitions as quasi-exogenous shocks and additionally analyze a separate firm–supplier sample to support the hypotheses with largely consistent results. Managerial Summary Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investors are increasingly expected to act as private regulators, using ownership stakes to steer companies toward sustainability. Yet, looking only at whether a focal firm cleans up its own operations can be misleading because it ignores what happens in the broader supply chain. Using global firm data from 2006 to 2019, we find that companies under strong ESG investor pressure generate lower direct emissions but may shift pollution to suppliers, leaving the combined emissions unchanged. We also provide suggestive evidence that this outsourcing is reduced and sometimes can become reduced when investors can help firms adopt green technologies and directly oversee supplier practices.
Production and Operations Management · 2026-08-03T12:49:01+00:00 · He Zhang, Gaurav Jetley
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Racial bias in pulse oximetry—a critical noninvasive diagnostic tool that estimates blood oxygen levels using light absorption—has been shown to systematically overestimate oxygen saturation in Black patients, potentially delaying the detection and ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-08-03T12:48:41+00:00 · Li Chen, Hau L Lee, Shiqing Yao
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. The recent elimination of the United States de minimis exemption for import tariffs has been reported to have a significant impact on ultra-fresh fashion companies such as Shein and Temu. This article develops a game-theoretic model to investigate the ...
Journal of International Business Studies · 2026-08-03T00:00:00 ·
This study develops an attention-based view of cross-border crowdfunding by examining how informational cues in campaign narratives guide backers’ attention and funding decisions. Crowdfunding enables global reach but intensifies competition for limited backer attention. Extending the attention-based view from managerial attention in organizational settings to crowd attention on digital platforms, we conceptualize crowd attention as decentralized and stimulus-driven. We identify two key informational cues as attention stimuli: global narrative (universal relevance) and backer-country focus (localized engagement). We argue that these cues increase support for international campaigns but that their effects depend on campaign characteristics such as cultural orientation and market readiness, which align with different backer motives. We further propose that cultural differences amplify, rather than hinder, backers’ responsiveness to attention stimuli. Using large-scale Kickstarter data, we find support for our arguments and demonstrate how digital narratives shape attention and funding decisions in cross-border exchanges.
Strategic Management Journal · 2026-08-02T22:24:47+00:00 · Sandeep Devanatha Pillai, Brent Goldfarb, David A. Kirsch, Seojin Kim, Evan Starr
Abstract Research Summary Though scholars employ abduction, there is no agreed-upon structure to reporting their findings. Moreover, the traditional hypo-deductive reasoning structure does not align with the epistemology of abduction. We propose an abductive testimonial structure, termed PEEBI, which consists of five sections in which the authors take prior knowledge and theories, establish the context and observations that are worthy of interest, identify and evaluate candidate explanations for the observed patterns, determine the best explanation and their reasoning for accepting it, and abstract the best explanation to a more generalizable theoretical contribution. Consistent with abductive epistemology, PEEBI advances knowledge in a modest, stepwise fashion. PEEBI foregrounds transparency and communication of the author's judgment and elevates the role of the readers by giving them information to better make judgments. Managerial Summary Researchers frequently make discoveries by starting from a surprising observation and reasoning backward to the best explanation. Yet, the field has no shared way to write up this kind of work, and the conventional hypothesis-testing template does not match how such reasoning unfolds. We propose a reporting structure, PEEBI, which consists of five sections in which the authors take prior knowledge and theories, establish the context and observations that are worthy of interest, identify and evaluate candidate explanations for the observed patterns, determine the best explanation and their reasoning for accepting it, and abstract the best explanation to a more generalizable theoretical contribution. PEEBI makes the author's judgment transparent, giving readers the information they need to weigh the evidence and reach their own conclusions.
Strategic Management Journal · 2026-07-30T12:10:48+00:00 · Michelle Lee, Shelby L. Gai
Abstract Research Summary This study investigates how social class background shapes CEO career outcomes. Extending the shifting standards model to post-appointment evaluation, we theorize that CEOs from lower-class backgrounds face persistently high confirmatory standards, producing asymmetric consequences. When their performance is strong, the high confirmatory standards amplify their success, resulting in higher initial and subsequent compensation compared to their higher-class counterparts. When performance falters, the same bar makes shortfalls more readily read as falling short of expectations, resulting in lower compensation and higher dismissal risk. We test these predictions using a novel dataset on CEO social class backgrounds from 1992 to 2018, supplemented with board interviews. The findings support our hypotheses, demonstrating how social class background operates as a double-edged sword by increasing rewards for success and penalties for failure. Managerial Summary Does social class background affect how a CEO is evaluated? Drawing on compensation and dismissal outcomes for U.S. CEOs from 1992 to 2018, along with interviews with directors, we show that CEOs' social class backgrounds shape how their performance is interpreted. CEOs from lower social class backgrounds receive higher initial compensation and are rewarded more when their firms perform well. But when performance weakens, these same CEOs face steeper pay cuts and higher dismissal risk than their higher-class peers. The same background that generates recognition when things go well makes shortfalls easier to interpret as underperformance. For boards, this suggests that background can quietly shape evaluations at the highest levels. For CEOs, perceptions of exceptional mobility and capability can become a liability when performance turns.
Abstract Research Summary We explore how Large Language Models (LLMs) can serve as synthetic subjects to inform strategy research. We introduce a framework for designing and running simulated experiments with LLM-powered agents. We argue that this approach is useful for rapid, low-cost prototyping of human experiments and for generating novel hypotheses. We apply the framework to the exploration–exploitation dilemma and show that LLM-based experiments reproduce patterns observed among human participants. We then vary parameters and boundary conditions to illustrate how the same setup can support design iteration and surface hypotheses about when and why established results change. In the conclusion, we discuss the promise and limitations of artificial intelligence agents as “model organisms” for strategy. Managerial Summary Artificial intelligence (AI) agents are beginning to enter firms as tools that can execute work, from writing code to coordinating complex tasks across systems. This article argues that their value for strategy extends beyond task automation: AI agents can also be used to simulate strategic interactions and assess how strategies perform under alternative assumptions. In our exploration–exploitation application, these simulations reproduce core patterns from prior human experiments and reveal where those patterns weaken or reverse. Used this way, AI agents can help firms prototype strategic choices, stress-test assumptions, and direct managerial attention toward promising leads before larger commitments of time and effort.
Journal of Accounting Research · 2026-07-29T08:59:35+00:00 · Yoojin Lee, Shaphan Ng, Aruhn Venkat
ABSTRACT We examine whether the largest place-based, firm-specific corporate subsidies (“Megadeals”) awarded by state and local governments affect local firms’ innovation. First, we document that (1) subsidy firms innovate in the subsidized county and (2) subsidy firms bring inventors from other counties into the subsidized county, consistent with subsidy firms generating new knowledge locally. In our main test, we use a stacked cohort design with stringent fixed effects to document that local firms increase patenting following a Megadeal. Cross-sectionally, effects are increasing (1) in subsidy firm innovativeness, (2) in the technological closeness of subsidy firms and local firms, (3) when subsidy and local firms share an industry, and (4) when the subsidized location has a heavy college presence. Additionally, we document that following a Megadeal, local firms increasingly make citations to subsidy firm patents and that the patent similarity of local and subsidy firms increases. We document that subsidy firm inventors are more likely to move to local firms following a Megadeal. We also find that subsidies for labs, headquarters, and high-tech manufacturing plants drive our main results. These results are consistent with knowledge spillovers being one channel through which we observe an increase in local firm patenting following Megadeals.
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-07-29 · Krishnan Nair, Eric Y. Lee
Building on the premise that political party affiliation reflects one’s ideology and core values, various studies in the upper echelons literature have examined the link between CEO political party affiliation and decision-making. In contrast, recent work in political psychology suggests that party affiliation shapes behavior largely because it serves as a salient social identity. Taking a reconciliatory approach, the present work highlights the value of both perspectives in explaining the CEO’s orientation toward conformity. According to the ideology literature, Republicans display greater conformity than Democrats due to dispositional differences in how much they value conformity. On the other hand, the identity perspective suggests that both Democrats and Republicans strive to conform to co-partisans and distinguish themselves from counter-partisans. Integrating insights from both perspectives, we theorize that Republican CEOs generally display greater conformity than Democratic CEOs due to dispositional differences, but that the extent to which these dispositional tendencies translate to competitive strategy depends on the political composition of CEOs in a given industry. Finally, we draw on self-concordance theory to theorize about the performance implications of fit and misfit between CEO party affiliation and conformity. We find support for our predictions in a sample of S&P 500 firms from 2010 to 2019.
Strategic Management Journal · 2026-07-24T07:00:00+00:00 · Mohammad Hosseini, Bertrand V. Quelin
Abstract Research Summary This study examines how legal design shapes contractual governance in public–private partnership (PPP). We argue that PPP-specific laws do not simply strengthen institutional safeguards; by varying in detail, they also alter the flexibility available for project-level contracting. Highly specific laws better constrain governmental discretion but raise adaptation costs, making user-pay contracts, where private partners bear demand risk and rely on market-responsive adjustment, less attractive. Less specific laws preserve greater contractual discretion and are therefore associated with more user-pay arrangements. We also show that countries with weaker political constraints adopt more specific PPP laws, suggesting that legal design compensates for weaker institutional checks. Using 3986 PPP projects in 53 countries from 1997 to 2021, we find support for these claims. Managerial Summary Governments often pass public–private partnership (PPP) laws to attract private capital into infrastructure projects. This study shows that what matters is not only whether such laws exist, but how detailed they are. Highly specific laws can make government commitments more credible, especially where political checks and balances are weak, but they can also limit the flexibility private partners need when revenues depend on users, such as tolls or fees. Across 3986 PPP projects in 53 countries, we find that more detailed laws are linked to fewer user-pay projects, while less detailed laws are linked to greater use of user-pay arrangements. Our analysis suggests that legal certainty and flexibility must be balanced: specific legal regimes can protect private investment while narrowing the range of viable investment models.
The Journal of Finance · 2026-07-23T07:31:09+00:00 · CARSTEN H. CHONG, VIKTOR TODOROV
ABSTRACT We derive tight pricing kernel restrictions from options with same-day expiration (“0DTEs”). These restrictions concern the volatility of small and frequent asset price moves that the equity and options markets must agree on in a frictionless economy. Their violation leads to pseudo-arbitrage opportunities, characterized by nontrivial reward-to-risk ratios over arbitrarily short horizons and achieved by a combined position in 0DTEs and the underlying asset. Empirically, we find no evidence of feasible pseudo-arbitrage opportunities, as transaction costs, estimation risk, and short-term volatility risk prevent investors from taking advantage of small and infrequent disagreements about volatility between equity and options markets.
Journal of Accounting Research · 2026-07-23T07:00:00+00:00 · ANTHONY LE
ABSTRACT In this study, I explore how accounting rules—in particular the restrictiveness of GAAP—have impacted the labor market for accountants. I find that when the rules become more restrictive, there are fewer students majoring in accounting and fewer accountants and auditors overall. The overall number of accounting positions that firms recruit for does not decrease when the rules become more restrictive; however, the nature of accountants' work changes. There is less focus on tasks such as applying judgment, thinking creatively, and thinking critically and more focus on determining compliance. Despite the decrease in accountants, earnings for accountants do not increase, and the wage distribution becomes more compressed. I supplement these analyses with a survey-based field experiment and find that the salience of restrictiveness heightens students' views of accounting as a profession where they are unable to use creative and critical thinking. Overall, the findings suggest that restrictive regulation can shift the task content of occupations and reduce the pool of individuals interested in the profession.
Journal of Accounting Research · 2026-07-23T07:00:00+00:00 · RAMONA DAGOSTINO, ANYA NAKHMURINA
ABSTRACT This paper studies how partisan alignment between city leaders and state governors shapes information processing and bond pricing in the municipal bond market. Using a novel data set on 1,045 U.S. cities from 2005 to 2019, we show that cities with the same political affiliation as the state governor face 9 basis points lower borrowing costs than misaligned cities. The effect is stronger for riskier bonds, in states where governors hold greater authority, and for fiscally dependent cities. Aligned cities also receive more aid during fiscal distress. Partisan alignment shapes how investors interpret and respond to financial information: Nondisclosure and adverse audit findings raise borrowing costs primarily for misaligned cities, while penalties for aligned cities are markedly smaller.
Journal of Accounting Research · 2026-07-23T07:00:00+00:00 · Jung Ho Choi, Dan Li, Daniele Macciocchi
ABSTRACT We examine the labor market consequences of the 2020 Regulation S-K requiring human capital disclosure in 10K filings. Using large-sample job-level data and a Generative Large Language Model (GLLM), we observe that public firms subject to the regulation increase their disclosure of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) information in job postings relative to a matched sample of large private firms. The increase in job-posting disclosure is more pronounced among firms facing greater external pressure to increase their workforce diversity. These findings suggest a shift in demand for diverse candidates by public firms following the regulation. Yet, consistent with short-term inelastic labor supply, this demand shift lengthens the recruitment period, with noticeable increases in workplace gender diversity emerging one year after the regulation, particularly among firms that demonstrate a credible commitment to DEI. Our study documents how securities regulations can impact labor market practices and underscores the challenges involved in shaping workforce diversity.
Journal of Accounting Research · 2026-07-23T07:00:00+00:00 · VOLKER LAUX, LUCAS MAHIEUX
ABSTRACT Regulators are contemplating or mandating precise measurement of financial climate-risk exposure to promote sustainable investments. We show that such mandates can be counterproductive in the presence of social funds that catalyze change by subsidizing the adoption of cleaner production technologies. Firms can exploit a social fund's impact motive by measuring their climate-risk exposure imprecisely. This strategic imprecision prevents the fund from distinguishing between firms that require subsidies and those that would switch to clean technologies for financial reasons alone, thereby increasing the ex ante subsidies firms can extract. A by-product of this rent-seeking behavior is that firms adopt clean technologies more frequently than would be jointly efficient under precise measurement. Our analysis suggests that the regulatory push for precise climate-risk measurement can reduce social funds' impact and the frequency of green transitions.
Journal of Accounting Research · 2026-07-23T07:00:00+00:00 · HARALD AMBERGER, JOHN GALLEMORE, JARON WILDE
ABSTRACT Effective policymakers must balance the demands of formulating a corporate tax system that raises revenue and spurs economic activity (e.g., investment) while promoting a “level playing field” across firms. Balancing these tradeoffs has likely caused tax systems to become more complex over time, increasing firms’ difficulty in understanding and complying with tax regulations. We investigate the impact of tax system complexity on the responsiveness of firm-level investment to tax policy changes. Exploiting staggered tax rate changes and variation in tax system complexity across countries, we document two key findings. First, firm-level investment is less sensitive to changes in the corporate tax rate when tax system complexity is higher, suggesting that such complexity can undermine the ability of tax policy to affect economic growth. Second, the impact of tax complexity on the sensitivity of investment to tax rate changes varies significantly across firms, with domestic-owned, smaller, and private firms being more affected. These cross-sectional disparities are consistent with tax system complexity potentially reducing tax system parity. Collectively, our findings suggest that corporate tax system complexity can negatively impact the ability of fiscal policy to affect investment and lead to heterogeneous tax policy responses across firms.
Journal of Accounting Research · 2026-07-23T07:00:00+00:00 · MENGQIAO DU, RACHEL XI ZHANG
ABSTRACT Women often lack the opportunity to join exclusive social clubs, limiting the benefits they derive from their social networks. We investigate whether, when given the opportunity to interact with the right people in a professional setting, women gain greater advantages from these connections for career performance and advancement compared to men. Using a unique data set that documents when, where, and with whom financial analysts interact at investor conferences, we find that female analysts show greater improvement in earnings forecast accuracy than their male counterparts after interacting with a firm's executives. Further evidence suggests that female analysts overcome homophily in conference interactions with executives and that they sustain their gains, enhancing forecast accuracy for up to three years. In addition, both the capital and labor markets recognize women's superior gains from conference connections. Our findings suggest that women capitalize on professional connections, highlighting the importance of promoting structured networking opportunities for women in professional environments.
Journal of Accounting Research · 2026-07-23T07:00:00+00:00 · WEIJIA ZHI
ABSTRACT This study examines the relation between CEOs’ preferences for environmental protection (“nature-loving preferences”) and corporate environmental actions. Drawing on social ecology research, I develop a proxy for CEOs’ nature-loving preferences based on their childhood exposure to greenspace and validate it using their positive discussions of nature during earnings conference calls. Findings show a significant positive association between CEOs’ nature-loving preferences and their firms’ participation in Clean Development Mechanism projects. This effect remains robust after addressing firm–CEO matching and omitted variable concerns. Cross-sectional tests reveal stronger effects when local environmental demands are high and when CEOs have greater decision-making power. Further analyses suggest that these CEOs are associated with greater corporate carbon reduction, while market reactions to their appointments remain neutral. The study highlights the link between CEOs’ personal environmental preferences and firms’ environmental actions, offering new insights into individual-level factors behind corporate social responsibility.
Journal of Accounting Research · 2026-07-23T07:00:00+00:00 · SVENJA DUBE, HYE SEUNG (GRACE) LEE, DANYE WANG
ABSTRACT We examine whether and, if so, how retail consumers change their shopping in response to firm-specific negative environmental, social, and governance (ESG) news. Using an event study methodology, we do not find significant changes in consumer foot traffic in response to negative ESG news, on average. However, the average consumer reacts negatively when such news is covered by national or global media outlets, which elevates consumer awareness. In addition, we provide evidence of the heterogeneity in responses to negative ESG news across consumer groups. Consumers in more ESG-conscious counties, as measured by county ESG preferences, income, education, and political ideology, reduce store visits in response to negative ESG news. In contrast, consumers in the least ESG-conscious counties increase their visits in response to negative ESG news. These opposing reactions explain the insignificant average consumer response to negative ESG news. Furthermore, the ESG-conscious consumers' negative reaction is, at most, modest, dissipating within six weeks. Overall, our findings suggest that firms face divergent responses to ESG activities from different consumer groups, underscoring the divisive nature of ESG issues.
Journal of Accounting Research · 2026-07-23T07:00:00+00:00 · Karthik Balakrishnan, Darren Bernard, Kristina M. Rennekamp, Blake Steenhoven
ABSTRACT Capital flows increase in response to new public information. Conventional explanations typically conclude that this reflects a rational response to reduced risk. However, investors may also be overconfident in their ability to benefit from new information, even when it is publicly available and does not provide a relative advantage. We exploit two complementary settings to examine how this “better-than-average” mechanism affects capital flows. Archival evidence from horse race betting markets shows capital flows increase following the public provision of a summary measure of horse performance, even though more total parimutuel wagering necessarily implies a greater wealth transfer from bettors to tracks. A controlled lab experiment provides direct causal evidence of our proposed mechanism. Combined, our results suggest that new public information can increase capital flows due to investors’ overconfidence in their ability to benefit from information relative to others. Our findings inform regulators seeking to understand the consequences of expanding the public information available to individual investors.
Journal of Accounting Research · 2026-07-23T07:00:00+00:00 · Christopher Armstrong, Stephen Glaeser, Stella Yeayeun Park, Oscar Timmermans
ABSTRACT We study how the assignment of intellectual property rights between inventors and their employers affects innovation. Incomplete contracting theories predict that stronger employer property rights reduce the threat that employee inventors hold up their employers, thereby affecting inventor and invention outcomes. We test these predictions using a U.S. appellate court ruling that shifted the assignment of property rights from inventors to their employers. Within-employer-year analyses demonstrate that affected inventors are less likely to retain patent rights, assign patents to new employers, or leave their current employer, all consistent with reduced inventor ability to hold up their employers. Due to the reduced possibility of hold-up, affected inventors’ innovations are revealed more promptly when disclosed, draw from a broader set of prior patents, and spread more to subsequent patents. If affected inventors do leave their employer, they are more likely to relocate to unaffected states. Furthermore, employers affected by the ruling are more likely to locate their inventors in agglomeration economies and alter their innovation strategy by reallocating activity across states and expanding their innovation portfolios. Our collective evidence suggests that shifting intellectual property rights to employers affects inventor and invention outcomes by reducing the threat of employee hold-up from the employer's perspective.
Journal of Accounting Research · 2026-07-23T07:00:00+00:00 · CHLOE XIE
ABSTRACT This paper examines how market participants trade on private information about firm fundamentals using the largest known case of informed trade of earnings announcements. From 2011 to 2015, a cartel of sophisticated traders illegally obtained early access to and traded on over 1,000 firm earnings announcements. Using this setting, I identify the information in earnings announcements that these market participants found most price relevant. The informed traders preferred announcements with larger earnings and sales surprises relative to forecasts, quantitative managerial guidance, and more extreme news sentiment. Despite their perfect foresight, the traders performed, perhaps surprisingly, poorly relative to hypothetical trading strategies based on comparable foresight. Frictions that limited their performance include price impact, risk aversion, and information processing costs. The trading performance of these informed traders implies that information about firm fundamentals explains little of the cross-sectional variation in earnings announcement returns, even for sophisticated market participants.
Journal of Accounting Research · 2026-07-23T07:00:00+00:00 · CHEN CHEN, DIFANG HUANG
ABSTRACT Policy makers and researchers are concerned that the expected credit loss (ECL) approach may exacerbate procyclicality. Using administrative loan-level and firm-level data in China, we find that banks adopting the ECL model reduced their credit supply and became more prudent in lending decisions after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, compared to banks using the incurred credit loss (ICL) approach. Our findings are more pronounced for banks that experienced greater loan loss provisions induced by ECL and for firms with higher credit risk. The credit contraction persisted throughout our sample period. We further document that firms more exposed to ECL banks experienced larger reductions in loans, assets, liabilities, and revenue after the pandemic began than those more exposed to ICL banks. These findings support the conjecture that the ECL approach may exacerbate procyclicality.
Production and Operations Management · 2026-07-23T05:27:14+00:00 · Yuyun Zhong, Wenjing Shen, Oben Ceryan
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. The surge in product returns poses significant financial and environmental challenges, particularly for seasonal goods, as retailers must often discard or liquidate returned items at the end of a short selling season. To address these challenges, we ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-07-23T05:26:51+00:00 · Zhechao Yang, Qili Wang, Liangfei Qiu, Hsing Kenneth Cheng
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Social media plays an increasingly important role in shaping consumer purchase behavior and informing operational decisions. However, the multimodal nature of social media content, which often combines text and images, makes it difficult for firms to ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-07-23T05:26:31+00:00 · Jiameng Lyu, Shilin Yuan, Bingkun Zhou, Yuan Zhou
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Numerous existing studies have examined the performance of Sample Average Approximation (SAA) in the fundamental newsvendor problem. Despite these advances, critical gaps remain in two aspects. First, existing works focus on the linear-cost newsvendor ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-07-23T05:26:11+00:00 · Christian Terwiesch, Lennart Meincke, Karan Girotra, Ethan Mollick, Gideon Nave, Karl Ulrich
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. This research examines how well large language models (LLMs) generate new product ideas, focusing on new products for college students priced under $50. Through a series of studies, we identify key strengths and weaknesses of using LLMs for product ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-07-23T05:25:31+00:00 · Shany Azaria, Noam Shamir1Coller School of Management, 26745Tel-Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. This article presents a methodological approach that employs empirical analysis to investigate the adverse operational effects of congestion within a court system setting. Central to this study is the premise that prolonged lead time generates additional ...
Journal of International Business Studies · 2026-07-22T00:00:00 ·
Geopolitical conflicts can abruptly and significantly change the institutional conditions of multinational corporations (MNCs). Yet, the impact of such institutional friction on foreign divestment is not yet well understood. While prior research has conceptualized institutional friction as a dynamic alternative to static measures of institutional distance, its implications for firm behavior remain underexplored. We develop and test a model of institutional friction that captures how structural (political affinity), situational (military threat and regulatory responses), and operational (institutional embeddedness) friction jointly influence foreign divestment decisions, using the case of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Based on data from 864 MNCs operating in Russia, we find that institutional friction arising from political affinity and military threat, combined with firms’ institutional embeddedness, significantly affects exit decisions. In contrast, economic sanctions imposed by Western countries have no direct effect on MNCs’ exit decisions but become consequential through their interaction with other dimensions of institutional friction, amplifying the effects of political affinity and military threat. These findings advance international business research by providing a structured and empirically grounded framework for analyzing how geopolitical conflicts affect strategic responses of MNCs. Specifically, we demonstrate how structural, situational, and operational frictions shape MNCs’ market exit decisions.
The Review of Financial Studies · 2026-07-21T00:00:00+00:00 ·
Abstract We measure the nature and severity of a variety of belief distortions in market reactions to hundreds of economic news events by synthesizing structural estimation with algorithmic machine learning to quantify bias. We find that investors systematically overreact to perceptions about multiple fundamental shocks, a phenomenon we show often dampens rather than amplifies market volatility via a “shock composition effect.” Such effects imply that the stock market can underreact to news, even when investors overreact to all shocks.
Academy of Management Review · 2026-07-20 · Yih-Teen Lee
Vision is widely recognized as a central leadership mechanism for motivating followers and directing collective action. Yet, existing research has largely treated vision as a leader-articulated statement or communicative act, offering limited insight into how visions endure, evolve, and remain collectively enacted over extended periods of time. Drawing on Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia as a theoretical lens, this paper develops a theory of visioning as a generative organizing system of collective future-making. I conceptualize the architecture of visioning as comprising three interdependent processes: vision crafting, through which collective futures are imagined and articulated; vision structuring, through which they are anchored in temporal, symbolic and material arrangements; and vision resonating, through which they become collectively inhabited and carried forward by collaborators. Together, these processes operate recursively through the interplay of leadership and organizing, generating inviting and enabling effects that support the realization of collective futures. By shifting attention from vision statements to visioning systems, this paper reframes vision as an ongoing organizing accomplishment and offers a new perspective on how collective futures are created and sustained across generations.
Production and Operations Management · 2026-07-18T05:41:14+00:00 · Wenming Zhang, Xiangyue Zhang, Na Shu, Yongxi Cheng
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. In the classic secretary problem, the decision-maker is faced with an online sequence of candidates with values. Upon seeing a candidate, they have to make an irrevocable take-it-or-leave-it decision. We generalize this framework to the secretary problem ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-07-18T05:40:09+00:00 · Abhishek Srivastava1Operations Management & Decision Sciences, 309827Indian Institute of Management Kashipur, Kashipur, Uttarakhand, India
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Firms are increasingly confronting a fundamental organizational choice: whether to retain human control over operational and marketing decisions or to delegate decision authority to agentic artificial intelligence (AI) systems. While recent advances in ...
Academy of Management Review · 2026-07-17 · Jessica A. Reif, Jonathon N. Cummings
In knowledge-intensive teams, collaborative interactions among teammates have historically served as the primary means through which members access task-relevant information, advice, and feedback. Generative artificial intelligence (AI), however, now offers members an alternative source of these resources. We develop a multilevel theory that proposes team members who are proficient with generative AI are more likely to perceive the resources it can offer as functionally equivalent to those they can access through their teammates. In turn, we propose that some members will shift their knowledge-seeking interactions to generative AI. As this substitution behavior accumulates within a team, the team’s collaboration network is less likely to foster the critical emergent states that support team effectiveness. The key insight of our theory is a dilemma for knowledge-intensive teams: generative AI can boost team performance by helping members to work more efficiently, but a lack of collaboration among teammates can offset these gains and undermine team satisfaction.
Abstract Research Summary Strategy research examines the drivers of firm performance. Variance decomposition studies have analyzed industry's impact, with little attention paid to the industry to which a firm is assigned. This study investigates how industry assignment affects the findings about industry's impact. We analyze existing industry classification schemes and introduce a machine learning-based scheme that leverages an embedding model to process text from annual reports. We find that industry assignment differs substantially across schemes, and that certain firms are more consistently grouped together. Schemes that group more similar firms together exhibit stronger industry effects. Given the literature's frequent reliance on the criticized Standard Industrial Classification scheme, industry's role in firm performance has likely been systematically underestimated. Managerial Summary Understanding what drives a company's success is crucial. Prior research has surprisingly found that a firm's industry plays little role in explaining a firm's performance. However, this study suggests that industry's importance is likely understated due to how firms are grouped into industries. Comparing several existing industry classification schemes alongside a new one we built using machine learning, we find that grouping similar firms in the same industry increases reported industry importance and decreases firm importance. Being more precise about industry membership reveals that industry matters more than previously thought. The implication is that understanding the industry is more important for a firm's performance and could be key to understanding sustained success.
Administrative Science Quarterly · 2026-07-15T08:02:51+00:00 · Siobhan O’MahonyFeld Family Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Department Chair, Management and Organizations, Boston University, Questrom School of Business, USA
Production and Operations Management · 2026-07-15T04:47:49+00:00 · Donggyu Jeon, George P Ball, Gilvan C Souza
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Automotive manufacturers have been under intense pressure to improve the fuel efficiency, or miles per gallon (MPG), of their internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles. Research that explores hidden costs of continuing to push the limits of ICE MPG is ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-07-15T04:47:03+00:00 · Shawn Mankad, Masha Shunko, Qiuping Yu
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. We study how one store’s performance affects others within a large branded network. Stores influence each other both negatively, through cannibalization, and positively, via agglomeration as well as knowledge and reputation spillovers. This study causally ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-07-15T04:45:49+00:00 · Xudong Cai, Bin Zhang, Xi Zhao, Gengzhong Feng
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Decentralized applications (DApps)—digital applications operating on blockchain platforms—are transforming diverse industrial sectors. As blockchain platforms feature protocol-based governance, the mechanisms driving DApp adoption differ fundamentally ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-07-15T04:45:30+00:00 · Qianqian Liu, Shenyang Jiang, Liangfei Qiu, Baofeng Huo
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Dockless bike sharing has been widely recognized for its potential environmental benefits by bridging the last-mile gap and encouraging a shift toward greener modes of travel. However, these benefits depend on large-scale bike adoption rather than mere ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-07-13T05:56:57+00:00 · Wei Liu, Vidyadhar G Kulkarni
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. We consider a joint admission and aggregate service rate control problem in a service system. Admission control involves deciding which arriving customers to admit and which to reject. Aggregate service rate control focuses on determining the staffing ...
Strategic Management Journal · 2026-07-13T03:07:53+00:00 · Arkadiy V. Sakhartov, Joseph T. Mahoney, Jeffrey J. Reuer
Abstract Research Summary Is real option theory useful for management research? This topic was hotly debated two decades ago. Real options were said to be inapplicable to management research and to lack conceptual distinctiveness. Whereas responses to the claim about the non-distinctiveness of real options were disparate, the concern about the theory's non-applicability was considered remediable. Such responses left the impression that real options lost the debate, and the use of real options in management research started to stagnate. This paper reviews the opposing positions in the debate, establishes the conceptual distinctiveness of real options, and outlines responses to concerns about the theory's applicability to management research, thereby underscoring the promise of real option theory as a key pillar for research in strategic management. Managerial Summary Managers often face decisions about whether to invest, wait, expand, switch the use of resources, or exit a market under uncertainty. This paper explains why real options remain a valuable way to think about such decisions despite earlier criticism of the approach. It argues that the core strength of real options is not only in valuing investments but also in helping managers make better sequences of decisions over time by considering how today's choices affect tomorrow's opportunities. The paper also shows how real options can accommodate learning, changing information, organizational constraints, and behavioral biases rather than ignoring them. By viewing strategy as a dynamic process of optimizing decisions under uncertainty, managers can better preserve flexibility, allocate resources, and improve long-term value creation in changing environments.
Administrative Science Quarterly · 2026-07-11T04:11:37+00:00 · James A. EvansMax Palevsky Professor in Sociology and Data Science, University of Chicago, USA
Production and Operations Management · 2026-07-09T10:16:57+00:00 · Guowei Liu, Jiong Sun, Jianxiong Zhang
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. This paper investigates how dual-purpose firms—organizations that pursue both profit and social objectives—strategically design their product lines in markets where traditional profit-maximizing firms may imitate their behavior. We find that consumer ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-07-09T10:16:35+00:00 · Che-Yi Liao, Esmaeil Keyvanshokooh, Francisco Pasquel, Gian-Gabriel P Garcia
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Personalized treatment planning requires various patient-level considerations, including personal risk factors and contraindications. However, existing algorithms for facilitating treatment planning frequently fail to account for uncertainties in their ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-07-09T10:16:09+00:00 · Lu Kong, Kejia Hu, Lanfei Shi, Ting Wang
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Student evaluations of teaching are widely used in higher education operations to assess instructional quality and inform personnel decisions, yet they remain vulnerable to systematic bias. This study examines whether the rapid transition to online ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-07-09T10:15:42+00:00 · Wenxuan Liu, Xiangting Liu, Maoqi Liu, Zhi-Hai Zhang, Hanzhang Qin
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. In this paper, we study contextual stochastic optimization, where decisions are made under uncertainty and the distribution of random parameters can be partially inferred from covariates observed prior to decision-making. In many practical settings, these ...
Administrative Science Quarterly · 2026-07-09T07:08:20+00:00 · Laura Sonday
Administrative Science Quarterly, Volume 71, Issue 3 , Page 692-736, September 2026. This study examines how people change their relationship with work through the adoption and enactment of a new work ideal: a novel aspiration for what constitutes an optimal work life. Drawing on two years of ethnographic observation of the Financial ...
Academy of Management Review · 2026-07-08 · Mateja Andric
Firms evolve within the temporal context of entrepreneurs’ lives, over the course of which entrepreneurs experience various life events. To advance our understanding of the temporal dynamics that entrepreneurs’ life events trigger at the entrepreneur and firm levels, and how entrepreneurs can navigate these dynamics, this study applies a life course perspective to introduce a theory of firms’ temporal embeddedness in entrepreneurs’ lives. This theory outlines the reciprocal temporal coupling between entrepreneurs’ life events and firm-level dynamics, thereby offering novel insights into the managerial challenges entrepreneurs face in navigating life events. In particular, this study introduces theorizing on the direction, magnitude, valence, and temporal pattern of the impact of life events on both firm goals and firm performance. It explicates the temporal prediction problem and cost–benefit trade-offs entrepreneurs face when navigating life events, and it introduces theoretical insights into the effectiveness and efficiency of different dynamic navigation strategies for managing the impact of various classes of life events. By advancing a life embeddedness theory that temporally embeds firms into entrepreneurs’ event-filled lives, this study contributes to research at the intersection of entrepreneurs’ private lives and businesses, and to event-based perspectives on entrepreneurship.
Journal of Accounting Research · 2026-07-07T03:34:13+00:00 · XIANGNIAN KONG, KE NA
ABSTRACT This paper studies shareholder derivative lawsuits related to CEO compensation. We document that compensation lawsuits are more likely to be filed against firms with higher CEO pay, especially in the presence of poor firm performance. Firms reduce the level of CEO compensation after lawsuits, which leads to CEO departures and declines in CEO effort provisions, and consequently, results in deteriorated firm performance. Interestingly, compensation lawsuits accompanied by low support in the preceding Say-on-Pay votes, which likely capture the quality of pay practices, are associated with even higher pay cuts, but do not harm firm performance or lead to departures of talented CEOs, supporting the idea that suboptimal pay and deteriorated performance after compensation lawsuits are driven by the lack of a sophisticated understanding of CEO pay by plaintiff shareholders.
Production and Operations Management · 2026-07-07T01:20:20+00:00 · Gabriele Mauro, Jury Gualandris, Evelyne Vanpoucke
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. To address climate change, firms that pursue carbon neutrality might adopt various CO2abatement technologies, including purchasing carbon credits; investing in third-party CO2capture and storage; or redesigning products, processes, buildings, and energy ...
Academy of Management Review · 2026-07-07 · Africa Ariño, Pascual Berrone, Joan E. Ricart, Xavier Sobrepere, Alexis Yong
We advance stakeholder governance theory by theorizing how public–private partnerships (PPPs) can govern relationships with both contributing stakeholders (public and private partners) and legitimate but non-contributing stakeholders in order to create and more equitably distribute value. By integrating insights from stakeholder theory and PPP governance research, we develop a framework that distinguishes three categories of formal-relational mechanisms (i.e., participation and representation, joint integration, and monitoring and transparency). We theorize how these mechanisms mitigate three governance risks common in PPPs—cooperation failure, coordination failure, and opportunistic co-optation—that stem from goal misalignment, deficits in experience-based PPP capabilities, and power imbalances. We further argue that when risks co-occur, governance mechanisms can interact paradoxically. As a result, effective governance often requires portfolios of complementary mechanisms rather than single solutions. Our theory offers a meso-level account of how hybrid collaborations can sustain joint value creation while shaping more equitable value distribution, and contributes to both stakeholder theory and PPP governance research.
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-07-07 · Su Chen, Jie (Jasmine) Feng, María Del Carmen Triana
Given women’s distinct values, perspectives, and decision-making approaches, the inclusion of female directors has been proposed as a potential mechanism for curbing excessive CEO pay raises. Yet, empirical evidence remains mixed, indicating that the mere presence of a female director does not reliably translate into meaningful influence. Drawing on minority influence theory as our core framework, supplemented by decades of gender research, we examine the incremental influence of appointing a female director on CEO pay raises to identify conditions under which her minority influence is strengthened or weakened. Using 5,395 firm-year observations from 791 Standard & Poor’s (S&P) 1500 firms between 2010 and 2017, we find that appointing a new female director is associated with smaller CEO pay raises when boards have higher levels of incumbent female representation (vs. token representation), a female CEO, fewer male-held interlocking directorships, and more frequent membership changes among male directors. We replicate our analyses using an alternative dataset, alternative measures, and more nuanced decompositions of CEO pay raises (e.g., warranted vs. unwarranted raises) and find consistent results. This research augments the dialogue on gender diversity in board governance and provides evidence on when incremental changes in board composition can help address persistent concerns about excessive CEO compensation.
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-07-07 · Hannah Schupfer, Birthe Soppe
Despite consensus on the urgency of addressing grand challenges, agreement on appropriate solutions remains elusive. Industry incumbents are increasingly influential in shaping solutions to these problems, yet their contentious involvement complicates their prognostic framing of such solutions. As moral legitimacy demands intensify, incumbents are pressured to advance transformative solutions while simultaneously meeting pragmatic legitimacy demands tied to the profitability of conventional businesses. How incumbents deploy prognostic framing under moral–pragmatic legitimacy tensions remains underexplored. We address this question through an inductive, longitudinal case study of a Norwegian oil major’s articulation of climate solutions. Our analysis reveals four prognostic framing mechanisms: bundling core business with cleaner alternatives, moralizing core business, assimilating incremental alternatives with core business, and contrasting radical alternatives with core business. Through these mechanisms, incumbents recast their contested core business as solution to a societal problem, thereby navigating moral–pragmatic legitimacy tensions while constraining the perceived problem–solution fit of radical alternatives. Deriving a grounded model of problem-source-to-solution reversal, our study advances research on framing and grand challenges by illustrating how prognostic framing can be deployed to shape problem–solution correspondence and constrain more transformative solutions to societal problems.
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-07-07 · Shuye Lu, Huaikang Zhou, Qiuping Peng, Ning Li
Faced with evolving skill demands and retention pressures, organizations are increasingly relying on lateral mobility to redeploy internal talent and maintain agility. Yet, they confront a persistent talent development paradox: how to cultivate deep specialization that supports current-role performance while fostering adaptability for cross-role transitions in dynamic internal talent markets. Drawing on human capital theory and matching perspectives, this study examines how the structure of training investments, characterized by breadth and depth, differentially shapes mobility outcomes across varying internal market conditions. Using seven years of personnel data from a large internet company’s lateral mobility program, we find that a broader training portfolio prior to transfer application is associated with a higher likelihood of transfer, while a deeper, more specialized portfolio predicts a lower likelihood of transfer. Breadth also predicts higher turnover following repeated rejections, but greater retention when rejection rates are low. Notably, post-transfer performance is moderated by job distance: breadth is positively associated with performance in high-distance moves, while depth is negatively associated with performance only when job distance is high. These findings shed light on how organizations navigate the specialization–adaptability trade-off through calibrations of training breadth and depth, offering new insights for talent management and employee career development.
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-07-07 · Andrea Sottini, Alessandro Giudici, Benedetto Lorenzo Cannatelli
The literature on social intermediaries (SIs) highlights their role in alleviating poverty and promoting market inclusion in emerging economies through interventions that counterbalance pressures from formal and informal institutions. However, this research centers on interplays between intermediaries and institutions, implicitly assuming that beneficiaries (BENs) reject their condition of poverty and retain a minimally functioning capacity for reflexive agency, supporting engagement with such interventions. In contrast, our study of slums and rural communities in Kenya and Sierra Leone examines social intermediation amid conditions in which extreme marginalization has fractured BENs’ reflexive capacity, leaving them unable to orient toward purposive action. Using a critical realist relational lens, we develop a process model in which social intermediation unfolds through interdependent morpho-regenerative processes—institutional shielding, relational accompaniment, and entrepreneurial empowerment—that create prolonged protective spaces against oppressive pressures and repair reflexivity gradually until BENs can sustain it on their own. We theorize morpho-regeneration as a custodial practice of “with-in” intervention that restores individual capacities for social and economic participation, enabling more conventional outside-in and inside-up intermediation approaches. Our study offers new insights into the relational dimensions of poverty alleviation and their connection to community-level dynamics, with relevance to other contexts where agency is severely destabilized.
Production and Operations Management · 2026-07-02T04:17:33+00:00 · Chengzhang Li, Yuanchen Li
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Firms commonly use audits to ensure their suppliers comply with social responsibility standards. Yet audits are imperfect: atype I erroroccurs when a compliant supplier is mistakenly flagged as non-compliant, and atype II erroroccurs when a non-...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-07-02T04:17:13+00:00 · Daoheng Zhang, Hasan Hüseyin Turan, Ruhul Sarker, Daryl Essam, Shan Dai, Lianmin Zhang
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. We consider a multilocation newsvendor network in which historical data are the only available information about the joint demand distribution. To determine optimal inventory levels, we develop a novel data-driven two-stage distributionally robust ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-07-01T09:07:50+00:00 · Jiang Li, Jianzhong Du, Siyang Gao, Qiang Ye, Guangxin Jiang
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. We study simulation-assisted service system design, where stochastic simulation is used to select the best design from a finite set of structural or parametric alternatives. Since high-fidelity simulation can be prohibitively time-consuming, we adopt a ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-07-01T09:07:35+00:00 · Simin Li, Achal Bassamboo, Martin A Lariviere
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. The use of urgent care centers (UCCs) to reduce emergency department (ED) overuse has yielded mixed results in prior research. This paper investigates how the spatial proximity between UCCs and EDs drives heterogeneous effects of UCCs on ED demand. Using ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-07-01T09:07:16+00:00 · Huashan Li, Hari Bapuji, Srinivas Talluri, Prakash J Singh, Sriram Venkataraman
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Prior research on supply chain geographical complexity has predominantly treated geographical distance and geographical dispersion as interchangeable concepts. Further, nearly all empirical studies examining supply chain antecedents of product quality ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-06-29T12:02:05+00:00 · Somayeh Torkaman, Sarah Gelper, Nevin Mutlu, Tom Van Woensel
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Omni-channel retailers typically face high return rates, particularly in their online channel. This paper examines how these returns can be converted into exchanges by leveraging omni-channel capabilities. We do so in the context of a fast-fashion ...
Journal of Marketing · 2026-06-29T12:01:08+00:00 · Nicole Black, Lachlan Deer, David W. Johnston, Johannes S. Kunz
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. National public health awareness campaigns that emphasize peer-to-peer support are increasingly adopted, but evidence on the effects of peer-based programs at scale remains limited. Using quasi-experimental methods, the authors examine whether the ...
Journal of Marketing · 2026-06-29T12:00:46+00:00 · Marc Bravin, Melanie Clegg, Reto Hofstetter, Marc Pouly, Jonah Berger
Journal of Marketing, Volume 90, Issue 5 , Page 187-204, September 2026. Following trends on social media has become increasingly popular. But what is the best way to do so? Should brands and other creators copy the trend as closely as possible, or should they put a more unique spin on it? To answer this question, the authors ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-06-25T11:58:03+00:00 · Mengxiao Zhang, Shi Chen, Haipeng Luo, Yingfei Wang
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Multi-echelon stochastic inventory models with known demand distributions have long underpinned supply chain coordination, yielding first-best policies in centralized systems and contract mechanisms that induce decentralized agents to implement these ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-06-25T11:57:36+00:00 · Guangzhi Chen, Tianxin Zou1Warrington College of Business, 33115University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. We examine a firm’s personalized pricing (PP) strategies in markets where consumers are uncertain about product quality. In such markets, prices serve not only as a tool for price discrimination but also as a means of conveying quality information to ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-06-25T11:57:05+00:00 · Chao He, Chunqiao Tan, Yangyan Shi, Arvind K Tripathi
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. This study examines manufacturers’ (i.e., brand-name firms’) incentives to adopt blockchain technology-supported (BTS) platforms in markets where deceptive and non-deceptive counterfeits coexist. It is among the first to analyze the adoption of BTS ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-06-19T11:52:06+00:00 · Chi Zhou, Rafael Becerril-Arreola, Mingming Leng
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Businesses selling in online marketplaces often enhance their offerings with short delivery times, but short delivery times typically result in low delivery-time conformance—the probability of on-time delivery, often published in the form of delivery-time ...
Journal of Accounting Research · 2026-06-18T03:29:19+00:00 · Stephannie Larocque, Jessica Watkins, Eric Weisbrod
ABSTRACT We compare the earnings information produced by the five largest forecast data providers (FDPs)—Bloomberg, Capital IQ, FactSet, I/B/E/S, and Zacks—and observe substantial differences across FDPs in both forecasted and actual street earnings values, and thus the earnings surprise, for the same firm-quarter. We provide evidence that differences in the earnings surprise across FDPs for the same firm-quarter (i.e., “FDP differences”) have economically meaningful implications for price responsiveness and liquidity around earnings announcements. We also find that, for announcements where FDPs disagree about whether the announcing firm missed or beat earnings expectations, investors are more likely to side with higher-quality FDPs but may not fully impound the implications of FDP quality differences during the announcement window. On average, relative to the other FDPs, I/B/E/S ranks highly in our measure of FDP quality, such that investor reactions are likely to align with I/B/E/S earnings information, validating its use as a representative FDP in academic research. Taken together, our results are consistent with FDPs pursuing differentiated information production strategies that generate capital market frictions when these strategies lead to material FDP differences.
Journal of Marketing · 2026-06-17T06:09:21+00:00 · Phyllis Xue Wang, Zhengyu Shi, Jinjie Chen, Qiyuan Wang
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. Although mental health conditions have worsened globally, many consumers remain insufficiently engaged in mental healthcare. Intuitively, practitioners can address this challenge by applying strategies that research has shown to promote physical ...
Journal of Marketing, Volume 90, Issue 5 , Page 35-54, September 2026. An idea is more than a simple collection of words or ingredients that make up the idea. What makes an idea original or appealing is how these elements are combined in the context in which they appear. This research leverages representation learning ...
Administrative Science Quarterly · 2026-06-13T12:59:31+00:00 · Thomas Lyttelton, Nathan Wilmers
Administrative Science Quarterly, Volume 71, Issue 3 , Page 657-691, September 2026. Political realignment in the United States has reshuffled party affiliations across occupational lines. The party of unions and minimum wages is increasingly also the party of managers and professionals. In this article, we investigate whether this ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-06-12T09:20:30+00:00 · Hao Ding, Mor Armony, Achal Bassamboo, Ruomeng Cui
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. While online reviews are critical in e-commerce, the strategic behavior of reviewers is understudied, especially in business-to-business (B2B) markets. We investigate buyers’ strategic behaviors when leaving reviews: whether B2B buyers withhold reviews ...
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-06-12 · Paolo Aversa, Paul Gouvard, Maria A. Makarova
Popular narratives often attribute innovations to a few “heroic” figures. Although scholarship has challenged this myth, it typically treats attribution as an issue of credit allocation, separating innovation production from innovator recognition. As a result, we lack an integrated account of how innovations and innovators become progressively linked through social processes of attribution. We address this gap through a micro-historical study of the guillotine, a beheading machine enduringly attributed to—and named after—Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, a humanist, physician, and politician who did not, in fact, invent it. Analyzing debates on equality in penal reform during the French Revolution (1788–1792), we develop a process model of attribution grounded in the co-construction of innovations and innovators. We theorize how audiences’ evaluations of a contributor’s engagement with a novel solution escalate into an evaluation–attribution spiral that crystallizes the innovator–innovation link. Our model identifies the mapping of contributors’ engagement onto value-laden problem dimensions as a key mechanism, and shows why, once crystallized, attribution persists even as the innovation’s meaning shifts—transferring credit or blame to the attributed actor regardless of material involvement. In doing so, we advance research on innovation production, innovator recognition, and the social construction of technology.
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-06-12 · Hassan Md. Hamadi, Anna Brattström
The 2022 launch of ChatGPT triggered a wave of social media discussion about generative AI. Drawing on 215,279 posts from five months after this launch, we extend prior accounts of hype as a vehicle for strategic resource mobilization to develop a theory of hype as collective sensemaking and knowledge creation. Existing models rest on a fixed relational architecture: knowledgeable actors leverage information asymmetries to project visions, directing expectations top down. ChatGPT collapsed this architecture by making generative AI accessible, democratizing technology evaluation; meanwhile, social media emerged as the arena where relational publics could form, driving vision formation and contestation around generative AI from the bottom up, reshaping how a nascent technology acquired meaning. Combining grounded theory with computational text analysis, we develop a process model on the role of relational publics in hypes. We explain how collective knowledge accumulates through traceable conceptual prototyping, testing a technology’s capability and proposing meaning simultaneously, and how, when this knowledge crosses a technology literacy threshold, hype transitions from an expanding to a containing phase. The model advances our understanding of how novel technologies diffuse when crowds simultaneously co-construct visionary imaginaries and practical knowledge, and of the role social media plays in this process.
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-06-11 · Madeleine Rauch, Shaz Ansari
Experiencing trauma in extreme contexts (e.g., areas affected by war, famine, or disease) can undermine professionals’ ability to cope, and remain engaged, with work. Prior research has highlighted coping strategies, such as detachment from trauma. However, less attention has been given to how professionals cope in demoralizing contexts, where trauma is persistent, detachment is difficult, and hope for impact erodes. Drawing on 73 diaries, 146 interviews, field observations, and archival data from Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), we show how professionals cope by temporally reframing their experiences—anchoring in the past or future to reinterpret their experience, and reorienting their agency to sustain engagement in the present. Building on construal-level theory, we identify three reframing pathways that enable professionals to remain engaged over time. Such temporal reframing influences not only how professionals cope but also whether they return to fieldwork or redirect purpose to broader systemic change and policymaking. We contribute to the literatures on trauma and coping by theorizing temporal reframing as a cognitive-emotional coping approach that reorients disoriented agency and explains divergent pathways of sustained engagement or redirected purpose.
Administrative Science Quarterly · 2026-06-10T04:58:33+00:00 · Daniel B. SandsKenan-Flagler Business School, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC
Journal of Accounting Research · 2026-06-10T04:56:24+00:00 · SIPENG ZENG, KUO ZHOU
ABSTRACT Combining hedge funds’ quarterly position information with their access records on the SEC's EDGAR server, we explore whether hedge funds proactively gather and analyze textual information in 10-K filings related to their stock holdings, and how these behaviors affect their positions. We find that hedge funds adjust their positions according to the textual information in the annual reports they download. Meanwhile, analyzing these reports helps them to generate excess returns. Overall, our evidence suggests that the textual content of annual reports contains crucial company insights, prompting a subset of hedge funds that engage in bulk downloads from the SEC's website to trade based on diligent analysis of 10-K filings.
Journal of Accounting Research · 2026-06-09T06:43:01+00:00 · WEI CAI, ANDREA PRAT, JIEHANG YU
ABSTRACT Prior research has pointed to differences in organizational capital as a reason for the persistent performance discrepancies among otherwise similar firms. In this paper, we develop and validate a new measure of organizational capital. Based on over a million crowd-sourced employee reviews scraped from Glassdoor, we construct the measure of organizational capital at the firm-year level using the word embedding model and ChatGPT-generated synthetic reviews. Our measure varies over time in accordance with macro trends, and differs both across and within firms, reflecting firm heterogeneity and major internal changes. We validate our measure by testing empirical predictions of the properties of organizational capital discussed in prior literature. Our findings suggest that this measure captures a slowly evolving intangible asset that is significantly associated with firm performance and top management's influence, aligning with the conceptualization of organizational capital by Dessein and Prat. We further showcase applications of our measure in accounting, economics, finance, and management literature. Taken together, the paper provides implications for various stakeholders who are interested in assessing and managing firms' organizational capital.
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-06-09 · Anran Li, Michael Jensen
This study examines the relationship between firm status and investment activities. Focusing specifically on financially uncertain investments, we argue that middle-status firms engage in more financially uncertain investments than low- and high-status firms. Moreover, the extent to which firms perform above historical and social benchmarks mitigates the relationship between status and financially uncertain investments. We find broad support for our arguments in a longitudinal sample of privately controlled listed Chinese firms traded on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges. Specifically, we find that social benchmarks based on comparisons to firms in the same industry and status group mitigate the inverted U-shaped relationship between status and financially uncertain investments. Moreover, the effect of industry benchmarks, not status benchmarks, is stronger than the effect of historical benchmarks, that is, comparisons to own past performance.
Production and Operations Management · 2026-06-06T07:32:24+00:00 · Desheng Wu17938University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, P. R. China
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. This paper analyzes the academic evolution and educational progress of Operations and Supply Chain Management in China. The field has transformed over recent decades. It has transitioned from a knowledge-importing phase to indigenous innovation. We show ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-06-06T07:31:42+00:00 · Desheng Wu
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. This Part II paper analyzes the industrial transformation and policy governance of Operations and Supply Chain Management in China. Chinese supply chains are changing fast. The system is shifting from labor-based cost advantages to technology-driven ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-06-06T07:28:54+00:00 · Hua Chen, Kevin Chung
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. This study examines contests within a multi-tier organization, where the owner offers a prize for subordinate branches to compete, and branch managerssubsequentlyset rewards to motivate their agents. Our main goal is to explore how the owner can steer ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-06-06T07:25:55+00:00 · Keumseok Kang, Sushil Gupta, Inkyoung Hur, Sungbum Jun
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Billions of dollars are exchanged between companies through accounts payable in today's business landscape. Given its immense scale and critical role in business operations, effectively managing accounts payable and working capital is essential for ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-06-06T07:25:33+00:00 · Mehmet Gumus, Sara Jaberi, Mohammad Nikoofal, Taner Bilgic, Arcan Nalca
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Recent innovations have driven a steady increase in online marketplace transactions. To remain competitive, numerous marketplace platforms and independent data providers offerCompetitive Intelligence Services(CIS), enabling sellers to explore not only ...
Journal of Marketing Research · 2026-06-05T03:20:15+00:00 · Taku Togawa, Naoto Onzo1School of Commerce, 13148Waseda University, Japan
Journal of Marketing Research, Ahead of Print. Brand logos are key visual elements that shape consumers’ perceptions and behaviors. This research advances the logo literature by systematically examining an understudied design feature: three-dimensionality. Three-dimensional (3D) logos incorporate ...
Journal of Marketing · 2026-06-05T03:19:09+00:00 · Jaeyeon (Jae) Chung, Eric S. Park
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. How do consumers form preferences when they cannot rely on established quality standards? This question is examined in the context of nonfungible token (NFT) art markets, where buyers lack evaluative anchors such as provenance, conventional aesthetic ...
Journal of Marketing, Volume 90, Issue 5 , Page 167-186, September 2026. Despite research on clustering strategies in franchised systems, little is known about its impact on outlet survival during times of economic adversity. In this research, the authors identify two governance mechanisms used by franchisors that vary at a ...
Journal of Marketing Research · 2026-06-04T05:34:10+00:00 · Mingzhang Yin, Khaled Boughanmi, Anirban Mukherjee
Journal of Marketing Research, Ahead of Print. The ability to quickly capture and adapt to customer preferences is central for firms seeking to offer personalized products and improve retention. This objective becomes challenging when individual-level data on customer interactions are limited, as is ...
Journal of Marketing · 2026-06-04T05:33:42+00:00 · Minkyung Koo, Ashok K. Lalwani, Sijie Sun
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. Coupons have the potential to double, triple, or even quadruple sales (Neslin 2002). However, coupon redemption rates remain abysmally low, which causes inefficiencies in marketing, as coupons are sent to a large segment with only a small fraction ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-06-04T05:33:01+00:00 · Junhao Vincent Yu, Tim Kraft, Robert B Handfield, Rejaul Hasan, Marguerite Moore
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Apparel retailers face increasing pressure to communicate the corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance of their supply chains. While communicating positive CSR performance is common, communicating less-than-perfect performance is challenging and ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-06-04T05:32:15+00:00 · Xiexin Liu, Xinwei Chen
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Retail recommendation systems increasingly operate as real-time decision engines that must personalize suggestions while respecting operational constraints such as inventory availability, category rules, and promotion policies. This is especially ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-06-04T05:31:55+00:00 · Jisun Yu, Kunsoo Han, Che-Wei Liu, Sunil Mithas
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. How do information technology (IT) and research and development (R&D) investments jointly shape the global dispersion of multinational manufacturers’ operations and their production costs? We argue that IT enhances a firm's ability to leverage R&D-induced ...
The Review of Financial Studies · 2026-06-03T00:00:00+00:00 ·
Abstract We develop a dynamic theory of “Partial Equilibrium Thinking” (PET), which micro-founds time-varying return extrapolation: extrapolative beliefs are present at all times, but only sometimes manifest themselves in explosive ways. We formalize the distinction between normal times shocks and “displacement shocks,” and study their interaction with extrapolative beliefs. In normal times, PET generates constant extrapolation and momentum. After a displacement shock that increases uncertainty, PET leads to stronger and time-varying extrapolation, triggering bubbles and endogenous crashes. Our theory sheds light on both market dynamics in normal times and Kindleberger’s narrative of bubbles within a unified framework.
Academy of Management Review · 2026-06-01 · Olli-Pekka Kauppila, Eero Vaara
The attention-based view (ABV) posits that strategic actions are shaped by the issues members attend to. Seminal theorizing explains top management’s role in distributing and enacting attention, but we know less about how organizational attention emerges through bottom-up strategic initiatives. Whereas traditional ABV adopts a dyadic approach to attending (attendee and object of attention), we introduce a triadic approach (attendee, coattendee, and joint object) to explain the buildup of joint attentional engagement in bottom-up strategic initiatives. Drawing on research on social cognition and social agency, we develop a three-fold process model comprising: (1) brokering and rhetorical work as key forms of triadic agency through which individuals initiate and sustain joint attentional engagement; (2) cognitive alignment and shared trust as mechanisms through which a collectively attending entity and collective attention emerge, enabling a jointly attended issue to develop into a strategic initiative; and (3) attracting and engaging broader organizational attention amid competing issues and initiatives, thereby connecting the emergent strategic initiative to the organization’s broader strategic agenda. By theorizing organizational attention as a joint, emergent, and recursive phenomenon, we advance both ABV and strategy process research, thereby offering a micro-foundational explanation of how bottom-up initiatives gain traction and enable strategic change.
MIS Quarterly · 2026-05-31T18:47:23+00:00 · Susan C. Athey et al.
“Notice and choice” is a mainstay of policies designed to safeguard consumer privacy. This paper investigates distortions in consumer behavior when faced with notice and choice, which may limit the ability of consumers to safeguard their privacy. We used data derived from a field experiment at MIT that distributed a new product, Bitcoin, to all 4,494 undergraduate students. There are two primary findings. First, small navigation costs have a tangible effect on how privacy-protective consumers’ choices are, often in sharp contrast with individual stated preferences about privacy. Second, the introduction of irrelevant but reassuring information about privacy protection makes consumers less likely to avoid surveillance, regardless of their stated preferences toward privacy.
Administrative Science Quarterly · 2026-05-30T12:23:17+00:00 · Tristan L. Botelho, Ethan J. Poskanzer
Administrative Science Quarterly, Volume 71, Issue 3 , Page 613-656, September 2026. Research has consistently found that organizational evaluations produce gendered outcomes. We advance understanding of this inequality by examining how multistage evaluations—a common organizational design feature—shape gendered evaluative disparities. We ...
Administrative Science Quarterly, Volume 71, Issue 3 , Page 573-612, September 2026. In this article, we show that remote work is associated with higher skill and qualification requirements in hiring. Drawing on qualitative interviews, we identify several mechanisms through which remote work raises hiring standards. By reducing face-to-...
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-05-29 · Umit Ozmel, Yoon Jung (Jenny) Kwon, David H. Hsu
Using the setting of corporate venture capital (CVC) investments, we examine how the knowledge obsolescence of a venture’s interorganizational partner shapes the venture’s innovation performance. We conceptualize knowledge obsolescence as the declining relevance of a firm’s knowledge base as technological domains evolve. We suggest and find that as a venture’s CVC investor becomes more knowledge-obsolete, it develops stronger incentives to appropriate the venture’s technologies and intellectual property to renew its own knowledge base—what we term obsolescence-induced appropriation incentives. Our analyses also reveal key contingencies. The negative association between CVC knowledge obsolescence and the venture’s innovation is (a) amplified when the CVC’s parent firm faces intense competitive pressures, and (b) mitigated when the venture is backed by independent venture capitalists with high network prominence. Robustness tests further show that strong intellectual property protection regimes attenuate this negative association, providing further support for the existence of obsolescence-induced appropriation incentives by the venture’s interorganizational partner. By adopting a temporal perspective on partners’ evolving knowledge relevance, this study hence clarifies when interorganizational ties may hinder innovation and how shifts in a partner’s knowledge base reshape the partner’s appropriation incentives.
Production and Operations Management · 2026-05-28T05:42:20+00:00 · Chengcheng Yu, Lan Lu, Lindong Liu, Qiao-Chu He
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. This article addresses a periodic repair problem for free-floating shared bikes that incorporates uncertain failure rates and covariate information. We conceptualize a physical landscape resembling black holes in cosmology to represent locations with ...
Journal of Marketing Research · 2026-05-26T07:56:08+00:00 · Paulo Albuquerque, Anita Tusche, Marton Varga, Nadine R. Gier-Reinartz, Bernd Weber, Hilke Plassmann
Journal of Marketing Research, Ahead of Print. This research examines whether functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data add predictive value beyond traditional market and survey data in forecasting two critical outcomes: (1) store manager adoption and (2) consumer sales of consumer packaged ...
Journal of Marketing Research · 2026-05-26T07:55:29+00:00 · Dena Yadin, Nira Munichor, Elanor F. Williams, Inbal Stockheim
Journal of Marketing Research, Ahead of Print. Consumers rely heavily on product reviews in their purchasing and consumption decisions, and how reviews influence product sales is well-documented. This research asks whether reviews might have an afterlife beyond purchase—that is, whether they can ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-05-26T07:47:48+00:00 · Miao Bai, Shu He, Xinxin Li, Ayush Sengupta
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Transportation has been one of the obstacles preventing people from obtaining timely and appropriate care. Emergency departments (EDs) are uniquely positioned in the healthcare system, providing around-the-clock care for illnesses and injuries that span a ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-05-26T07:47:08+00:00 · Yang Qian, Hai Che, Yezheng Liu, Yuanchun Jiang, Jennifer Shang
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Competitive intelligence is essential for operations management decision-making. Beyond traditional offline information channels, firms increasingly gather online data and resources to generate comprehensive competitive intelligence. This study derives ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-05-26T07:46:39+00:00 · Tom (Tianteng) Wang, David (Jingjun) Xu, Keng Leng Siau, Zhongju (John) Zhang
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. The number of recruitment postings on digital recruitment hiring platforms has increased since the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the weak surveillance and operations of these platforms, combined with the fact that most job seekers have relatively low ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-05-26T07:46:04+00:00 · Vishal V Agrawal, Ioannis Bellos, Hang Ren
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. A major concern that customers face when considering buying an electric vehicle is the uncertainty about its ability to cover their mobility needs. While an electric vehicle’s rated range is publicly known, the range it realistically achieves for a given ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-05-26T07:45:41+00:00 · Christoph Löffel, Moritz Fleischmann, Tobias Hausen, Steffen Thomas Klosterhalfen
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Agrochemical companies operate multi-echelon, long-lead-time supply chains to serve seasonal and uncertain demand for crop protection products from farmers around the globe. To match supply and demand in this challenging setting, alignment of the sales ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-05-25T12:27:14+00:00 · Like Bu, Shivam Gupta, Milind Dawande, Ganesh Janakiraman
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Firms routinely outsource their business requirements to external agents for many reasons; for example, to focus on their core competencies or to save costs. However, overbilling by agents has been well-acknowledged as a notorious problem across major ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-05-22T03:16:12+00:00 · Arda Yenipazarli1Department of Logistics & Supply Chain Management, 122530Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, GA, USA
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. This article examines supply-base configuration, supplier selection, and order allocation under supply risk and downstream rivalry. We develop a Cournot duopoly model in which two firms sell partially substitutable products and procure a critical input ...
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management · 2026-05-21T07:00:00+00:00 · Pieter L. van den Berg, Andre P. Calmon, Andreas K. Gernert, Stef Lemmens, Maria Rabinovich, Gonzalo Romero
Administrative Science Quarterly · 2026-05-19T02:29:33+00:00 · Sen Chai, Anil R. Doshi, Luciana Silvestri, Tiona Zuzul
Administrative Science Quarterly, Volume 71, Issue 3 , Page 527-572, September 2026. Catastrophic innovation failure derails firms’ innovation process and threatens their legitimacy. Prior research has analyzed internal and external responses to failure separately, focusing either on intra-firm learning and failure remediation or on ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-05-18T07:32:12+00:00 · Jiayi Joey Yu, Christopher S Tang, Musen Kingsley Li
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Should a retailer disclose its variable costs to consumers? While disclosing variable costs (e.g., material cost, production cost, and shipping cost) can build consumer trust through transparency, it may also lead to resentment if the actual gross profit ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-05-18T07:17:32+00:00 · Tinglong Dai, David Simchi-Levi, Michelle Xiao Wu, Yao Xie
Production and Operations Management, Volume 35, Issue 10 , Page 3579-3596, October 2026. Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is shifting from conversational assistants toward agentic systems—autonomous decision-making systems that sense, decide, and act within operational workflows. This shift creates an autonomy paradox: as GenAI ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-05-18T07:15:57+00:00 · Tugce Martagan1Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, 1848Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. There are more than 7,000 known rare diseases, yet around95%of them lack effective treatments. This paper explores how Operations Management (OM) research can help improve patient access to rare disease treatments. We first examine key challenges and ...
Journal of Marketing · 2026-05-18T02:51:17+00:00 · Xuelian Qin, Lin Tian, Bo Zhou
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. Major video streaming distributors are investing heavily in producing first-party (original) content, yet the economic viability of this high-cost strategy remains a subject of intense managerial debate. This article develops an analytical model to ...
Journal of Marketing Research · 2026-05-18T02:50:11+00:00 · Gilian R. Ponte, Tom Boot, Thomas Reutterer, Jaap E. Wieringa
Journal of Marketing Research, Ahead of Print. Firms use privacy-sensitive data to make targeting decisions, which can inadvertently reveal the underlying information driving those decisions—a risk the authors term “targeting privacy risk.” The authors use differential privacy to quantify and control ...
Academy of Management Review · 2026-05-18 · Yasir Dewan, Abhinav Gupta, Donald C. Hambrick
Research has shown that employee populations of some firms exhibit distinct ideological hues, consisting overwhelmingly of either left-leaning or right-leaning individuals, and that the implications of such skews are substantial. However, little is known about how ideologically skewed employee populations come to be. We present a theory that predicts the degree to which a firm’s employee population will be ideologically skewed, rather than normally distributed, at a given point in the firm’s lifespan. Our theory unfolds in three stages. First, we argue that founding conditions—societal polarization, ideological skewness of relevant labor markets, and founder ideology—determine whether a firm’s initial workforce will be ideologically skewed. Second, we propose that if an ideological skew initially emerges, attraction–selection–attrition (ASA) processes reinforce the skew, causing it to increase over time. Third, we highlight that ASA-driven outcomes are not deterministic; instead, emergent post-founding contingencies—such as shifts in the salience of ideologies, pressures to be mainstream, and reversal mandates—can either exacerbate or dampen ideological skews. By identifying these contingencies, we explain why some firms become bright “red” or “blue” while others are “purple,” and offer a foundation for understanding the interplay between societal polarization and ideological leanings of employee populations.
Production and Operations Management · 2026-05-16T12:17:39+00:00 · Milad Mirzaee, Elaheh Fata, Guang Li1Smith School of Business, 120458Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. This paper examines how assortment size influences consumer purchasing behavior and retailer profits, focusing on the paradox of choice (PoC), where overly limited or excessive options can diminish purchase intent. Although PoC effects are well-documented ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-05-16T12:16:14+00:00 · Ayşe Çetinel, A Gürhan Kök, Robert P Rooderkerk
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. For omnichannel multi-brand retailers, store openings are consequential strategic decisions. Beyond whether to open a store, firms must choose a format, select product categories, and decide how to support them in-store. To inform these decisions, we ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-05-16T12:15:39+00:00 · Yuxuan Zhang, Boya Peng, Jing Wu
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Sustainable development demands addressing two core challenges: mobilizing financial resources and aligning stakeholder incentives. This article surveys the operations-finance interface literature through the lens of “Mobilizing Resources” and “Aligning ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-05-16T12:13:58+00:00 · Yongge Yang, Yu-Ching Lee, Po-An Chen, Chuang-Chieh Lin
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. This study is focused on periodic Fisher markets where items with time-dependent and stochastic values are regularly replenished, and buyers aim to maximize their utilities by spending budgets on these items. Traditional approaches of finding a market ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-05-16T11:21:19+00:00 · Yixin Zhu, Hongfan(Kevin) Chen, Sean X Zhou
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. This article aims to study the impacts of disruption risk at different supplier tiers on the performance of both centralized and decentralized supply chains. We consider a three-tier supply chain, containing a tier-0 firm (original equipment manufacturer [...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-05-15T08:43:55+00:00 · Sreekumar Bhaskaran, Sanjiv Erat, Rajiv Mukherjee
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Consumers often purchase access to a digital service by paying an upfront fee, and then consume the service over a period of time. In this article, we examine the implications of such temporal separation of purchase and consumption on a user’s consumption ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-05-15T08:43:28+00:00 · Robert J Niewoehner, Eric Xu, Eunae Yoo, Hyoju Jeong
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Background:Education, like other service operations, depends on the quality of its delivery channel. Broadband has become a critical delivery channel for learning in the modern education system, but access and speed remain uneven across U.S. communities. ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-05-15T08:42:48+00:00 · Wenbin Wang, Owen Q Wu, Gilvan C Souza
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Combined heat and power (CHP) technology produces both heat and electricity from a single-fuel input, achieving an efficiency (total useful energy output divided by fuel input) as high as 90%. However, using CHP exposes firms to a higher fuel price ...
Administrative Science Quarterly · 2026-05-13T07:21:27+00:00 · Julia DiBenigno
Administrative Science Quarterly, Volume 71, Issue 3 , Page 479-526, September 2026. Women in masculine-typed roles often experience their gender identity as a barrier to proving themselves by the ideal-worker norms of their male-dominated occupations. Yet, these women often internalize these experiences, blaming themselves for their ...
Journal of Accounting Research · 2026-05-12T13:54:33+00:00 · ANDREA TILLET
ABSTRACT I examine whether the FASB's revenue recognition guidance under ASC 606 influences revenue comparability across firms and industries and whether revenue comparability reduces analysts’ disclosure processing costs. I extract firms’ revenue policy disclosures from 10-K filings to measure their textual similarity and compare revenue policies across firms and industries. I find an increase in revenue comparability for firms in different industries with similar revenue-generating transactions upon adoption of ASC 606. In contrast, I find a decrease in revenue comparability for firms in the same industry with similar revenue-generating transactions. Further, though I find that analysts are more likely to forecast revenues when firms have higher revenue comparability, this benefit of revenue comparability is less pronounced under ASC 606. This finding suggests the ASC 606-related changes to revenue comparability impose disclosure processing costs on analysts.
Journal of Accounting Research · 2026-05-11T15:50:39+00:00 · MARY BROOKE BILLINGS, ROBERT W. HOLTHAUSEN, CHRISTINE PETROVITS, DANYE WANG
ABSTRACT We assemble and describe a sample of 174,782 lawsuits filed against 218,437 public-company lawsuit-defendants in federal district court from 2006 to 2021. These lawsuits involve an array of allegations, including product liability, civil rights discrimination, contract breaches, improper compensation and labor practices, antitrust violations, corruption, securities violations, pollution, and intellectual property infringement. The sample exhibits rich variation across firms, industries, time, suit type, plaintiffs, and outcomes—reflecting not only firm activities but also social, political, and regulatory trends. Although many claims matter very little, some are important individually or in aggregate. We observe 23% of defendants experience a market value decline exceeding 10% of current assets around the lawsuit filing. Consistent with the notion that even low-stakes claims, when numerous or persistent, can introduce frictions or reflect underlying issues, we find that aggregate legal exposure is associated with increased return volatility and decreased profitability. Subsequent tests indicate that materiality, public and private enforcement, and firms’ information environments (as well as other firm traits) are associated with managers’ decisions to disclose these claims. Collectively, our descriptive evidence establishes a foundation for further research into underexplored types of corporate litigation that represent a broad range of alleged wrongdoing and socially irresponsible behavior.
Production and Operations Management · 2026-05-11T07:10:59+00:00 · Albert Y Ha, Weixin Shang, Yunjie Wang
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. We investigate the incentive for a retailer to share private demand information with two rebate-offering manufacturers who sell substitutable products through the retailer. We show that the retailer’s incentive to share information depends on the ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-05-11T07:10:38+00:00 · Menghuan Zhou, Yeming Gong, Liangfei Qiu, Ajay Kumar
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Driven by advances in machine learning (ML), smart products improve over time through data-driven insights as ongoing user interactions generate usage data that enable the training, evaluation, and refinement of underlying algorithms. However, when firms ...
Journal of Marketing · 2026-05-11T07:09:31+00:00 · Hoorsana Damavandi, Kersi D. Antia, Praveen K. Kopalle
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. Price increases can elicit a range of negative customer responses, from dissatisfaction to complaints, exits, and even boycotts. Practicing managers and academics agree that firms must justify their price increases, and consider three justification types—...
Journal of Marketing · 2026-05-11T05:52:38+00:00 · Samuelson Appau, Giana M. Eckhardt, Kingsley Tetteh Baako
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. Ride-hailing platforms are expanding globally, making inroads into developing markets. However, the technological affordances of many ride-hailing platforms were built in response to conditions in developed markets. Unlike developed markets, developing ...
Journal of Marketing Research · 2026-05-11T05:51:19+00:00 · Yuansheng Wei, Lin Tian, Baojun Jiang
Journal of Marketing Research, Ahead of Print. Online content platforms monetize user engagement through advertising and share ad revenue with content creators to incentivize content provision. A central design decision for these platforms is the choice of ad intensity policy, which governs how ...
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-05-08 · Elena Doldor, Madeleine Wyatt, Doyin Atewologun
Career scripts are typically treated as static frameworks that outline expectations of career paths. Little is known about how they are actively scripted, “on the ground” among career actors. We address this shortcoming by examining promotion scripts in a professional services firm. Through an inductive study of 91 participants, we identify different variations of the promotion script among human resource professionals and partners as gatekeepers. Adopting a relational lens, we uncover scripting processes and modes through which gatekeepers and promotion seekers jointly and intersubjectively construct the script. We extend career script scholarship in two ways. First, we theorize promotion scripts as polyphonic, multi-voiced, and partially contested among promotion actors, problematizing a view of career scripts as collectively shared representations. Second, we broaden focus beyond script content to empirically substantiate the notion of career scripting. We evidence how polyphonic promotion norms are scripted through (a) formalized and political scripting among gatekeepers, and (b) relational sponsorship practices between promotion seekers and gatekeeping sponsors, through which they jointly construct and differentially amplify the script variations. Our grounded model reveals how four scripting modes sustain polyphony in the promotion script, foregrounding the multi-actor, political, and relational dynamics implicated in the scripting of career norms.
Abstract Research Summary This paper examines how firms' adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) relates to the demand for managers and managerial skills. Using a skills-based measure of AI adoption derived from Lightcast job postings, we show that firms with greater AI adoption post more managerial vacancies and a higher share of such vacancies than less intensive adopters. These relationships are strongest in manufacturing and among firms with higher research & development intensity. Greater AI adoption is also associated with shifts in managerial skill requirements toward interpersonal and growth-oriented skills, including stakeholder management, creativity, and sales management, and away from routine administrative skills such as budgeting, planning, staff management, and customer service. Overall, the results suggest a reconfiguration of managerial roles toward capabilities facilitating scaling, coordination, and adaptation in AI-enabled environments. Managerial Summary As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more prevalent within firms, managers and executives face a practical question about how managerial roles may change. Using US job postings data from 2010 to 2022, we find that firms with higher AI adoption exhibit relatively greater demand for managerial roles, especially in manufacturing and among more innovative firms. We also find that more intensive AI adoption is associated with changes in what managers are expected to do. Demand shifts away from routine administrative skills such as budgeting and planning and toward growth-related skills such as sales, creativity, and stakeholder management. Overall, the evidence suggests a growing emphasis on managerial roles that relate to scaling, coordination, and organizational adaptation.
Journal of Accounting Research · 2026-05-05T13:41:02+00:00 · THERESA BÜHRLE, ELISA CASI, BARBARA STAGE, JOHANNES VOGET
ABSTRACT We study the economic consequences of anti-loss trafficking rules, which disallow the use of loss carryforwards as a tax shield after a substantial ownership change. We use staggered changes to these rules in the EU27 Member States, Norway, and the United Kingdom from 1998 to 2019 and find that limiting the transfer of tax losses is related to the number of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) declining by 18%, driven by loss-making targets. Turning to broader industry dynamics, we find decreases in survival rates of young companies after tighter regulations. Loosening of regulation is associated with increased firm survival. Tightening (loosening) anti-loss trafficking rules is related to decreased (increased) industry productivity, especially in R&D-intensive industries that are more prone to loss-making. Finally, tighter anti-loss trafficking rules are associated with lower deal synergies and risk-taking. All effects concentrate in strict regimes.
Journal of Marketing Research · 2026-05-04T07:04:34+00:00 · Jiani Xue, Shiri Melumad
Journal of Marketing Research, Ahead of Print. User-generated photos play an increasingly important role in online reviews, yet little is known about the process by which they are initially created. This article develops a theory of image creation arguing that reviewers invest more creative effort in ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-05-04T06:57:37+00:00 · Benjamin Legros, Francis de Véricourt, Johan SH van Leeuwaarden, Jan C Fransoo
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. A fundamental principle in operations management holds that increasing the number of servers reduces delays in service systems. To date, no mechanism has been identified that could reverse this effect. We propose, however, that risk aversion can cause ...
Journal of Accounting Research · 2026-05-04T04:40:03+00:00 · Ya Kang, Yupeng Lin, Yang Qiu
ABSTRACT This study examines the spillover effect of bank financial misconduct on the uninsured deposits of peer banks within local markets. We first validate that misconduct banks experience an increase in deposit spreads and a corresponding outflow of deposits following the misconduct. We then show local peer banks exhibit divergent deposit responses, contingent on how misconduct is perceived by information recipients in different economic contexts. During normal periods, depositors receiving a negative signal about bank misconduct reallocate their funds from misconduct banks to local peers, a local reallocation effect that decreases deposit spreads and increases deposit inflows for peer banks. Cross-sectional analysis further reveals that this local reallocation effect is more pronounced for financially sophisticated depositors, amplified when peer banks have strong fundamentals, but attenuated when misconduct banks are financially sound. During financial crisis periods, however, bank misconduct leads to withdrawals from both misconduct banks and their peer banks, a local contagion effect whereby local peer banks face increased deposit spreads and deposit outflows following the misconduct.
Information Systems Research · 2026-04-30T07:00:00+00:00 · Eaman Jahani, Benjamin S. Manning, Joe Zhang, Hong-Yi TuYe, Mohammed Alsobay, Christos Nicolaides, Siddharth Suri, David Holtz
Production and Operations Management · 2026-04-30T03:04:11+00:00 · Xabier Barriola, Luk N Van Wassenhove
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Natural disasters disrupt retail operations by simultaneously triggering demand surges and supply interruptions. Restricted access to affected areas raises transportation costs and complicates replenishment, while stores that remain open experience ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-04-30T03:02:51+00:00 · Wei Gu, Meng Li, Shujing Sun
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Follow-up appointments are crucial for maintaining continuity of care, yet patients often encounter various barriers to accessing these services. In this study, we examine the potential of telemedicine applications for follow-up care (tele-follow-up), ...
Journal of Marketing · 2026-04-30T03:01:49+00:00 · Christian Hughes, Jillian Hmurovic
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. Social media is essential to how brands are built and managed, especially for person brands. This research investigates how political person brands’ internal linguistic consistency shapes social media engagement. Specifically, the authors examine ...
Journal of Accounting Research · 2026-04-27T16:03:55+00:00 · Phillip T. Lamoreaux, Lauren Matkaluk, Amy G. Sheneman
ABSTRACT This paper examines investors’ perceptions of auditor involvement in non-GAAP reporting as captured by non-GAAP disclosures in 10-K filings. We find that firm-years with auditor involvement in non-GAAP reporting have higher CARs, lower bid–ask spreads, lower stock volatility, and lower abnormal trading volume on 10-K filing dates. To sharpen identification of auditor involvement, we hand-collect non-GAAP measures and reconciliations for S&P 500 firms and identify which exclusions reconcile directly to the audited financial statements. As the percentage of exclusions that reconcile directly to the audited financial statements increases, bid–ask spreads and stock volatility on 10-K filing dates decrease. We find that the results are not driven by strategic reporting or managers’ responses to perceived litigation risk. This study provides new insights into non-GAAP disclosures outside of earnings announcements, which have been largely ignored in prior literature. Collectively, our results suggest investors value auditor involvement in non-GAAP reporting and inform policymakers and standard setters considering the usefulness of assurance over non-GAAP measures.
Journal of Accounting Research · 2026-04-27T14:00:50+00:00 · Blake Holman, Benjamin P. Commerford, Finn Kinserdal
ABSTRACT Complex accounting estimates are becoming increasingly important to financial statements. Yet, such estimates create ample opportunities for bias. Although both management and independent auditors are tasked with ensuring these estimates are free from error and bias, evaluating the appropriateness of these measures can be quite difficult. Drawing on unconscious thought theory, we predict and find across three experiments that engaging in unconscious thought can improve accounting practitioners’ evaluations of accounting estimates. In Experiment 1, we use practicing auditors as participants and find that unconscious thought improves less-experienced auditors’ ability to recognize income-decreasing patterns of bias. In contrast, more-experienced auditors respond similarly to both incoming-increasing and income-decreasing bias, regardless of whether they use conscious or unconscious processing. In Experiments 2 and 3, we provide evidence that prompting managers to engage in unconscious thought also improves their recognition of patterns of bias within estimates. Overall, our findings demonstrate how unconscious processing can be intentionally prompted to improve accounting professionals’ ability to recognize subtle patterns of bias that they might otherwise overlook.
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-04-27 · Shiko M. Ben-Menahem, Vivianna F. He, Georg Von Krogh, Christian Wedl
The tension between innovation workers’ need for autonomy and managerial demands for formalized control has long posed a theoretical and practical puzzle. Formal controls are often viewed as managerial impositions that constrain innovation, limiting understanding of why and how workers actively participate in expanding them. Drawing on an inductive qualitative study of a multiyear formalization effort at a chemicals manufacturer, we explain how innovation workers’ productive resistance—their constructive contestation of emerging controls—drives the expansion and integration of an enabling control configuration. We find that formalization unfolds through bottom-up and top-down activities in which workers’ resistance can either constrain or amplify control expansion. Productive resistance, expressed through reformulation, redirection, and reinforcement, addresses deficits in the specificity, scope, and potency of emerging control mechanisms. By surfacing and resolving these deficits, workers and managers advance formalization and cocreate controls that reconcile autonomy with managerial oversight, thereby enabling innovation. Challenging received wisdom in innovation research and control theory, we show that expanding formal controls in innovation does not require minimizing resistance but can proceed through a path of productive resistance. We extend theory on innovation and control by explaining how resistance can generate, rather than hinder, the formal controls that support innovation.
Production and Operations Management · 2026-04-26T02:22:43+00:00 · Dehai Liu, Kun Qian, Ning Zhao, Sushil Gupta
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Effective utilization of disaster warning signals is crucial for mitigating impacts and enhancing operational resilience in disaster management. Although an emerging area of scholarly interest, the literature remains fragmented and lacks a unifying ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-04-26T02:22:22+00:00 · Esther Gal-Or, Muhammad Zia Hydari, Rahul Telang
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. We study how bug bounty programs (BBPs) shape software vendors’ security and release choices. Vendors invest in internal assurance before release to reduce residual vulnerabilities, and after launch they must manage vulnerability discovery, disclosure, ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-04-26T02:21:57+00:00 · Yunke Li, Xin Geng, Harihara Prasad Natarajan
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Motivated by ticket pricing challenges facing live event managers, we study how to maximize revenue when setting prices for multiple ticket categories with interdependent demand, realistic capacity constraints, and pricing restrictions. We define this ...
Journal of Marketing · 2026-04-26T02:20:56+00:00 · Daniel E. Chavez, Molly R. Burchett, Brian Murtha
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. This article examines whether, when, how, and why sales managers should get involved in customer exchanges as members of sales teams. It does so by drawing on the literature on status and deference in teams to advance novel hypotheses and testing them ...
Strategic Management Journal · 2026-04-25T05:35:31+00:00 · Tristan L. Botelho, Qingyang (Iris) Wang
Abstract Research summary Organizations are increasingly using large language models (LLMs) to support strategic evaluations. We examine whether and how these systems rely on gender and race. We asked GPT to evaluate identical startup pitches varying only the founder's name, shaping gender and race perceptions. Across 26,000 evaluations, GPT did not systematically assign lower scores to underrepresented minorities but avoided ranking them last without increasing winning likelihoods. To explain these patterns, we conducted “Second Opinion” experiments where GPT evaluated pitches alongside inputs simulating human bias. GPT more readily corrected explicit, identity-based bias than bias framed as neutral business critiques, with corrections limited in magnitude. We theorize these findings reflect symbolic compliance : LLMs suppress overt discrimination without substantively altering evaluative logic, allowing inequality to persist in AI-supported strategic evaluations. Managerial summary Large language models (LLMs), like OpenAI's ChatGPT, are increasingly used in strategic evaluations (e.g., hiring, pitches). We examine whether and how these models exhibit gender and racial biases in their evaluations of startup pitches, where we only varied founder names (shaping gender and race perceptions). Across multiple experiments, we find that GPT evaluators did not systematically assign lower scores to underrepresented minorities, primarily by reducing their likelihood of being ranked last. However, this behavior reflects a symbolic effort to avoid overt discrimination rather than a deeper fairness commitment. While LLMs may not reproduce historical and societal biases in overt form, their ability to correct them remains limited. These results highlight the need for implementing bias mitigation measures before integrating LLMs into high-stakes strategic evaluation processes.
Production and Operations Management · 2026-04-24T10:51:03+00:00 · Leila Hosseini, Vijay Mookerjee
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. In today’s fast-paced digital world, consumers demand instant access to online content and are intolerant of delays, making website speed a key competitive advantage in attracting web traffic. Google’s Speed Update and Core Web Vitals have further ...
Journal of Marketing · 2026-04-24T10:46:48+00:00 · Martina Cossu, Zachary Estes, Joachim Vosgerau
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. People with disabilities are among the most stigmatized groups in society, and the most underrepresented in advertising. The authors investigate advertising practices by which brands can include people with disabilities in ways that go beyond mere ...
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-04-22 · Alexandra Rheinhardt Beer, Amnah Ameen, Dhvani Badwaik, Monique Domingo, Nora Madjar
Co-creation between creator–client dyads is becoming increasingly common in creative service work. In these settings, clients hold authority over creative decisions, while providers possess the necessary expertise to evaluate and execute the work, resulting in authority–expertise asymmetry. Yet, little is known about what unique challenges arise from authority–expertise asymmetry and how creative service providers navigate them to sustain co-creation. We address this question through an inductive study of 51 tattoo artists who collaborate with clients to create permanent, highly personal tattoos. Our analysis reveals that creative service providers experience authority-driven inputs as straining co-creation, specifically through strained visioning, feasibility, and participation. To sustain co-creation in the face of these challenges, the providers engage in facilitating co-creation practices, which we define as the set of deliberate practices through which providers shape how authority-driven client inputs enter and function in the interaction under conditions of authority–expertise asymmetry. This facilitation involves three interrelated practices: facilitating ideation, implementation, and coordination. Together, our findings advance a model of how co-creation can be sustained when authority and expertise are structurally decoupled, with implications for theories of co-creation, coordination, and creativity.
Abstract Research Summary The trade-off between scale and scope has long posed a strategic dilemma, especially in digital settings, where specialization enables hyperscaling. Drawing on a longitudinal case study of ByteDance, we theorize how digital firms can overcome this constraint through the use of artificial intelligence (AI) combined with an adaptive organizational design. AI evolves and improves through self-learning and cross-fertilization across domains, becoming increasingly valuable as learning accumulates. This, however, is contingent on access to structurally related data that allow learning to transfer across domains. We show how AI reverses the conventional logic of the resource-based view: rather than valuable resources enabling diversification, diversification amplifies the value of resources. AI thus transforms the scale-scope nexus from being a trade-off into a source of strategic advantage. Managerial Summary The growing centrality of AI and digital platforms is reshaping how firms pursue and sustain growth. This study examines how ByteDance leveraged AI and adaptive organizational design not only to scale rapidly but also to diversify across industries and markets. Rather than incurring rising costs or coordination complexity, the firm's AI capabilities improved with each deployment through cross-fertilization across domains, enabling more efficient growth across multiple domains. For managers, the findings highlight how dynamic combinations of AI and organizational structure can help overcome traditional trade-offs between scale and scope, opening new pathways for scalable, cross-market expansion in increasingly competitive environments.
The Review of Financial Studies · 2026-04-21T00:00:00+00:00 ·
Abstract We present a portfolio choice demand model that allows for the nonparametric estimation of investors’ (subjective) expectations and risk preferences. Using comprehensive 401(k)-plan-level data from 2009 through 2019, we explore heterogeneity in asset allocations using our empirical framework. We recover investors’ beliefs about each asset and examine the implications and potential sources of those beliefs. Heterogeneity in expectations across investors accounts for twice as much variation in portfolio holdings as heterogeneity in risk aversion. Belief heterogeneity is partly driven by investors’ characteristics and experiences, reflecting local sources of information such as county-level GDP and employers’ past performance.
The Review of Financial Studies · 2026-04-21T00:00:00+00:00 ·
Abstract To understand the dynamics of investors’ asset demands, we develop a general-equilibrium model driven by a single latent variable: heterogeneity in investors’ confidence about mean endowment growth. The model predicts persistent heterogeneity in asset demands and concentrated portfolios. Consistent with the data, limited confidence reduces investors’ demand elasticities and makes stock prices excessively volatile—driven by latent demand rather than observable characteristics. The underlying economic mechanisms are driven primarily by investors’ desire to hedge changes in future beliefs instead of current disagreement. Finally, consistent with survey data, investors’ expectations correlate positively with past returns and negatively with future returns.
Journal of Accounting Research · 2026-04-20T09:57:04+00:00 · QINGKAI DONG, ANTHONY LE
ABSTRACT Labor unions in the United States are subject to financial reporting mandates. This study examines how these mandates affect unions and their members. Using several regulation-based empirical designs, we document that more granular reporting requirements adversely affect unions' election outcomes. Supplemental analyses suggest that these findings are consistent with the strategic use of unions' disclosed information by parties such as employers and their consultants. We find mixed evidence on whether the mandates materially improve oversight of unions. Lastly, we find that the mandate reduces employees' average pay without clear benefits for employers, aside from reallocating investment from labor to capital. Collectively, our results suggest that more fine-grained financial reporting requirements impose costs on unions and weaken their ability to represent employees, resulting in worse employment outcomes.
Journal of Marketing Research · 2026-04-18T04:21:21+00:00 · Ludovica Cesareo, Cesare Amatulli, Alessandro M. Peluso, Matteo De Angelis
Journal of Marketing Research, Ahead of Print. Overproduction and overconsumption represent key issues in the fight against resource waste and environmental degradation. Whereas the scientific debate has mainly focused on how to increase product durability by improving tangible aspects (e.g., ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-04-18T04:17:09+00:00 · Feng Tao, Yao-Yu Wang, Zhaolin Li, H Neil Geismar
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. We investigate the impact of skewed demand on robust inventory management. Including skewness in calculations leads to cubic constraints that prevent a standard two-stage method from deriving an explicit and tractable objective function. To overcome this ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-04-18T04:15:29+00:00 · Yunlong Wang, Fan You, Thomas Vossen, Rui Zhang
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. We consider an assortment optimization problem for a class of online video games where the in-game virtual store has a unique structure with two sections: Featured and Just For You (JFY). All customers (players) are offered the same Featured section ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-04-18T04:14:18+00:00 · Haokun Du, Bin Hu, Elena Katok
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Dynamic pricing is often complicated by strategic customer behavior. One tactic utilized by retailers to manage strategic customer behavior, known as Markovian pricing, is to offer price discounts at random intervals to prevent customers from predicting ...
Journal of Marketing · 2026-04-18T03:57:43+00:00 · Craig J. Thompson, Anil Isisag
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. How do brands provide identity value to consumers? The marketing literature provides three primary answers to this key managerial question: by building brand communities, by forging anthropomorphized relations whereby consumers regard brands as ...
Abstract Research Summary As organizations increasingly adopt generative AI (GenAI), they face a strategic challenge: not only deciding which tasks AI should perform, but also how to organize the integration of human and AI efforts to produce viable solutions. We propose that a cognitive asymmetry between human's tacit, embodied knowledge and AI's codified knowledge creates a representational gap that complicates human–GenAI collaboration. Through a qualitative study of professional perfume creation, we identify representational integration as an organizing process through which humans and GenAI coordinate to bridge this gap. This process unfolds across three practices: allocating tasks based on cognitive advantages, converting knowledge across tacit and codified forms, and steering GenAI outputs as problem solving evolves. This study advances a novel organizing perspective on human–GenAI collaboration under conditions of cognitive asymmetry. Managerial Summary Organizations increasingly deploy GenAI in knowledge-intensive work, yet many struggle to convert human and AI contributions into strategic value. This study takes a cognitive lens, showing that humans and GenAI rely on different forms of cognition—and that value emerges when organizations can coordinate and combine them. Successful human–GenAI collaboration therefore requires more than adopting powerful models. It depends on organizing practices that help employees translate across representational formats, relate GenAI outputs to embodied expertise, and iteratively steer GenAI as their interpretations evolve. Investing in these practices and skills allows organizations to harness GenAI's generativity while recognizing that human sensemaking, tacit knowledge, and contextual understanding remain indispensable for producing coherent, high-quality outcomes.
Journal of Accounting Research · 2026-04-16T16:05:35+00:00 · Yue Qi, Timothy A. Seidel, Joseph H. Zhang, Junsheng Zhang
ABSTRACT The engagement quality review is a key component of an audit firm's quality control system. This study leverages unique data on individual engagement quality reviewers (EQRs) to examine how previous shared working experience between EQRs and engagement partners affects audit quality. While prior research suggests that within-firm network ties between predecessor and successor partners facilitate knowledge transfer, we find that prior shared working experience between EQRs and engagement partners is associated with lower audit quality. Mechanism tests indicate that such experience is associated with a higher likelihood of regulatory enforcement actions related to deficiencies in audit procedures, insufficient evidence, and a lack of professional skepticism. We also find that such experience corresponds with higher materiality thresholds, suggesting reduced scrutiny during audit planning and execution. Additional analyses reveal that these adverse effects primarily arise when previous shared working relationships did not produce adverse outcomes, when EQRs are not audit industry leaders, and when they face lower reputational risk. These findings are especially salient given that EQRs’ previous shared working experience with engagement partners appears to weigh heavily in EQR assignments. Overall, our study provides important insights into the implications of EQR independence and the determinants of engagement quality review effectiveness.
Journal of Accounting Research · 2026-04-16T16:00:13+00:00 · EUNJEE KIM, HAI PHAM
ABSTRACT This paper hypothesizes that information flows from target firms to large shareholders during activist campaigns and that these flows have governance consequences. Focusing on actively managed mutual fund families, we find that informed trading by large-holding fund families increases during activist campaigns relative to smaller-holding fund families invested in the same firms. The effect is stronger for firms that attend more invitation-only investor events, face greater threats from activist campaigns, and are harder to value. Consistent with information flowing from management to large-holding fund families, the effect strengthens when Regulation Fair Disclosure enforcement is lax and when the information is favorable to the firm. Furthermore, the increased information advantage is associated with more management-friendly voting behavior by these investors and a higher likelihood of target firms winning activist campaigns and retaining board seats. Overall, our findings are consistent with a potential quid pro quo in which investors’ access to information from management is associated with more pro-management behavior.
Journal of Marketing Research · 2026-04-14T06:45:02+00:00 · Daniel Winkler, Nils Wlömert, Jūra Liaukonytė
Journal of Marketing Research, Ahead of Print. This research investigates how demand for an artist's creative work changes when social media mobilizes to “cancel” the artist in response to misconduct. Human brands are particularly vulnerable to reputational shocks, yet how misconduct translates into ...
Journal of Marketing · 2026-04-14T06:44:33+00:00 · Molly R. Burchett, Brian Murtha, Bernard J. Jaworski
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. Prior research on marketing principles focuses mainly on the benefits of using a relatively small set of high-level principles. However, based on 38 in-depth interviews with marketing professionals across firms and industries, the authors find that ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-04-14T06:44:01+00:00 · Xue Guo, Guohou Shan, Michael Rivera, Liangfei Qiu
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Real-time feedback applications are reshaping employee performance feedback in operations management. Their design and implementation significantly influence employee engagement, which is a key factor in the success of technology-driven business ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-04-14T06:42:54+00:00 · Garros Gong, Stanko Dimitrov, Michael R Bartolacci
Production and Operations Management, Volume 35, Issue 10 , Page 3865-3880, October 2026. This work addresses the operational conflicts between visibility-driven mobilization and cost efficiency in disaster management scenarios involving wildfires. Using official wildfire reporting on the social media platform Twitter (now X), we develop a ...
Journal of Marketing · 2026-04-14T06:34:30+00:00 · Ankit Anand, Alok R. Saboo, Ritesh Adhyapak
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. Climate disclosures have emerged as a prominent communication tool for firms facing growing pressure to address climate challenges, yet their impact on firm performance remains unclear. This study proposes a nonlinear (U-shaped) relationship between ...
Journal of Marketing · 2026-04-14T06:33:40+00:00 · Xiaoyan (Jenny) Liu, Chi Hoang, Sharon Ng
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. Many leading retailers have introduced AI-driven autonomous stores, sparking a trend that others are eager to follow. Although prior research has emphasized consumer acceptance of these formats and their operational advantages (e.g., reduced costs, ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-04-14T06:33:10+00:00 · Jianyue Wang, Ki Ling Cheung, Albert Y. Ha
Production and Operations Management, Volume 35, Issue 10 , Page 3848-3864, October 2026. In this paper, we explore the question of whether an apparel manufacturer should incorporate a renting channel into its existing business model, which currently only includes a retailing channel. We also examine how such a change would affect product ...
Journal of Accounting Research · 2026-04-09T05:22:14+00:00 · Pietro A. Bianchi, Jere R. Francis, Antonio Marra, Nicola Pecchiari
ABSTRACT We investigate the monitoring quality of accountants with ties to the Mafia in their role as auditors for “clean” firms—those with no known ties to organized crime. Using a proprietary government database, we identify Italian firms with alleged ties to the Mafia through their executives, directors, or shareholders. We define “suspect accountants” as those who serve as auditors for these Mafia-connected firms, acknowledging their potential associations with criminal entities. We predict and find evidence that “clean” clients (treatment group) monitored by suspect accountants are more likely to engage in earnings management practices that reduce taxable income, compared with a control sample of “clean” firms monitored by accountants with no known Mafia ties (control group). Our findings suggest that accountants with ties to the Mafia act as low-quality monitors in the “clean” economy.
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-04-09 · Ryan T. Allen, Robert Bremner, Rory M. McDonald
Firms increasingly involve user communities in product development, and prior research documents many benefits in idea generation, knowledge sharing, and cost reduction. We theorize, however, that incorporating market feedback about products from these communities can harm products’ commercial performance. Because community feedback is volunteered by self-selected participants rather than sampled to represent the broader market, it may mislead firms when narrow community preferences diverge from mainstream demand. We predict that greater incorporation of community feedback will increase positive evaluations of a product within the community, but undermine its broader commercial success when there are strong user self-selection pressures (like for initially niche-targeted games). We test this theory in the personal-computer (PC) video-game industry using Steam Early Access, where developers integrate community feedback prior to release. Using a multimethod design that combines large-scale archival analyses with interviews of developers, executives, and community members, we find that feedback incorporation during Early Access improves post-launch commercial outcomes of games only when the Early Access community closely mirrors the distribution of users in the broader Steam market. However, in unrepresentative communities—even large ones—greater incorporation predicts lower post-launch revenues despite favorable community evaluations.
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-04-09 · Anne Burmeister, Daniel Z. Levin
People are often reluctant to network or seek advice from others due to anticipated emotional discomfort. Yet, most prior research is either vague regarding the exact nature of such discomfort or identifies mainly proself (i.e., self-oriented) concerns. Not sufficiently addressed, though, are prosocial concerns about advice seeking as an inequitable exchange that potentially burdens the advice giver. Paradoxically, advice givers have a lot to gain from providing advice. To address this “inequity illusion” of advice seeking, we integrate prosocial impact and equity theorizing. We propose that a prosocial framing of advice seeking (i.e., the idea that advice seeking is beneficial for advice givers) functions as a psychological equity restoration technique that lowers the advice seeker’s “burden anxiety”—thereby increasing advice-seeking behavior. We further examine whether prosocial framing is more potent in relational settings that amplify worries about potential inequity, such as with higher-status or unfamiliar advice givers. Using a multi-study experimental design, including two randomized controlled field experiments, we find that prosocial framing of advice-seeking benefits leads to increased advice seeking, mediated by burden anxiety. We also find initial evidence that prosocial framing is a more potent motivator when the advice giver has higher relative status or is more unfamiliar.
Information Systems Research · 2026-04-08T07:00:00+00:00 · Thomas Roderick, Monica Chiarini Tremblay, Rajiv Kohli, Arturo Castellanos, Yolande Pengetnze
Journal of Marketing Research · 2026-04-08T01:36:05+00:00 · Michael Thomas114716Robert J. Trulaske, Sr. School of Business, University of Missouri, USA
Journal of Marketing Research, Ahead of Print. Sellers frequently make positive but vague claims about product quality—a practice known as “puffery” that enjoys legal protection. This research examines whether puffery influences consumer behavior in the context of Airbnb listings. The study exploits ...
Journal of Marketing · 2026-04-08T01:35:40+00:00 · Yeseul Kim, Dipayan Biswas, Courtney Szocs, Khalia Jenkins
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. When their identity is salient, consumers from historically marginalized and privileged groups are differentially influenced when it comes to choosing algorithmic service providers (e.g., AI-enabled tellers, chatbots, robots, and digital kiosks). Under ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-04-08T01:23:42+00:00 · Sushil Gupta, Seyed Sina Mohri, Reza Zanjirani Farahani
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Wildfires—also known as wildland fires, bushfires, and forest fires—are large-scale, uncontrolled fires that occur in vegetated areas, triggered by natural or human causes. They have significant economic, environmental, and social impacts. As with most ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-04-08T01:23:18+00:00 · Lijian Lu, Ruxian Wang, Xinyi Zhou
Production and Operations Management, Volume 35, Issue 10 , Page 3829-3847, October 2026. As consumer demand for transparency and accountability in product sourcing grows, traceability-enabled technologies are increasingly adopted across supply chains. This paper explores the diverse impacts of traceability on product quality and supply chain ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-04-08T01:22:39+00:00 · Tuuli Hakkarainen, Anatoli Colicev, Torben Pedersen
Production and Operations Management, Volume 35, Issue 10 , Page 3812-3828, October 2026. Geographic dispersion is routine in new product development, yet it remains unclear whether employee geographic distance (EGD) slows project execution. We develop a coordination cost perspective in which EGD is postulated to increase project delays ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-04-08T01:21:56+00:00 · Nan Liu, Shan Wang, Noa Zychlinski
Production and Operations Management, Volume 35, Issue 10 , Page 3792-3811, October 2026. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated telemedicine adoption, offering a convenient alternative to in-person care. However, televisits may not fully address health concerns and sometimes require supplementary in-person visits, consuming resources that could ...
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-04-08 · Chen Zhang, Ning Li, Xilan Zhang, Yi-An Deng, Laijie Yang
Pacing has long been critical for understanding team work patterns. As organizations increasingly embrace multiple memberships, with workers engaged in different concurrent projects, it becomes important to understand how team pacing is uniquely shaped in such contexts. Extending beyond prior theories with single-membership assumptions, we theorize a new perspective on how team pacing is influenced by multiple memberships—contexts typically characterized by non-coinciding project portfolios across members. Based on this theorizing, we examined a large-scale dataset comprising over 1.6 million entries of project activities involving 1,712 individuals across 415 team projects, and found that higher average multiple memberships among core members delayed the timing of a project’s activity surge. This surge-delaying effect was mitigated, however, when project members shared greater external project overlap. An additional experiment revealed that the reduced perceived feasibility of holistic optimization was an important psychological mechanism underlying the surge-delaying effect. Furthermore, we found that projects with longer time spans were less likely to experience a surge, but for those that did, surge timing had implications for efficiency: projects with either a markedly early surge (i.e., initial phase) or a markedly late surge (i.e., final phase) exhibited greater temporal procedural efficiency than those with an intermediate-phase surge.
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-04-08 · Silvia Stroe, Charlotta Sirén, Vivianna Fang He, Barbara Burkhard, Vangelis Souitaris
With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence technologies, algorithmic facial expression analysis (AFEA) has emerged as a promising methodology to measure emotions. Despite rapid adoption across management subfields, however, the full scope of AFEA’s theoretical potential remains underexplored. This paper provides a framework that links the AFEA measurement innovation to major opportunities for theoretical advancement around emotions in organizations. We start by describing the methodological basis of AFEA and reviewing its applications in management research to date. We then outline two core capabilities of AFEA—namely, capturing the temporal structure of emotions and detecting inauthentic expressions of emotions—and illustrate how these capabilities can enable theory advancement in management research. After presenting an empirical demonstration of AFEA’s capabilities and a practical step-by-step guide for using it, we conclude by discussing key considerations for realizing the future potential of AFEA research.
The Review of Financial Studies · 2026-04-07T00:00:00+00:00 ·
Abstract We study how intraday and overnight components of past returns predict future stock returns from 1926 to 2019. Portfolios formed on past intraday returns display momentum without long-term reversal, whereas portfolios formed on past overnight returns display no momentum. We link this asymmetric day-night pattern to the fact that most trading occurs intraday, which has remained stable over time. Evidence from international stock markets, intraday intervals, and analyst expectations suggests that investors underreact to private information revealed through trading. This underreaction mechanism is most consistent with Hong and Stein’s (1999) theory of momentum.
Production and Operations Management · 2026-04-03T09:58:47+00:00 · Mehmet E Ahsen, Radha Mookerjee, Mehmet US Ayvaci
Production and Operations Management, Volume 35, Issue 10 , Page 3770-3791, October 2026. Despite significant advancements in predictive artificial intelligence (AI), organizations continue to grapple with determining the most effective integration of AI into their operations, particularly in combining AI with human capabilities in task ...
Journal of Marketing · 2026-04-03T06:15:10+00:00 · Janina Mettler, Aline Lanzrath, Christian Homburg
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. Extended reality (XR) technologies hold the potential to transform buyer–seller relationships in business-to-business (B2B) sales. Yet, the consequences, antecedents, and contingency effects of XR integration in B2B organizations remain underexplored. ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-04-03T06:14:05+00:00 · Michael D Stott, Chelliah Sriskandarajah, Jon M Stauffer1Department of Information and Operations Management, 2655Texas A&M University, TX, USA
Production and Operations Management, Volume 35, Issue 10 , Page 3730-3749, October 2026. Additive manufacturing (AM) is a process by which three-dimensional products are made via the addition of material in a layer-by-layer fashion. This manufacturing technique is growing in commercial usage, given its advantages in creating very dense or ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-04-03T06:13:21+00:00 · Benjamin Legros, Johan SH van Leeuwaarden
Production and Operations Management, Volume 35, Issue 10 , Page 3750-3769, October 2026. In service systems, customers tend to overutilize resources, resulting in high congestion. We study a non-coercive way to alleviate congestion based on customers’ awareness of the negative waiting externalities they impose. To this end, we revisit Naor’s ...
The Review of Financial Studies · 2026-04-03T00:00:00+00:00 ·
Abstract We find that firms are the primary sellers who clear the market for index fund buying, providing shares at a nearly one-for-one rate. Most demand-side institutions trade in the same direction as index funds rather than accommodating passive demand. We use two instruments for index fund demand and show that firms causally respond to exogenous passive demand, with prices serving as the coordinating mechanism. Firms satisfy passive demand mostly through nonprimary market issuance, for example, through employee stock-based compensation. Our results suggest that passive investing has systematically supplied capital to firms by enabling equity issuance over the last two decades.
Journal of Accounting Research · 2026-04-02T07:00:00+00:00 · CAROLYN DELLER, SANTIAGO GALLINO
ABSTRACT This paper explores the influence of two fixed payment arrangements—time-based and output-based wages—on worker behavior and performance in a multidimensional task setting. We examine how these wages affect the time workers spend on individual units of a task and their work quality. We contend that fixed compensation schemes can implicitly communicate standards of acceptable work. Our empirical evidence from MTurk experiments and a laboratory experiment indicates that workers on output-based wages deliver higher quality and spend more time on individual units than their time-based counterparts. These findings are consistent with output-based wages, implying a standard of acceptable quality—without a conflicting standard of speed—to which workers respond. Our results emphasize the power of implicit cues from fixed compensation schemes and offer insights for employers, suggesting the choice between output- and time-based wages should be informed by whether quality or turnaround time is valued more.
Production and Operations Management · 2026-04-01T06:47:35+00:00 · Jason Nguyen, Behrooz Pourghannad
Production and Operations Management, Volume 35, Issue 10 , Page 3678-3696, October 2026. Government environmental agencies are increasingly partnering with large, foreign corporate buyers in the energy efficiency improvement process to encourage investments at small manufacturers that can enhance the value of local manufacturing. Using a ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-04-01T06:45:33+00:00 · Sukrit Pal, Thu Trang Hoang
Production and Operations Management, Volume 35, Issue 10 , Page 3660-3677, October 2026. In response to social protests, transportation network companies introduced incentive programs to improve hourly utilization and retain drivers. While such initiatives assume increased driver commitment, their impact on labor allocation across competing ...
Journal of Marketing · 2026-04-01T06:29:21+00:00 · Lynn Sudbury-Riley, Katy Kerrane, Michael Haenlein
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. Betrayal is a harmful phenomenon that damages relationships and imposes significant psychological and financial costs. This research examines consumer experiences of multiple betrayals by multiple actors in high-stakes situations, where the consequences ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-04-01T06:27:45+00:00 · Nakyung Kyung, Xiaoyu Liu
Production and Operations Management, Volume 35, Issue 10 , Page 3697-3714, October 2026. The opioid epidemic poses widespread societal challenges. In response, electronic prescribing for controlled substances (EPCS), which requires prescribers to use the e-prescribing system, has begun attracting attention to combat the opioid epidemic by ...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-04-01T06:26:30+00:00 · Weitao Ren, Chuanshuai Ru, Wenqiang Xiao, Fangruo Chen
Production and Operations Management, Volume 35, Issue 10 , Page 3715-3729, October 2026. This paper studies how an online seller designs a menu of return contracts to manage consumer heterogeneity arising from product misfit risk. In the model, informed consumers know the product fits, whereas uninformed consumers face uncertainty about fit. ...
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-04-01 · Timothy D. Hubbard, Lívia Markóczy, Aten Zaandam
Understanding how executives’ backgrounds influence corporate behavior is essential for organizational science and society. Previous research offers conflicting predictions about whether childhood resource scarcity leads to self-focused or prosocial tendencies, with evolutionary theories predicting greed and social psychology theories pointing to generosity. This contradiction is especially relevant for chief executive officers (CEOs), whose decisions significantly impact stakeholders. Here, we show that CEOs from lower social class origins engage in both more greedy behaviors (e.g., pursuing excessive compensation) and more prosocial behaviors (e.g., internal corporate social responsibility) than their higher-class counterparts. Using survey data from 135 S&P 1500 CEOs, we demonstrate that both behaviors stem from the same psychological mechanism: a resource insecurity mindset formed during childhood. This mindset makes lower-class origin CEOs simultaneously vigilant about personal resource accumulation and compassionate toward others facing constraints. We examine how CEO job insecurity and overconfidence influence these effects. Through experiments, coded CEO interviews, and executive qualitative interviews, we find broad support for our theory. These findings resolve a significant theoretical contradiction by showing that self-serving and other-serving behaviors can coexist and share common roots. Understanding these dual behavioral tendencies has important implications for corporate governance, executive selection, and organizational inequality.
Academy of Management Review · 2026-03-31 · Felix Danbold, Batia M. Wiesenfeld
We develop theory about the role of organization member prototypes in shaping when and why employees from different social identity groups experience varying levels of perceived inclusion—the feeling that one both belongs and is free to be themselves. Organization member prototypes set expectations about the features members should possess. Because prototypes typically align with societally dominant groups, members of dominant groups tend to enjoy high perceived inclusion while those with nondominant identities face tradeoffs between authenticity and belonging. Prototype exclusivity—the extent to which the organization member prototype reflects a narrow set of people—determines the magnitude of these tradeoffs for people with nondominant identities. Prototype exclusivity is shaped by four distinct prototype dimensions: accessibility, feature count, balance, and clarity. For organizations, greater prototype exclusivity stratifies perceived inclusion and impedes diversity. We highlight how organizations can leverage our theorizing to boost inclusion, and we provide a research agenda for exploring further consequences of prototypes in organizations.
The Review of Financial Studies · 2026-03-30T00:00:00+00:00 ·
Abstract We causally test alternative theories of expectation formation. Using a randomized information experiment we show overreaction is a key feature of individuals’ return expectations, and individuals’ response to the price-earnings ratio is opposite of academic consensus. Our evidence is inconsistent with standard models of expectation formation, but subjective mental models that deviate from objective benchmarks can jointly explain the updating behavior in the experiment, the link between individuals’ prior perceptions and expectations, and the heterogeneity of updating. Conditional on their beliefs, individuals’ sensitivity of equity shares in a hypothetical portfolio choice experiment is consistent with the standard Merton model.
Journal of Marketing · 2026-03-27T05:18:30+00:00 · Jasmina Ilicic, Stacey Brennan
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. Consumption of addictive products, such as gambling, alcohol, tobacco, gaming, fast food, and illicit drugs, is an important public health and policy issue. Research identifies that political ideology influences positive consumer behaviors, but little is ...
Journal of Marketing · 2026-03-27T05:17:51+00:00 · Vanessa M. Patrick, Deepa Chandrasekaran, B.J. Allen
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. Industry leaders and academics recognize the importance of addressing the needs of edge consumers—those who are underserved or unserved in a marketplace. Yet little is known about how organizations transform their new product development (NPD) processes ...
Journal of Marketing Research · 2026-03-27T05:17:23+00:00 · Lexie Lan Huang, Xueni (Shirley) Li, Kimmy Wa Chan
Journal of Marketing Research, Ahead of Print. Consumers often resist marketing information about death-related products and services (DRPS), let alone purchase them. Yet, there is a massive market and universal necessity for DRPS offerings like life insurance and funeral services. Proactively ...
Academy of Management Review · 2026-03-26 · William A. Kahn, Han Liu
Organizations devoted to care, morality, and social purpose sometimes generate rather than relieve suffering. Paradoxically, such suffering often persists not because it is unseen, but because acknowledging it threatens the organization and its members’ identities as benevolent and caring. We develop a process theory explaining how organizations respond to organizationally caused suffering under identity threat, and why responses diverge toward either propagation or mitigation. Drawing on systems psychodynamics, compassion research, and identity threat theory, we argue that identity-threatening harm activates threat appraisal concerning valued self-definitions. This appraisal channels responses along two pathways. “Constriction” narrows responsibility, localizes blame, and produces bounded or performative forms of compassion that stabilize personal identity while leaving systemic injuries unaddressed. “Expansion” distributes ownership of harm and enables responsible compassion that more substantively engages suffering. We further theorize how internal sensegivers and organizational conditions shape movement both along and between these pathways. By foregrounding identity threat appraisal as a central mechanism, we explain why compassionate intentions do not reliably produce compassionate outcomes, and why suffering may be compounded in organizations most committed to alleviating it.
Journal of Marketing Research · 2026-03-25T12:32:01+00:00 · Na Kyong (Kimberly) Hyun, Michael L. Lowe, Aradhna Krishna
Journal of Marketing Research, Ahead of Print. Consumers are more easily persuaded by people who are similar to them in looks, behavior, and beliefs. Does similarity's effect on persuasion extend to similarity in how people sound? The authors explore how similarity in vocal timbre influences consumer ...
Journal of Consumer Research · 2026-03-25T00:00:00+00:00 ·
Abstract Online behavioral research assumes survey responses come from humans, yet vision-enabled AI agents can now autonomously complete surveys by capturing screenshots, processing questions, and submitting responses. Because these agents perceive the same rendered visual content that humans see, traditional detection methods are ineffective. This article introduces the Cognitive Trap Framework: researchers can transform architectural constraints of vision-language models into survey questions where the correct answers are simultaneously difficult for AI agents but easily processed by humans. Six traps derived from computer science benchmarks demonstrate the framework. Against 1,007 human participants (Prolific) and 526 researcher-deployed AI agents (e.g., ChatGPT Agent, Google Project Mariner), cognitive traps detected 97.1% of agents (vs. 2.3% with traditional attention checks), while flagging only 4.1% of humans. Pre-registered replications on Amazon Mechanical Turk and CloudResearch Connect demonstrate cross-platform effectiveness, and validation against 34 frontier models spanning two years reveals that model improvement is non-monotonic because each new architecture reconfigures which constraints it resolves and which it introduces. The framework can thus generate new cognitive traps as AI agent models evolve, and a public repository provides researchers with validated traps ready for deployment.
Journal of Marketing Research · 2026-03-24T11:49:51+00:00 · Kelley Gullo Wight, Holly S. Howe, Danielle J. Brick, Gavan J. Fitzsimons
Journal of Marketing Research, Volume 63, Issue 5 , Page 895-916, October 2026. Communication is a key aspect of the joint decision-making process, yet the field lacks an understanding of how people talk to each other while making joint decisions. In this article, the authors analyzed nearly 200 joint decision conversations from shop-...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-03-24T11:49:11+00:00 · Davood Shiri, Masoud Shahmanzari, Fehmi Tanrisever
Production and Operations Management, Volume 35, Issue 10 , Page 3640-3659, October 2026. Effective management of election campaigns involves dynamic decision-making under uncertainty. Traditional approaches rely heavily on pre-planned strategies that often fail to adapt to real-time changes in voter sentiment and external factors. This paper ...
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-03-24 · Alessandro Piazza, William D. Miles
We examine how entrepreneurs transition to angel investing through the lens of generalized reciprocity and embeddedness. Using a multimethod approach combining archival analysis with three experiments, we reveal how psychological and social mechanisms shape this transition. We find that entrepreneurs who have received angel funding are more likely to become angel investors themselves, particularly when they share educational, professional, or geographic ties with their initial investors. While angel investors, like all investors, seek financial returns, we theorize that choosing angel investing over alternative investment vehicles reflects prosocial motivations rooted in reciprocity. Our mediation analyses demonstrate that gratitude, rather than reputation concerns, drives this initial transition. Furthermore, entrepreneurs who received embedded funding preferentially direct their investments toward entrepreneurs with whom they share embedded ties. This reveals a two-part process: emotional mechanisms drive the decision to become an angel investor, while structural embeddedness guides investment targeting. These findings integrate psychological accounts of generalized reciprocity with sociological perspectives on embeddedness, linking individual-level and structural explanations of prosocial behavior in economic contexts. Our study highlights how angel investing perpetuates itself through self-reinforcing cycles that create both opportunities and constraints for ecosystem development.
Journal of Consumer Research · 2026-03-21T00:00:00+00:00 ·
Abstract People with disabilities constitute 15% of the world’s population with a total disposable income of more than $2.6 trillion. However, few companies offer products tailored to the needs of this segment, making it important to understand how mass-market consumers react to innovations that target people with disabilities. Nine studies and six supplementary studies (twelve preregistered) reveal that innovations targeting consumers with disabilities are subject to comparatively greater scrutiny by mass-market consumers. Specifically, consumers find charging price premiums for innovative products less acceptable when they are targeted at people with disabilities. The aversion to targeting this segment occurs only when firms charge a price premium and persists even when firms provide cost justifications for the relatively higher prices. Drawing on research on disability stereotypes, we identify pity for people with disabilities as a critical driver of these reactions. Variations in pity across disabilities are related to the acceptability of a price premium for adaptive innovations. These findings are suggestive of a novel form of paternalism against consumers with disabilities. Paradoxically, this view may render the marketplace less inclusive for consumers with disabilities, as it could penalize companies that provide more options for this underserved segment.
Production and Operations Management · 2026-03-20T03:28:43+00:00 · Feng Mai, Jingyi Sun, Muer Yang
Production and Operations Management, Volume 35, Issue 10 , Page 3617-3639, October 2026. The direct impacts of long wait times in elections, such as lost wages for voters and suppressed turnout, are well-documented. Drawing upon the service operations literature, we hypothesize that such operational inefficiencies may have far-reaching ...
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management · 2026-03-19T07:00:00+00:00 · H. Harriet Jeon, Claudio Lucarelli, Jean Baptiste Mazarati, Donatien Ngabo, Hummy Song
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-03-19 · Deniz Öztürk, John M. Amis
Drawing on a study of Syrian refugees engaged in informal work in Turkey, we examine how and why workplace relationships of marginalized groups break down and, in some cases, may be repaired. We develop a process model to explain the concept of relationship splintering—the gradual and recursive deterioration of relationships. We identify degrading, silencing, and distancing as key organizational mechanisms of splintering. These mechanisms are triggered by an attribution of blame and collectively constitute a system of organizational dehumanization. Over time, these mechanisms may cause complete relationship fracture, or, under certain conditions, be reversed to enable repair. Our work offers a more dynamic understanding of relationship processes extending theories of workplace marginalization. We also contribute to the literature on refugee workforce integration by foregrounding integration as a relational and processual phenomenon in organizational contexts characterized by structural inequality.
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-03-19 · Rebecca R. Kehoe, F. Scott Bentley
Integrating insights from research on newcomer socialization and generalization of learning, we theorize that individuals’ prior mobility across organizations may offer learning opportunities that mitigate the barriers they face as newcomers transitioning into subsequent employment contexts. Building on evidence that individuals experience a temporary decline in performance when they switch employers, we argue that more mobile individuals will experience a smaller performance decline and shorter time to performance recovery following entry into a new employer as they are better equipped to adapt to the norms, values, and expectations of new organizational social contexts. We further theorize that the benefits associated with prior mobility are likely to be greatest when newcomers’ social integration into a new organization is more challenging or more central to their new role. We find overall support for our theory using data on moves made by 8,693 hedge fund managers between 2,129 firms in the U.S. hedge fund industry from 2004 to 2019. We contribute to research on the influence of individuals’ career experiences on their transitions into new organizations, and offer insights to ongoing conversations related to the implications of employees’ investments in firm-specific human capital.
Academy of Management Review · 2026-03-18 · Li Lu, Bei Yan
As humans and AI increasingly work together in organizations, how can they dynamically allocate tasks and roles amid evolving task demands? Humans and AI represent the world in distinct yet complementary ways, creating both performance opportunities and coordination challenges for human–AI collaboration (HAIC). Tackling this, we advance a novel theory of “hybrid cognitive alignment” (HCA) as an emergent coordination mechanism that explains microprocesses leading to a functional compatibility between human and AI, enabling both parties to anticipate and adapt to each other. We apply the taskwork–teamwork framework to explain what needs to align, and create an AI-typology to elucidate how HCA can be achieved. We delineate how humans collaborate with “tool-like,” “assistant-like,” “rigid-teammate-like,” and “teammate-like” AI through four distinct pathways to develop instrumental, contextualized, prescribed, and reciprocal alignments. Our theory complements the current top-down organization design approach with a bottom-up, emergent perspective. We highlight AI’s material properties as a distinctive driver of emergent coordination in HAIC, in parallel to human–AI’s iterative exchanges. Our work creates a new theoretical frontier for the coordination literature, helps to synthesize mixed findings regarding HAIC effectiveness, and generates implications for designing and deploying AI as a collaborator.
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-03-18 · Romain Boulongne, Trevor Young-Hyman, Pascual Berrone
Current scholarship offers divergent views on whether broadening stakeholder governance creates joint gains or redistributes value away from equity holders. To address this tension, we develop a temporal model of stakeholder governance that specifies how these gains are distributed over time. We argue that broadening stakeholder governance initially reduces rewards for equity stakeholders because coordination costs rise and value is reallocated toward contracted stakeholders. However, over time, diminishing coordination costs and increasing returns from firm-specific investments increase rewards for equity stakeholders. Additionally, because contracted stakeholders make firm-specific investments, they may be willing to compromise their claims on firm resources when their firms face economic difficulties. Given these dynamics, we argue that broadening stakeholder governance is likely to increase firm survival. To test these arguments, we analyze longitudinal data for French firms with varying governance structures. Overall, our findings suggest that broadening stakeholder governance produces a dynamic balance in which stakeholders protect their interests yet deepen their commitments over time. In this way, we elevate survival as a primary outcome of stakeholder governance and offer guidance on the design of resilient democratic governance.
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-03-18 · Ricardo Coelho Da Silva, Leid Zejnilović, Marco Berti, Miguel Pina e Cunha, Pedro Oliveira
When crises strike, new forms of emergent organizing often arise to address urgent societal needs that formal institutions struggle to meet. Among these, emergent response groups (ERGs)—self-organized communities that form to respond to unexpected and extreme events—offer a particularly salient example of decentralized and nonhierarchical organizing. This multicase study investigates eight ERGs that formed during the COVID-19 pandemic to design and distribute critical medical supplies. Drawing on sensemaking theory, we show how bricolage—making do with at-hand resources—supports coordination and community structuring by reducing equivocality caused by distributed actors. Our findings describe how these ERGs grew rapidly by using bricolage to reduce action, goal, and resource equivocality, enabling coordinated and scalable crisis response efforts. We contribute to research on emergent organizing in crisis contexts by revealing how bricolage fosters coherence and rapid scaling in the absence of formal hierarchies. Our study also challenges the dominant assumption that bricolage is inherently limiting to organizational growth, showing that—in the context of self-organizing collectives—it offers a novel solution to the problem of coordinating action among distributed agents.
Journal of Marketing · 2026-03-16T01:59:32+00:00 · Paul Parker, Paulo Albuquerque, Yakov Bart
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. This research uncovers a hidden dimension of inequality in lottery play: Lower-income consumers not only spend a larger share of their income on lottery tickets—a well-documented regressive pattern—but also earn less per ticket due to systematic ...
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-03-16 · Steffen Keck, Christian Schumacher, Abhinav Gupta, Keith Leavitt
Mega-threats—public, shocking, and identity-relevant events involving violence or injustice—can disrupt organizational life. Yet, research has largely overlooked the fact that such events may create asymmetric identity-based threats for employees who share identities with victims versus those who share identities with perceived perpetrators, leading to divergent psychological responses and workplace cooperation within and between groups. We examine how the salience of a race-based mega-threat shapes cooperation between Black and White employees. Drawing on self-categorization theory and intergroup interaction research, we propose that mega-threat salience more strongly increases intra-racial cooperation among Black versus White employees, due to heightened in-group identification among the former. Conversely, we hypothesize that mega-threat salience more strongly reduces White employees’ willingness to initiate cooperation with Black colleagues, driven by perceptions of a morally tainted social identity and concerns about social rejection. We argue that this negative effect is attenuated when White employees hold relatively lower (vs. higher) professional status than their Black interaction partners. We find support for these predictions in over 124,000 dyadic interactions between Black and White players in the National Basketball Association during periods of heightened Black Lives Matter salience. Two experimental studies replicate these findings and provide evidence for the envisioned mechanisms.
The Review of Financial Studies · 2026-03-15T00:00:00+00:00 ·
Abstract We propose that investment strategies should be evaluated based on their net-of-trading-cost return for each level of risk, which we term the “implementable efficient frontier.” While numerous studies use machine learning return forecasts to generate portfolios, their agnosticism toward trading costs leads to excessive reliance on fleeting small-scale characteristics, resulting in poor net returns. We develop a framework that produces a superior frontier by integrating trading-cost-aware portfolio optimization with machine learning. The superior net-of-cost performance is achieved by learning directly about portfolio weights using an economic objective. Further, our model gives rise to a new measure of “economic feature importance.”
Journal of Marketing · 2026-03-14T04:36:59+00:00 · Irene Nahm, Phillip Wiseman, Michael Ahearne, Seshadri Tirunillai
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. As many B2B companies are transforming their sales processes by adding online channels to the sales force, it is critical to better understand how salespeople respond, adapt, and manage relationships after customers adopt them. Leveraging data from a ...
Journal of Marketing · 2026-03-13T06:26:54+00:00 · Peggy J. Liu, Theresa A. Kwon, Ignazio Ziano
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. Consumers’ portion size choices are important, as they can influence how much food is eaten and wasted. While previous research has focused on self-selected portion sizes, this research examines portion size choices for others. The authors demonstrate ...
Academy of Management Review · 2026-03-13 · Dana Bement, Ryan Krause, Michael C. Withers, Matthew Semadeni
We leverage negotiated order theory to develop a model of board corrective governance concerning CEO leadership. We extend research on corporate governance to theorize that a board’s response to concerns about CEO leadership is a dynamic process of social order disruption and negotiation. When a disruption of an existing social order occurs, the CEO–board relationship is renegotiated by the board and, potentially, the CEO. We identify two critical relational dimensions—board affiliation with the CEO and board dependence on the CEO—that create four distinct negotiation conditions. Our model delineates the manner in which these negotiation conditions, in conjunction with the negotiation approach (cooperative or competitive) of the board and the CEO, give rise to a spectrum of first-order (i.e., retention, discipline, empowerment, dismissal) and second-order (i.e., changes to board dependence and affiliation) outcomes that influence the CEO–board relationship and subsequent corrective governance episodes. Our theoretical framework has important implications for governance research and practice, underscoring the need to view corrective governance decisions as interrelated negotiated outcomes shaped by evolving relational dynamics.
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-03-13 · Shinjinee Chattopadhyay, Shinjae Won, Matthew Bidwell
Skill demands evolve over the course of individuals’ careers, as new roles demand different kinds of skills from previous jobs. Yet, skill portfolios can be slow to change. We posit that this tension between dynamic job demands and durable skills creates career dilemmas for building the right portfolio of skills for long-term success. Studying a group of scientists in the pharmaceuticals industry, we argue and find that while specialization helps scientists to advance faster initially, it holds scientists back once they reach managerial ranks where coordination skills are required. Within managerial ranks, scientists with broader experience will advance faster since their experience will develop broader knowledge and more diverse social capital, which in turn will help them build coordination skills. While we find some evidence that employees try to adapt to these changing needs over their careers, such efforts to adapt are insufficient. Instead, we find that the level of specialization acquired while working as a scientist continues to influence promotion rates after people are promoted into management. We thus show that a skill portfolio built to help advancement at one stage of the career may hold employees back at subsequent career stages.
Journal of Marketing · 2026-03-12T12:47:01+00:00 · Kellilynn M. Frias, Deidre Popovich, Ronald P. Hill
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. Dual-market navigation refers to consumers’ ongoing engagement across structurally distinct and institutionally separate markets. Although prior research has focused on how consumers use service cues to evaluate individual service providers or products, ...
Journal of Marketing Research · 2026-03-12T12:45:33+00:00 · Samsun Knight, Tsung-Yiou Hsieh, Yakov Bart
Journal of Marketing Research, Volume 63, Issue 5 , Page 917-934, October 2026. The authors estimate the heterogeneity of TV advertising effectiveness across store characteristics and advertising levels using a large-scale panel of 135 U.S. retail and restaurant brands, and then use these estimates to assess strategies for improving ...
Journal of Marketing · 2026-03-12T12:10:40+00:00 · Shannon M. Duncan, Marissa A. Sharif
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. Small failures during goal pursuit are inevitable and often derail consumers from reaching their overall goals. This research demonstrates one simple, cost-free nudge: encouraging consumers to make up for small failures. The making-up-for-failure nudge ...
Strategic Management Journal · 2026-03-12T09:53:19+00:00 · Xinying Qu, J. P. Eggers, M. V. Shyam Kumar
Abstract Research Summary Complementing the role of AI in facilitating search and identifying combinations of high value in inventive activity, we argue that AI fundamentally alters the innovation landscape by unlocking new combinations that were previously infeasible. This effect arises because AI acts as a powerful shared layer due to its predictive capabilities and its ability to transmit solutions across domains, thereby creating a bridge between previously unconnected elements. Utilizing a matched sample of patents, we show that inventions incorporating AI exhibit a greater degree of novel recombinations compared to those without AI, and that our proposed bridging mechanism is consistent with these novel recombinations. Our study contributes by identifying a new mechanism by which recombinations emerge in inventive activity while also highlighting the role of enabling technologies such as AI in facilitating such recombinations. Managerial Summary How does AI impact inventive activity? We examine the question by studying the patenting activity of US firms over the period 2005–2023. We argue that AI fundamentally alters the innovation landscape by unlocking new combinations that were previously infeasible. This effect arises because AI acts as a powerful shared layer due to its predictive capabilities and its ability to transmit shared solutions, thereby creating a bridge between previously unconnected technological elements. Our analysis demonstrates that inventions that build on AI involve novel recombinations to a greater degree compared to inventions that don’t, and that AI bridges and connects knowledge domains that were hitherto disparate. These findings indicate that AI is more than just an invention of a new method of invention, and that it fundamentally reshapes the nature of inventive activity.
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-03-12 · Hee-Chan Song, Winnie Y. Jiang
How do individuals construct a sense of agency under persistent precarity? By studying a group of Thai sex workers whose lives are marked by poverty and stigma, we examine how individuals in persistent precarity construct different forms of agency, or agentic orientations, through self-narratives. We identify three narrative profiles with distinct agentic orientations: passive fantasizers, who convey shame and little agency; empowered victims, who channel anger into self-oriented agency; and compassionate carers, who exude acceptance and empathy and construct other-oriented agency. These agentic orientations are rooted in how individuals recount and connect their early life and current work experiences through recurrent emotional themes—shame, anger, or compassion—shaped by early encounters with influential institutions such as family (parents), community (Isaan), and religion (Buddhism). Building on these findings, we theorize a process we call cross-temporal emotional threading, through which individuals draw on core emotional threads to link their precarious experiences across time, enabling coherence in their self-narratives and shaping the construction of different agentic orientations. We further show that these agentic orientations manifest in distinct work behaviors and income levels. This study advances theoretical understanding of agency construction and contributes to research on persistent precarity, self-narratives, and the meaning of work.
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management · 2026-03-11T07:00:00+00:00 · Timothy C. Y. Chan, Jangwon Park, Frances Pogacar, Vahid Sarhangian, Erik Hellsten, Fahad Razak, Amol Verma
Academy of Management Review · 2026-03-10 · Joep P. Cornelissen, Mirjam D. Werner, Leander De Schutter, Omar N. Solinger
Constructs are broadly considered as the foundation of theory. In this paper, we review past writings on constructs and construct validity and highlight how logical errors, or fallacies, are frequent in how constructs are developed and validated in management research. We elaborate four common construct fallacies—a novelty, a self-referential, a reification, and a weak or false analogy fallacy—that affect the validity of a claimed construct and contribute to construct proliferation. As existing construct validity procedures are insufficient in avoiding such construct fallacies, we conceptualize a complementary argumentation-based view of constructs that we extend into a framework for construct validation. We illustrate the uses and value of the framework in developing stronger constructs and in detecting construct fallacies, and, in doing so, draw out its broader implications for theory development and research.
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-03-10 · Yixuan Li, Haiyang Liu, Zhefan Huang, Ellen Ernst Kossek, Mo Wang, Yueting Ji, Shengming Liu
Despite the widespread adoption of work–family policies intended to advance gender career equality, key indicators of women’s progression, such as reduced turnover and increased promotion, still lag. We argue that gender gaps stem from the ideal worker norm, which triggers devaluation when employees prioritize personal life over work (i.e., personal life stigma). Advancing gender equality therefore requires deeper organizational transformation that embraces employees’ personal lives. We propose that cultivating a climate for work–life inclusion, rather than relying on formal work–family policies, is critical for reducing personal life stigma and improving gender equality in career outcomes. Yet, practices that enable organizations to foster such a climate remain unclear. Using qualitative interviews and a three-wave employer–employee survey study, we examine (a) whether work–life-inclusive climate reduces personal life stigma, above and beyond work–family policies, and thereby gender inequality in retention and promotion; and (b) which specific human resource practices contribute to building this climate. Our findings confirm the former and demonstrate that personal life appreciation practices are influential in fostering work–life inclusion. Furthermore, bundling these practices with gender meritocracy and gender authenticity practices enables organizations to holistically cultivate work–life inclusive environments that enhance gender career equality.
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management · 2026-03-09T07:00:00+00:00 · Chengcheng Zhai, Rodney Parker, Kurt Michael Bretthauer, Jorge Mejia, Alfonso Pedraza-Martinez
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-03-09 · Myrto Chliova, Saku Mantere, Henri Schildt, Anna Salvanou
Many social movement organizations embrace a prefigurative mandate, enacting a desired future of social equality in the way they organize. While researchers have long recognized the difficulties these organizations face in realizing their egalitarian pursuits, the dynamics underlying a recurring puzzle remain unclear: how members of organizations explicitly committed to equality can negotiate meanings in their micro-level interactions in ways that cumulatively produce exclusionary dynamics. Our longitudinal qualitative field study of a refugee relief organization draws on an interactional framing perspective to explain this puzzle. We identify and theorize a phenomenon we term “moral exclusion”—the marginalization of heterogeneous perspectives through moral frames—even as members uphold an explicit commitment to equality. We elaborate the interactional dynamics through which moral exclusion emerges and becomes entrenched over time. Our model of moral exclusion has direct implications for literature on prefigurative organizing and interactional framing, while also offering conceptual clarity regarding broader organizational processes such as silencing and decoupling.
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-03-09 · Samer Faraj, Karla Sayegh
Research on coordination has traditionally focused on social and procedural arrangements that align collective action, yet this perspective often overlooks the embodied, pre-reflective processes that underpin effective coordinating. We draw on the distinction between focal and subsidiary coordinating to argue that focal coordinating—deliberate efforts to structure workflows and align tasks—depends on subsidiary coordinating, which consists of taken-for-granted, backgrounded embodied actions that support joint work. Through an ethnographic study of a neonatal intensive care unit relocation, we find that space change required iterative embodied repairs that targeted subsidiary coordinating, ultimately re-enabling focal coordinating. These repairs involved the reconfiguring of sensory access, inscribing new bodily habits, reallocating who-senses-what, and reorienting intercorporeal action. Our findings contribute to theories of coordinating and space by showing how spatial disruptions cannot be fully addressed through social or procedural adjustments alone, but must involve the reconstruction of embodied subsidiary coordinating.
Abstract Research Summary This study investigates how AI recommendation algorithms shape complementor strategies and market equality on digital platforms. Using two quasi-natural experiments from a food-sharing platform, we examine impacts of sequential algorithmic upgrades: from a location-based baseline to popularity-based (PopRec) and then personalization-based (PersRec). Analyses of over 1.7 million observations reveal that PopRec drives complementors to concentrate on a few offerings, while PersRec encourages new product introduction; yet these strategic shifts come at the expense of one another. Furthermore, PopRec reduces revenues of superstars but boosts revenues for long-tail complementors, enhancing market equality. Conversely, PersRec exacerbates market inequality by asymmetrically benefiting superstars. By bridging platform orchestration and AI frontiers, this study demonstrates the strategic potential of AI in platform management while underscoring the importance of algorithmic accountability. Managerial Summary Digital platforms increasingly deploy AI recommendation algorithms to manage ecosystem performance. This study reveals that these algorithms also function as effective orchestration mechanisms, incentivizing and shaping complementor offering strategies at scale. We find that popularity-based algorithms incentivize complementors to specialize and concentrate on a few core product offerings, while personalization-based algorithms foster broader new product introduction. Our results demonstrate the vital strategic value of AI for managing platform ecosystems. Crucially, both algorithms present inherent trade-offs for complementor strategies and trigger unforeseen market dynamics. Platform owners must meticulously design and implement algorithmic systems, balancing ecosystem generativity with operational control and considering far-reaching market inequality implications.
Journal of Marketing Research · 2026-03-04T11:34:24+00:00 · Jake An, André Bonfrer, Christine Eckert
Journal of Marketing Research, Volume 63, Issue 5 , Page 954-973, October 2026. Mobile applications in the personal development sector increasingly integrate goal-enabling technology features (GETFs), which allow users to define a service-related end goal, set implementation strategies through subgoals, and monitor progress. Little ...
Information Systems Research · 2026-03-04T08:00:00+00:00 · David Kim, Joseph S. Valacich, Jeffrey L. Jenkins, David W. Wilson, Manasvi Kumar, Paul Weisgarber
Journal of Accounting Research · 2026-03-03T04:11:09+00:00 · VERENA BRAUN, ROBERT F. GÖX, FELIX P. NIGGEMANN, ULRICH SCHÄFER
ABSTRACT This study examines how the subjectivity in measuring fair values of assets without readily observable market prices affects investment efficiency and shareholder value. When fair values are objective measures of asset value, they facilitate efficient investment decisions that align with shareholder interests. In contrast, firms' reliance on subjective valuation inputs causes underinvestment in long-term projects. If fair values are highly subjective, they may lead firms to favor less profitable short-term projects with objectively measurable fair values. When project returns are positively correlated, subjectivity in valuing long-term projects induces overinvestment in short-term projects with objective fair values. Regardless of these distortions, fair value measurement can add shareholder value. Not measuring fair values altogether leads to underinvestment, which moderately subjective fair values can alleviate.
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-03-03 · Stephan Bohn, Nora Lohmeyer, Harsh Kumar Jha, Juliane Reinecke
Frames not only shape societal debates but underpin the legitimacy of industries and institutions. Yet, even the most resonant frames can be turned on their head—weaponized against their initial intent. While framing research has studied competition between distinct frames, less is known about how a single frame’s meaning can be strategically inverted to serve opposing agendas. We conceptualize this process as “frame co-optation,” a potent but underexplored mechanism of discursive power that can alter institutional trajectories. The striking reversal of Germany’s nuclear energy phaseout provides a unique opportunity to examine frame co-optation. Using a multimethod machine-learning approach, we analyze three decades of the German nuclear energy debate to understand how the security frame, initially mobilized by antinuclear activists to justify a nuclear phaseout, was co-opted by pronuclear actors to advocate for its reversal. Our analysis shows how the pronuclear actors co-opted the security frame by perforating, camouflaging, infiltrating, and overwriting the frame’s meaning to invert its direction while preserving its resonance. We contribute to framing theory by introducing frame co-optation as a mechanism of strategic meaning inversion that can restore the legitimacy of controversial industries, and, more broadly, destabilize shared meaning and thereby amplify discursive polarization.
Journal of Marketing · 2026-03-02T05:10:13+00:00 · Gillian Brooks, Ashlee Humphreys
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. In this article, the authors examine the role of person brands in shaping emergent markets. Using ethnographic and archival data from the early online news market, they find that person brands use their social, cultural, and symbolic capital to create a ...
Journal of Marketing · 2026-03-02T05:09:06+00:00 · Jorge Jacob, Yan Vieites
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. This research investigates whether business professionals, on average, exhibit racial bias in strategic marketing decisions involving Black consumers. Across nine studies and four replications with current and aspiring business professionals from the ...
Journal of Marketing · 2026-03-02T05:08:53+00:00 · Kristopher O. Keller, Harald J. van Heerde
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. Brand manufacturers, big and small, regularly prune brand portfolios by deleting brands from categories. Competing brands try to fill the void, including sister brands owned by the same manufacturer, rival national brands, and private labels. This ...
Journal of Marketing Research · 2026-03-02T05:08:14+00:00 · Michelle Yoosun Kim, Rachel Gershon, Sydney E. Scott, Daniella Kupor, Tianqi Chen, Remi Trudel
Journal of Marketing Research, Volume 63, Issue 5 , Page 853-875, October 2026. Despite the ubiquity of ingredient quantity information in the marketplace, prior literature has yet to examine whether ingredient quantity shapes consumer choice. This research presents and tests a novel framework that charts when, why, and how this ...
Journal of Marketing Research · 2026-03-02T05:07:48+00:00 · Jessica Fong, Puneet Manchanda, Yu Song
Journal of Marketing Research, Volume 63, Issue 5 , Page 789-810, October 2026. This research investigates how platform-suggested prices influence sellers’ pricing decisions and selling outcomes. In collaboration with Mercari, a peer-to-peer e-commerce platform, the authors conduct a field experiment that varies whether a seller ...
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-03-02 · Shun Yiu, Matthew Bidwell, JR Keller
We draw on theories of internal labor markets and human capital pipelines to examine promotion patterns within large organizations. We introduce the idea of pipeline orientation to describe the way different jobs shape advancement. Specifically, we compare “pipeline” jobs that foster advancement into a highly circumscribed set of jobs with “sprinkler” jobs from which people are promoted into many different higher-level jobs. We first explain the factors shaping a job’s pipeline orientation, then examine its implications for career advancement within internal labor markets. We argue that whether employees occupy pipeline or sprinkler jobs plays an important role in determining whether people make typical versus atypical moves as they are promoted. We further suggest that pipeline and sprinkler jobs engender a speed–flexibility tradeoff, as workers within pipeline jobs have less flexibility in where they could move next but are promoted more rapidly. We test these ideas with internal personnel data from a large corporation.
Journal of Marketing · 2026-02-27T12:58:29+00:00 · Junqiu Jiang, Kapil R. Tuli, Nirmalya Kumar
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. This study investigates the sociopolitical processes underlying the development and approval of marketing budgets in large multinational corporations. While prior research has focused extensively on optimizing the level and allocation of marketing budgets,...
Production and Operations Management · 2026-02-27T12:57:24+00:00 · Jun Pei, Zijun Sun, Ping Yan, Liangfei Qiu
Production and Operations Management, Volume 35, Issue 10 , Page 3597-3616, October 2026. Recently, leading manufacturers have started adopting information and communication technologies (ICTs) to assist operators in capturing assembly operational errors. These manufacturers choose to develop internal ICTs and decide whether to implement ...
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-02-20 · Sruthi Thatchenkery
How can a firm increase its chances of spotting an up-and-coming competitor? I examine how the experience of top management teams (TMTs) relates to the foresight needed to spot “rising stars”—that is, competitors that are currently ignored by other firms in a market but later grow to become prominent threats. My theory hinges on the primacy of relational versus categorical reasoning in mental models of competition. Firm mental models conceptualize competition through a relational lens, such that deep experience within the focal firm encourages fixation on familiar, proximate rivals while varied experience across firms redirects attention to the competitive periphery. In contrast, industry mental models rely on categorical reasoning, such that varied experience across industries yields a shallow understanding of divergent—and often irrelevant—categorical logics while deep experience in the focal industry builds the expertise to see which competitors will break out in the future. I further show that deep industry experience enables the TMT to draw more useful insights from varied firm experience, while a combination of varied firm and industry experience creates harmful information overload. I find support for my theory using a hand-collected dataset on competitor identification and TMTs in the enterprise software industry.
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-02-19 · Christopher Sutter, Babita Bhatt, Israr Qureshi
Social intermediaries play a critical role in addressing exclusion, but must navigate entrenched power relations within informal institutions. Drawing on comparative case studies of three social intermediaries, this study examines how intermediaries negotiate systemic power—manifested through domination and discipline—across intersecting caste–gender hierarchies. We identify three distinct approaches to elite engagement: elite delegation, elite co-optation, and creative accommodation. Each of these reflects a specific combination of communal positioning and power frame adopted by intermediaries. Elite delegation, grounded in a detached communal positioning and a zero-sum power frame, prioritizes rapid scaling but reproduces existing hierarchies. Elite co-optation, marked by pragmatic communal positioning and a conditional positive-sum power frame, fosters short-term cooperation yet achieves only partial inclusion. Creative accommodation, characterized by embedded communal positioning and a positive-sum power frame, enables social transformation by simultaneously empowering marginalized groups and constructively engaging elites. By demonstrating how communal positioning and power frames shape these approaches, the study advances understanding of how systemic power sustains exclusion and how it can be reconfigured from within. We contribute to research on informal institutions and inclusion by elucidating how intermediaries can leverage positive-sum engagements to reshape domination and discipline, fostering more equitable and enduring informal institutional change.
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management · 2026-02-18T08:00:00+00:00 · Blair (Lianlian) Liu, Diwas Singh KC, Bradley R. Staats, Michael P. Fundora
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management · 2026-02-18T08:00:00+00:00 · Fernando Bernstein, N. Bora Keskin, Adam Mersereau, Morgan Wood, Serhan Ziya
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-02-17 · Jens-Christian Friedmann, Korcan Kavusan
Extensive research has examined how firms rely on alliances and acquisitions for sourcing technological knowledge, but we do not know whether acquirers can benefit from the technological knowledge of their targets’ pre-acquisition alliance partners. This study demonstrates that acquirers leverage relational assets inherited from their targets to access knowledge from the targets’ prior partners—knowledge that the target itself did not absorb during the alliance, including knowledge developed by the partner post-alliance. We term this form of knowledge absorption “knowledge bridging.” We reveal that knowledge bridging enables acquirers to more effectively absorb knowledge from their targets’ prior partners, compared to similar firms without prior alliances with the target. Knowledge bridging intensifies with the target’s previous knowledge absorption from its partners. Yet, this effect is weakened by the relatedness between the knowledge bases and business domains of the acquirer and the target’s partners and strengthened by the target’s post-acquisition autonomy.
Journal of Marketing Research · 2026-02-16T06:30:12+00:00 · Andreas Kraft, Raghunath Singh Rao
Journal of Marketing Research, Volume 63, Issue 5 , Page 831-852, October 2026. A large body of research shows that even when information is accessible, consumers often fail to attend to it. To what extent and under what conditions can firms profit from such consumer inattention? The authors study this question theoretically and ...
Academy of Management Review · 2026-02-09 · Paul Tracey, Jan B. Heide, Simon J. Bell
We propose a conceptual framework of transaction governance that augments the existing transaction cost economics (TCE) model with research on organizational identity orientation. Our focus is on how particular identity orientations imply preferences for formal versus informal governance mechanisms. These preferences, in turn, are activated when a firm faces particular transaction hazards. In general, the identity orientation construct augments the current perspective on governance choice and helps expand the current TCE model. We also discuss how a firm’s identity orientation is itself systematically shaped (strengthened or weakened) by transactional outcomes. These feedback processes involve certain paradoxes. For instance, even successfully governed transactions may actually weaken a firm’s identity orientation, to the extent that the governance choice is incompatible with the firm’s prevailing identity orientation.
Academy of Management Review · 2026-02-09 · Anna Szerb, Ilze Kivleniece, Vikas A Aggarwal
Although the phenomenon of dual-purpose organizations (DPOs)—market-based organizations that pursue both private (commercial) and broader social objectives simultaneously—has been explored extensively in prior literature, the role of organization design in addressing the distinct coordination problems inherent to DPOs has been largely overlooked. We develop a theoretical framework that conceptualizes how design considerations can influence organizational outcomes for DPOs. We identify two central coordination challenges faced by DPOs: an aggregation problem, in which heterogeneous individual preferences and organizational goals must be effectively aligned; and a consolidation problem, in which the dual-purpose nature of DPOs prevents the consolidation of goals into a single organizational meta-goal, resulting in nonhierarchical decision-making structures. We argue that formal organization design processes and mechanisms alone may fail to resolve these coordination problems, and we conceptualize the role and notion of soft governance, which we define as the agentic deployment of informal design mechanisms that shape an organization’s informal decision-making structure. Our core contribution lies in developing an integrative model of dual-purpose organizing that demonstrates how soft governance may complement formal organization design in alleviating the coordination problems inherent in DPOs, thereby supporting their stability and growth.
Academy of Management Review · 2026-02-09 · Dennis C. Jancsary
In this article, I develop insights into deliberate silence as a facilitator of institutional change. I argue that deliberate silence constitutes a form of text that can influence dynamics of discourse positions and discourse content, thereby affecting relationships among relevant actors as well as institutional dynamics. This makes it a useful resource for change proponents located at the center of fields to inconspicuously shift voice toward more peripheral allies, facilitate the visibility of problematizations and novel theorizations, and mitigate the effect of defense strategies from central opponents of change. Starting from a basic discourse-based model of institutional change, I show how a systematic acknowledgment of deliberate silence facilitates a better understanding of discursive dynamics. Specifically, I synthesize four types of deliberate silence—activating, suppressing, affirming, and concealing—in institutional change processes, and model a set of communication strategies based on these types of silence that support change in various ways. These ideas contribute to existing literature by suggesting novel ways of understanding how actors navigate barriers to institutional change, and how interactions between different types of actors during institutional dynamics unfold.
Academy of Management Review · 2026-02-09 · Jaideep Anand, Philipp Meyer-Doyle, Benjamin W Blunck
While acquisitions are a popular means of corporate development, it is often uncertain whether acquirers capture positive value. This uncertainty is further compounded by the profound competitive implications associated with acquisitions. To shed more light on these implications, we develop the concepts of negative and positive competitive externalities in acquisitions in more detail and outline a framework that explains which acquisitions give rise to which competitive externalities. We then predict their impact on acquirers’ and rivals’ value capture under different synergy and information conditions, providing several insights: First, when negative competitive externalities exist, when no bidder can create unique synergies and bidders are aware of the synergies and externalities, bidders engage in value-destroying acquisitions to avoid negative externalities. A bidder with unique synergies only captures positive value if the unique synergies exceed a rival’s negative competitive externalities. Second, information advantages of one bidder over others are a key factor enabling positive value capture even when competitive externalities exist. Third, faced with positive competitive externalities, bidders may lack incentives to acquire even if further synergies exist, and the most capable acquirer may not capture the most value. Our paper sheds light on competitive externalities in acquisitions and provides important insights for strategic management research.
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-02-09 · Alessandro Iorio, Shad Morris
A key theoretical tension in organizational network research lies in understanding how interpersonal connections shape employee turnover. While extensive workplace networks can reduce turnover by granting access to valuable information and resources, they can also increase it by exposing employees to information overload, leading to cognitive strain and disengagement. Drawing on process theory, we bridge these two previously disconnected mechanisms—information access and information overload—to uncover how they jointly influence turnover. We propose that an intermediate number of instrumental workplace connections maximizes retention, as it balances the benefits of information access with the burdens of overload. Specifically, we theorize that information access exhibits diminishing marginal returns in mitigating turnover as additional connections provide less value, while information overload accelerates as employees struggle to process a growing volume of inputs, resulting in a U-shaped relationship between the size of an employee’s network and turnover. We test these arguments across four studies: two preregistered experiments and two field studies of employees in large organizations. Our findings challenge conventional wisdom that larger networks are universally beneficial, providing insights into how the structure of informal networks drives turnover dynamics.
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-02-09 · Gavin Williamson, Timothy P. Munyon, Ali Mchiri, Malgorzata W. Kozusznik
Research shows that certain work roles constrain labor market success when individuals transition to new work roles, as they are viewed as discrediting by potential role partners. However, workers increasingly hold multiple roles simultaneously, which may alter the inferences drawn from roles that are discrediting in isolation. Building on role accumulation theory, we theorize that work roles that are net liabilities in isolation, such as the entrepreneur role, can become net assets as part of a compensatory role set, and we identify a new theoretical mechanism of role rectification through which this effect occurs. Mobilizing verbal protocol, experimental, and archival data sources, we find evidence for role rectification using the case of hybrid entrepreneurs, but we also find that the benefits of role rectification are attenuated in contexts where role accumulation magnifies role nonconformity risks.
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-02-04 · Ruolian Fang, Daniel J. McAllister, Zhen Zhang, Michelle K. Duffy, Lin Wang
This research examines why and when coworkers undermine employees who have social capital through high-level friends (i.e., friendship contact status). Drawing on appraisal theory, we theorize that coworkers envy—and subsequently undermine—such employees when they hold unfavorable core evaluations of the employees and perceive these employees’ friendship networks as sparse. For coworkers, unfavorable core evaluations of an employee signal that the person is undeserving of high-level friends, and sparse employee friendship networks signal a lack of guardian protection that increases coworkers’ own dominance-based control potential. These three components—high employee friendship contact status, low core evaluations (low employee deservingness) and low friendship network density (high coworker dominance-based control potential)—jointly drive the envy that fuels coworker undermining. We tested our theory and hypotheses across three studies. Study 1 supports our premise that coworkers negatively appraise employees’ high friendship contact status. Study 2 shows that coworkers’ core evaluations of employees and perceived friendship network density jointly moderate the effects of employee friendship contact status on coworker envy and undermining. Study 3 confirms that envy and undermining arise in response to high friendship contact status only when appraised employee deservingness is low and coworker dominance-based control potential is high. Our work highlights the liabilities of social capital, the role of perpetrator predation in workplace mistreatment, and how appraisal processes drive envy in organizations.
Academy of Management Review · 2026-02-03 · Jin P. Gerlach, Donald Lange
Organizational knowledge is essential for sustained competitive advantage, yet it naturally depreciates over time. Traditional rule-based technologies help counter this erosion by serving as stable repositories of knowledge. In contrast, machine learning (ML) systems—an increasingly prevalent and relied-upon technology—introduce new risks. Because their predictive models depend on historical training data, ML systems are vulnerable to model drift: a gradual misalignment with evolving operational realities that creates recurring needs for human-led repair. We develop a multilevel process model showing how and when repeated cycles of ML use and repair can unintentionally accelerate organizational knowledge depreciation. In doing so, we highlight the distinct vulnerabilities of ML systems, challenge the conventional view of technologies as stable repositories of knowledge, and emphasize the importance of deliberate human engagement alongside automation to sustain organizational knowledge over time.
Production and Operations Management · 2026-01-30T07:22:00+00:00 · Sairam Sriraman, David Wuttke, Volodymyr Babich, Eve Rosenzweig
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Blockchain technology holds promise for improving access to financing within supply chains, especially for small and under-financed suppliers. Yet, the specific ways in which blockchain technology mitigates financing frictions and the features that ...
Journal of Marketing Research · 2026-01-30T07:16:05+00:00 · Alexander B. Park, Yanyi Leng, Fausto J. Gonzalez, Jared Watson, Francesca Valsesia, Cynthia Cryder
Journal of Marketing Research, Volume 63, Issue 5 , Page 811-830, October 2026. How should firms best communicate their corporate social responsibility efforts? Across seven preregistered studies (two large field studies and five online lab experiments), the authors find that making a series of periodic contributions (e.g., donating $...
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-01-30 · Yiftach Yarmar, Tiantian Yang, Marissa D. King
Social networks play a role in exacerbating or ameliorating inequality. The persistence of network-based inequality is well documented. However, the mechanisms that disrupt this unequal access to resources remain poorly understood. This study investigates how structurally disruptive events, such as mergers and acquisitions (M&As), reshape gender homophily and resource sharing in networks. We examine how 59 M&As shape the evolution of 82,064 physicians’ referral and patient-sharing networks. We find that disruptive events enhance women’s access to resources by altering gender-homophily dynamics in formation, and maintenance. Specifically, acquisitions intensify men’s tendency to form ties with other men. In contrast, women are more likely to preserve ties with other women, with all-women dyads exhibiting greater resilience and higher maintenance rates than mixed-gender or all-men dyads. This dynamic results in richer networks for women, shielding them from the adverse effects of organizational disruption. These results highlight contrasting network behaviors following disruption: women winnow their networks, reinforcing stable, trust-based relationships with women, while men widen theirs, forming new distant ties with men. By demonstrating how gendered network dynamics evolve in response to disruptions, this study contributes to scholarship on gender inequality, network resilience, and conditions under which homophilous ties can mitigate disparities.
Journal of Marketing · 2026-01-28T04:40:56+00:00 · Cristel Antonia Russell, Anne Hamby, Stephanie Feiereisen, Hope Jensen Schau
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. Brands use factory tours, visitor centers, and other behind-the-scenes encounters to share their histories and operations. These backstory performances are fragile events that must balance revealing and concealing. This article defines “brand backstories” ...
Journal of Marketing · 2026-01-28T04:39:47+00:00 · Yijing Li, Angela Yi Gao, Flora F. Gu, Fine F. Leung
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. Influencer marketing has emerged as a prevalent marketing strategy for firms seeking to engage target customers, with significant research identifying various criteria for influencer selection. However, the role of endorsement rate—the proportion of an ...
Journal of Marketing · 2026-01-26T11:13:09+00:00 · Nofar Duani, Alixandra Barasch, Adrian F. Ward
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. Recent advances in live-streaming technology have empowered millions of amateur content creators to broadcast live video over the internet, sharing events and experiences with consumers as they happen. Despite the growing popularity of live streams, ...
Academy of Management Review · 2026-01-22 · David J. Skandera, Mark R. DesJardine, Dane P. Blevins
Prior research suggests firms maximize the financial returns from corporate social responsibility (CSR) by focusing on how stakeholders reward their CSR investments. This demand-side view of CSR’s financial returns overlooks the costs tied to each CSR investment, neglecting that returns also depend on the efficient use of resources. We integrate insights from corporate strategy research on firm diversification with the portfolio-based view of CSR to take a step toward a theory of optimal CSR diversification that balances demand-side and supply-side considerations. Our theory treats CSR investments as a diversification problem in which managers must choose from among three investment options when allocating additional resources to CSR: CSR portfolio scaling, within-cause diversification, and cross-cause diversification. Which option yields the highest marginal financial return at any point in a CSR portfolio’s evolution depends on the diminishing marginal rewards from stakeholders and the increasing marginal diversification costs associated with each option. Crucially, demand-side (e.g., demand complementarities) and supply-side (e.g., resource fungibility) factors shape the rates at which marginal rewards and costs change over successive CSR investments. Our framework reveals new ways for firms to diversify CSR portfolios and enhance the financial returns from CSR investments by optimizing resource allocations across the initiatives comprising CSR portfolios.
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-01-22 · Beth S. Schinoff, Kim Rocheville, Elana Feldman, Njoke Thomas
Implicit in the ideal worker norm is the assumption of the ideal worker body, a body that is always ready and willing to meet work demands. Yet, bodies vary in their ability to meet this ideal. Through a qualitative study of 66 workers in chronic pain, we build theory on the experience of a chronic, stigmatized deviation from the ideal worker body. Our analysis uncovered that as informants’ pain interfered with their work, they attempted to pass as ideal-worker-bodied. However, attempting to pass ultimately increased their pain and its interference with their work, thus catapulting them into a vicious cycle. For two thirds of our informants, this cycle led to their pain becoming intolerable, forcing them to reckon with pervasive ableist norms as they turned to medical professionals for help. Informants who received validating cues from medical professionals were better able to relinquish, albeit with difficulty, the ideal worker body as necessary. They came to accept an alternative to the ideal worker body: a sufficient worker body. Informants who received invalidating cues continued in the vicious cycle of striving for the ideal worker body. Our findings contribute to scholarship on bodies at work, stigma at work, and the ideal worker norm.
Journal of Marketing · 2026-01-20T04:27:44+00:00 · Jinyan Xiang, Mario Pandelaere, Daniel Todorovic
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. Peer-to-peer (P2P) platforms promise openness and access, yet various biases and barriers shape who gets served. This research investigates how regional economic inequality drives access to P2P services. Using archival, survey, and experimental data ...
Journal of Marketing · 2026-01-20T04:27:44+00:00 · Laxminarayana Yashaswy Akella, Praveen K. Kopalle, Stephanie M. Noble, Jens Nordfält, Dhruv Grewal
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. This research shows that interdepartmental distance between two departments in a store can significantly impact joint (combined) sales of that pair. Using data from blueprints and sales across 64 stores for 52 weeks, along with an experimental study to ...
Journal of Marketing · 2026-01-20T04:27:44+00:00 · Zhe Zhang, Xiaoyan Deng, Matthew Thomson, Ning Ye
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. Many marketers design their product packaging so that when individual units are positioned together, they form a coordinated and often larger image that spans multiple package faces. The authors coin the term “billboarding” to refer to this practice that ...
Journal of Marketing · 2026-01-20T04:27:44+00:00 · Nick J.F. Bombaij, Sarah Gelper, Marnik G. Dekimpe
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. In a reward-program promotion (RPP), brand manufacturers offer additional stamps or collectibles when their product is bought, which enables consumers to accelerate toward their collection goal in a retailer-led reward program. Such retailer–manufacturer ...
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-01-16 · Srikanth Paruchuri, Joel L. Andrus, David W. Sullivan
Investors perceive a CEO’s regulatory foci based on the language they use. Complementing earlier studies on the direct effects of CEO regulatory focus, we propose a novel theoretical paradigm in which CEOs’ regulatory-focused language act as interpretive frames shaping investors’ reactions to earnings deviations—the positive or negative earnings deviations from analysts’ expectations. We propose that investor reactions to earnings deviations will be amplified when investors perceive a CEO to have higher promotion focus, and dampened when investors perceive a CEO to have higher prevention focus. We employ a multimethod approach to test our theorizing; we use an archival study of S&P 500 firms from 2003 to 2017 to test our hypotheses, and two preregistered randomized vignette experiments to explore the underlying investor attributions theorized in our framework. Across all studies, we find broad support for our theorization regarding how CEO regulatory-focused language acts as interpretive frames for investors, which has important implications for research on the social view of financial markets and CEO regulatory focus.
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-01-14 · Ray Tsai Fang, Felice B. Klein, Chi Nguyen, Jeff Lingwall, Alexander Lewis
Many scholars assume that initiatives to promote gender and racial pay equality are largely performative, helping firms appear socially responsible while making little progress. However, the extent to which such initiatives are genuinely supported may depend on the ideological leaning of the field in which they occur. We propose that the higher the ratio of liberals in an industry or occupation, the more its members will be guided by logics that support the equal distribution of resources between gender and racial groups. Using large-scale archival samples of U.S. employees and recent data on U.S. firms and nonprofit organizations, we find support for our theory. The results indicate that membership in liberal-leaning industries and occupations is associated with stronger support for the use of pro-equality practices. Liberal-leaning industries and occupations also showed greater progress toward gender and racial pay equality over time. Notably, we controlled for various alternative explanations, such as demographic and geographic differences between fields. Thus, this paper suggests that the political composition of a field may give rise to logics and norms that shape how efforts to promote group equality are understood and pursued.
Journal of Marketing Research · 2026-01-13T10:01:35+00:00 · Yi-Na Li, Brady T. Hodges, Liu Fu, Haipeng (Allan) Chen
Journal of Marketing Research, Volume 63, Issue 5 , Page 935-953, October 2026. Figure–ground reversal (FGR) transcends visual conventions by reversing the roles of figure and ground in brand logo designs. In this research, the authors study how FGR logos affect consumers’ brand attitudes. Using traditional self-reported measures as ...
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. Amazon's dual role, as both marketplace owner and first-party (1P) seller, gives it power over third-party (3P) sellers who sell similar items. This dual role can weaken 3P sellers’ ability to compete, possibly harming 3P sellers and consumers. We examine ...
Journal of Marketing · 2026-01-13T09:59:01+00:00 · Lu Wang, Xueni (Shirley) Li, Qiyuan Wang, Lei Su
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. Internet meme marketing is a digital marketing practice in which marketers leverage internet memes to promote their brand or product. Despite its growing adoption in brand communications, academic understanding of meme marketing remains in its infancy. ...
Journal of Marketing · 2026-01-13T04:53:43+00:00 · Katherine C. Lafreniere, Sarah G. Moore, Mohamad Soltani
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. Consumers expect managers to respond to positive reviews, but it is unclear whether these responses are beneficial. This research finds that managerial responses to positive reviews can positively impact consumers when managers follow conversational norms ...
Academy of Management Review · 2026-01-09 · Nicole V. West, David G. Sirmon
While stakeholder support is essential for firm survival, when stakeholder pressures are at odds with firm interests, resistance becomes imperative for the firm. We theorize when and how empirically based responses enable firms to effectively resist stakeholders, without losing critical support, by following societal norms encouraging empirical debate. Extending arguments that stakeholder pressure progresses through phases, we argue that empirical debate is most influential before and after the phase when stakeholder deliberation occurs—that is, in the preceding phase, when issues are defined, and the subsequent phase, when remedies are debated. We detail two empirically based response strategies: (1) validity disputing and (2) validity promoting. While validity disputing sows doubt and uncertainty on the empirical elements of issues and remedies, validity promoting advances the empirical merits of the firm’s preferred remedy relative to stakeholders’ proposed remedy. Together, these strategies seek to mitigate stakeholder pressures by disrupting an issue’s rise to salience, and, failing that, to avoid remedies constituting more substantive concessions. We complete our model by examining three contingencies: firm dependence on stakeholders, causal complexity, and the strength of stakeholders’ values. Detailing empirical debate as a basis of response complements well-established, values-based approaches to address stakeholder pressures.
Academy of Management Review · 2026-01-09 · Joanna T. Campbell, Peer C. Fiss
Management phenomena are often causally complex, and management research has increasingly turned to a configurational perspective to better account for this complexity. Yet, despite recent attention to configurational theorizing, we still lack comprehensive guidance on when a configurational approach is most appropriate, leading to confusion and avoidable disputes in the review process. Moreover, despite growing calls for theoretical triangulation, our understanding of how configurational theorizing can be effectively combined with other theorizing approaches is limited, slowing the development of novel organizational theories and confining configurational inquiry to largely abductive research and ex post theorizing. We address these challenges in two ways. First, we articulate a framework of four key indications—causal conjunction, causal disjunction, outcome asymmetry, and outcome intentionality—that provide systematic guidance on when a configurational approach is warranted. Second, we introduce two configurational hybrid theorizing approaches that integrate configurational theorizing with propositional and process grammars. Specifically, we demonstrate how configurational-propositional theorizing can generate novel predictions about complex causal relationships, and how configurational-process theorizing can incorporate temporal dynamics through temporal-configurational layering. Together, these contributions broaden the theoretical toolkit for studying complexity and offer new ways to advance the configurational perspective and management theory more generally.
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-01-09 · Dean A. Shepherd, Vinit Parida, Sarah Chase, Joakim Wincent
Voyeurism offers audiences a window into the private lives of others. Given the widespread appeal of voyeurism, it is unsurprising that organizations have sought to commercialize voyeuristic events across various industries. Prior research has focused on the audience’s role in voyeuristic experiences. However, those being observed (i.e., observees) play an essential role in shaping audiences’ voyeuristic experiences, making it crucial to explore how voyeuristic businesses strive to manage observees’ engagement. For this exploration, we used an inductive approach. We focused on the voyeuristic business of slum tourism and interviewed the observees (slum residents), audience members (tourists), and orchestrators (tour guides) in the Dharavi slum. We found that businesses attempt to orchestrate a voyeuristic event to ensure continued observee participation by scripting the event, claiming to improve the lives of those in the transgressed community, bounding audience behavior, personalizing the observees, and memorializing the voyeuristic experience. This orchestrated interaction can temporarily blur the traditional roles of audience and observee, with some observees momentarily taking on the perspective of the audience and the audience momentarily being observed. This temporary switching of roles can enhance the experience of the voyeuristic event for the audience and for some of the nonconsenting observees.
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-01-09 · Neveen Saied, Katleen De Stobbeleir
How do people develop and leverage self-definitions of who and what they are not, or their “not-me” identities, to navigate their work lives? In contrast to dominant portrayals of not-me identities as negative or oppositional, we explore how they can serve as resources in identity work. Drawing on a grounded theory study of 80 interviews with independent workers and clients, we identify a process we call “identity filtering.” Through this process, individuals identify and disconfirm misaligned role or relational elements, cultivating not-me identity repertoires that serve as reference points for how they engage in and shape their role-relationships. We identify two distinct pathways: some individuals enact their not-me identities through setting boundaries and role screening, which in turn enhance their self-clarity. Others suppress their not-me identities by engaging in enmeshment, which generates emotional strain. These diverging paths emerge through distinct underlying mechanisms: self-worth and desire for control both enable enactment, while adaptability constrains it. By reconceptualizing not-me identities as resources, this study advances identity theory and deepens understanding of how (independent) workers navigate fluid role-relationships and uncertainty in contemporary work.
Academy of Management Journal · 2026-01-09 · Forrest Briscoe, Mark R. DesJardine
Are employees willing to leave when their employer violates societal norms? We develop an event-based framework for understanding employee turnover in response to stakeholder violations—publicly announced, regulator-sanctioned harms to stakeholders. We theorize that intense violations prompt some employees to reassess their affiliation due to reputational concerns, especially when violations are broad in scope, occur in rapid succession, or diverge from past patterns. These features increase the likelihood that observers, including peers and future employers, will view the misconduct as systemic, elevating reputational risk for those who remain. Using eight years of job history data from 735 large U.S. public companies, sourced from LinkedIn by Revelio Labs, we find that violations amounting to 5% of a company’s annual revenues translate into a 3.93% increase in employee turnover. Turnover rates rise further when violations are broad, rapid, or historically atypical. Departing employees tend to join firms with fewer prior violations, indicating a form of values-based sorting. We also estimate the financial toll of violation-induced turnover for representative firms in our sample. Our findings offer a new lens on stakeholder violations as organizational events that drive interorganizational migration.
Academy of Management Journal · 2025-12-22 · Elizabeth D. Rouse
Developing new creative products inherently involves ambiguity due to its focus on novelty. When organizations have high ambitions for novelty yet lack a specific product concept, they must coordinate complex work and manage possibilities alongside significant ambiguity. This longitudinal qualitative study of a video game project examines how a large-scale creative project team collaborated in the face of an underspecified product concept. I theorize how project teams employ two interconnected processes: an iterative compositional process that drives product development within periods, and a pragmatic adaptation process that shifts teams from creative idealism to realism across periods. The findings reveal three distinct but interrelated forms of work—product work, contribution framing, and adaptive psychological work—that enable creative workers to develop an ambitious product without a specified product concept. By examining both product work and the psychological experiences of creative workers across hierarchical levels, this research broadens our understanding of creative work beyond more exclusively product-focused perspectives.
Academy of Management Review · 2025-12-16 · Pouyan Tabasi-Nejad, Yuval Deutsch
Management scholars have predominantly theorized corporate political activity (CPA) as an exchange wherein a firm offers resources to a policy maker in return for favorable policy. While the CPA literature has extensively explored what drives firms to engage in CPA, it remains largely silent on the question of why a policy maker would accede to a firm’s attempt at influence. Drawing on social influence theory, we develop a framework that extends current CPA theory and centers a policy maker’s perspective when faced with CPA. We introduce a policy maker’s noninstrumental motives and identify novel types of CPA that appeal to these motives. We also consider the role of the bureaucrat—a heretofore largely ignored but important type of policy maker whose motives differ from those of politicians in key respects that shape whether and how a given policy maker is influenced. Lastly, we examine how third-party lobbyists affect the CPA process, identifying key pathways through which they are likely to enhance a firm’s CPA. By theorizing around the motives of the policy maker faced with CPA, we present a novel policy maker-centered framework that helps us better understand this socially and economically important strategy.
Journal of Marketing · 2025-12-11T11:45:55+00:00 · Elisa Montaguti, Scott Neslin, Sara Valentini
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. Returning products has become standard practice for consumers and a significant “pain point” for retailers. The authors contend that returns can be harnessed to increase profits. Doing so requires retailers to manage the interweaving dynamics of product ...
Journal of Marketing · 2025-12-09T06:31:15+00:00 · Divya Anand, Vamsi K. Kanuri, Lisa K. Scheer
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. Channel restructuring is a firm's redesign and optimization of its channel system to serve markets more effectively. Restructuring demands significant investments of time, capital, and managerial attention, as firms must reconfigure processes, renegotiate ...
Journal of Consumer Research · 2025-12-08T00:00:00+00:00 ·
Abstract Consumer researchers often prize relevance but overlook how narrow assumptions about good theory limit it. Much work focuses on construct-to-construct theorizing, which involves introducing new constructs or new links among them. Far less valued is phenomenon-to-construct theorizing, which begins with real-world patterns and seeks to explain them by identifying the underlying active ingredient constructs. Examples include why GMO labels reduce demand or why drip pricing leads people to choose higher-cost options. Our survey of authors in four leading journals shows that most believe only construct-to-construct work counts as theory. We argue that this view is too narrow. Drawing on a Bayesian framework for updating beliefs within a theoretical network, we show that phenomenon-to-construct theorizing follows the same logic of scientific inference. Both approaches rely on established links in the nomological network to draw stronger conclusions about the focal link of interest. Using well-supported construct-to-construct mechanisms to explain real-world phenomena is therefore a strength, not a weakness. We clarify how phenomenon-to-construct theorizing differs from both “mere application” and “empirics-first” research. Embracing this form of theorizing can broaden the reach of consumer research by connecting abstract ideas to meaningful, actionable phenomena that matter to scholars, practitioners, and policymakers.
Journal of Marketing, Volume 90, Issue 5 , Page 125-148, September 2026. Novice art pricing is an understudied domain. Novice artists operate as microenterprises, making crucial price-setting decisions. Research shows that newcomers often risk overpricing or underpricing their work, and existing online tools offer basic, cost-...
Journal of Marketing · 2025-12-05T11:27:39+00:00 · Martin Eisend, Anna Rößner, Erik Hermann
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. Although research on ethnic diversity in advertising is extensive, its findings remain fragmented and often inconclusive. This limits practical guidance for marketers. Beyond marketing- and consumer-specific factors, differences between ethnic minority ...
Journal of Marketing · 2025-12-02T09:29:27+00:00 · Jeeva Somasundaram, Laura Zimmermann, Quang Duc Pham
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. The pervasive use of smartphones has raised concerns about their addictive and maladaptive nature. This article introduces an intervention based on rational addiction theory to cost-effectively nudge consumers to reduce smartphone usage, promoting ...
Journal of Consumer Research · 2025-11-25T00:00:00+00:00 ·
Abstract Marketing materials often create difficulties for consumers through elements like unconventional fonts or distracting background images, leading to perceptual disfluency—a sense of difficulty encoding information. During choices, consumers can mistake perceptual disfluency for choice difficulty, a feeling of indecision. Building on this idea, 11 preregistered experiments ( N = 9,042) show that when making choices, perceptual disfluency can lead consumers to rely on information that feels more intuitively appealing to them, such as a familiar brand, a preferred country of origin, or a recommendation, rather than on information they must carefully consider like numerical product specifications. Differing from the effect of perceptual disfluency in other situations, during choices, this effect occurs because consumers process information less deeply, engaging in relatively more intuitive and less analytical processing. This effect is amplified when consumers endorse a “fast-is-accurate” lay theory. In contrast, it does not occur when consumers do not mistake perceptual disfluency for choice difficulty, as when prompted to consider the actual reason for the disfluency, or when not making a choice.
Journal of Consumer Research · 2025-11-25T00:00:00+00:00 ·
Abstract We identify a novel way in which setting goals can backfire. In 13 studies and 4 supplemental studies, using both incentive-compatible and hypothetical designs across a range of domains, we demonstrate that setting an explicit goal and making progress toward it decreases the likelihood of switching to alternative means of pursuit. This occurs because means seem more effective relative to alternatives if they have been used to progress toward a reference point. Consistent with this mechanism, we show that the perceived effectiveness of the means used to pursue a goal, relative to an alternative, partially mediates the effect of setting a goal on the decision to switch means. Furthermore, the effect occurs only after people make initial progress toward a specified reference point. Setting a goal does not decrease switching if people are reminded to consider the advantages of both the initial and alternative means. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical and practical implications of our findings.
Production and Operations Management · 2025-11-20T11:42:34+00:00 · Tinglong Dai, Simrita Singh
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Of the 1,247 artificial intelligence (AI) systems cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as of May 2025, many function as classifiers to help screen or diagnose specific medical conditions. Yet, questions remain about how to best integrate AI ...
Academy of Management Review · 2025-11-10 · Ines Kuric, Markus A. Höllerer
Current assumptions about theorization as a prerequisite for the diffusion of new ideas and practices are still largely shaped by an understanding of communication that predates the increasing prevalence of multimodality. We argue that this has led scholars to equate effective theorization with effective content rather than to adequately focus on expression and the ways in which communicative context matters for theorization. In this article, we draw on insights from social semiotics to reconceptualize effective theorization as a question of multimodal design (i.e., the conjunction of content and expression). By placing deliberate attention on the thus far overlooked role of expression, we identify three ideal types of multimodal theorization—expository, balanced, and suggestive—and develop propositions on how, and under what conditions, each of them has the greater potential to be effective for diffusion. Our theory development updates and expands upon the limits of verbal theorization, analyzing the affordances of multimodal expression in relation to characteristics of ideas and practices, audiences, genres of text, and the legitimacy of theorists. We further contribute to multimodal research by developing a systematic approach that distinguishes between “weak” and “strong” multimodality. Finally, we develop implications for related forms of academic and lay theorizing.
Academy of Management Review · 2025-11-07 · Juan (“John”) Almandoz, Patricia H. Thornton
Research on institutional logics has illuminated how institutional heterogeneity shapes individual and organizational behavior and the strategic management of organizations. This research has focused on the field and organizational levels of analysis, generally overlooking broader societal forces. Yet, increasingly complex societal dynamics, marked by unstable and conflicting institutional pressures, are consequential for decision-making and especially the management of organizations, suggesting the need to theorize societies for their evolutionary and revolutionary effects. We integrate institutional logics with legitimacy theory to develop an ecological model of societal evolution. This model explains how dominant institutional logics emerge and result in marginalizing alternative institutional logics. We argue societies characterized by a dominant logic are less stable and resourceful because logic dominance reduces institutional diversity, diminishing actors’ capacity to avail, access, and activate the necessary diversity of institutions to define and solve issues in complex societies. Analogously, the dominant logic crowds out space for alternative institutions in society, which decline in much the same way that biological ecologies languish under insufficient biodiversity. We develop the concept of institutional diversity to explain the mechanisms reinforcing checks and balances to ensure the availability of a broader range of institutions for identifying and solving problems in society.
Academy of Management Review · 2025-11-07 · Genevieve LeBaron, Laura J. Spence, Andrew Crane, Vivek Soundararajan, Michael J. Bloomfield
While the importance of promoting greater equality is widely recognized in management theory and practice, it has yet to be built into the core business process of value creation. To date, research on gender equality in management has either taken the dominant model of value creation as given or, from a critical perspective, viewed value creation as fundamentally incompatible with equality. In this paper, we instead develop a new approach to value creation to address gender equality. To do this, we advance a theory of feminist value creation that draws on social reproduction theory located within materialist feminism. We offer a feminist reconceptualization of value creation in terms of the nature of value, its valuation, and underpinning values, such as to successfully integrate within value creation the “private sphere” of socially reproductive work in addition to the “public sphere” of paid and productive work. We also theorize the material and cultural processes of transformation needed to move toward feminist value creation, and the intra-, inter-, and extra-organizational influences that will affect the likelihood of such a transition. We conclude by elaborating on our contributions to research on gender equality in management and value creation.
Academy of Management Review · 2025-11-03 · Marina Vorholzer, Anna Brattström
This paper advances a model of moral ambiguity in entrepreneurial action. Our model specifies the mechanisms surrounding moral responsibility, moral motivation, and the moral threshold through which perceived moral ambiguity shapes action. Specifically, we theorize (a) the interpretative elements that steer how the entrepreneur attributes moral responsibility and establishes moral motivation, (b) how multiple opposing interpretations can create attributional or motivational moral ambiguity, and (c) how the entrepreneur can process such ambiguity to make moral judgment. We then discuss how our model extends prior work on both ethics in entrepreneurship and moral approbation theory, and we outline research opportunities on moral ambiguity and judgment.
Journal of Marketing · 2025-11-01T12:42:47+00:00 · Minu Kumar, Pietro Micheli, Jatinder Jit (J.J.) Singh, Neil Goldberg
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. Design thinking (DT) has generated significant attention in relation to new product development and innovation and, more generally, value creation activities. Despite its focus on identifying and addressing the needs of users and other stakeholders in an ...
Journal of Marketing · 2025-11-01T12:42:47+00:00 · Nils Wlömert, Dominik Papies, Harald J. van Heerde
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. The shift from physical music consumption to online music streaming has fundamentally transformed the market for recorded music, giving consumers access to millions of songs on demand. Because streaming platforms pay artists and labels on a per-play basis,...
Academy of Management Journal · 2025-10-30 · Christina B. Hymer, Bethany S. Cockburn, Borbala Csillag
This study examines how role prototypicality shapes calling enactment. Taking an interpretivist grounded theory approach, we harness the professional Santa Claus context to investigate our research question. Drawing upon interviews, observation, archival documents, and survey data, we find that professional Santas provide different narratives—socially constructed stories that made points about themselves—according to their level of role prototypicality (prototypical, semi-prototypical, non-prototypical) to describe the intrapersonal processes through which they enact their calling. Whereas prototypical Santas internalize the Santa role prototype, semi-prototypical Santas reconcile felt deviation from it, and non-prototypical Santas reinterpret prototypical characteristics. Prototypical Santas generally express high identification with the professional Santa role, making way for continuous calling enactment. Semi-prototypical Santas tend to demonstrate low role identification, resulting in episodic calling enactment. Non-prototypical Santas uniformly express high role identification and continuous calling enactment. Role salience influences prototypical and semi-prototypical Santas’ level of identification with the professional Santa role, and thereby their pursuit of continuous or episodic calling enactment. These insights theoretically extend the callings literature by advancing conversations on role prototypicality, temporality, and role identification within called work.
Journal of Marketing · 2025-10-23T01:21:11+00:00 · Ruichun Liu, Unnati Narang
Journal of Marketing, Volume 90, Issue 5 , Page 55-76, September 2026. New forms of shared micromobility services, such as e-scooters, are growing rapidly across cities. However, their impact beyond the retail and restaurant sectors is less understood in the marketing literature. The authors examine how the entry of e-...
Academy of Management Review · 2025-10-17 · Shawn T. McClean, Joel Koopman, Nitya Chawla
Scholars have long recognized that employees construct boundaries around roles to conserve and effectively deploy their resources toward fulfilling the responsibilities of those roles. Despite this, these boundaries can be permeated, where one role intersects and siphons the resources associated with another. To date, however, theory has conceptualized this as a relatively static process. Challenging this implicit consensus, we propose that role boundaries are dynamically permeable; they can be breached by certain stimuli at certain times. Drawing inspiration from the biological sciences, we build a staged, unfolding model of boundary permeations, integrating prevailing boundary theory with conservation of resources theory and event systems theory. Our theory proposes that boundary permeations occur when a stimulus exceeds the current role’s permeability threshold; we further explicate personal and contextual factors that impact the strength of the intersecting role. Following a boundary permeation, we theorize that employees engage in action consistent with the permeation before entering a defensive mode to recover lost resources. In developing our theory, we not only challenge the view that boundary permeations are static but also identify the processes by which boundary permeation episodes unfold. In so doing, we focus greater attention on the temporal dynamics underlying boundary permeations.
Academy of Management Review · 2025-10-10 · Michael D. Ryall, Olav Sorenson
Most research on organizations presumes that leaders can direct their organizations toward a set of goals, but that ability requires leaders to anticipate the consequences of their actions, a problem of causal inference. To explore this problem, we develop a formal model of the organization as a system of causal relationships. Managers observe some elements of this system but not others. Hidden (unseen) elements can bias managers’ assessments of the expected consequences of their actions, but they only do so under a specific set of conditions. Absent those conditions, simple and even incomplete theories can often allow for accurate assessments. Interestingly, the specificity of the problematic condition also suggests several ways in which organization design could mitigate it, either by eliminating the influence of the problematic hidden factor or by revealing it to the manager.
Academy of Management Review · 2025-10-10 · Phebo D. Wibbens, Teresa A. Dickler, Timothy B. Folta
The ability of multi-business firms to redeploy resources across businesses is a principal source of corporate advantage, as evidenced by a plethora of theoretical and empirical research. However, extant theory is silent in clarifying how resource redeployability might impact competitive behavior of rivals. Redeployability reduces irreversible commitments, which have long been recognized to deter rivalry, allow privileged access to scarce resources, and sustain a valuable strategic position. This raises a tension between the flexibility advantages and potential commitment disadvantages of redeployability. Using a dynamic computational model, we explore the competitive conditions under which redeployability can be advantageous or detrimental to long-term value. In addition to enhancing our understanding of the boundary conditions around the value of resource redeployability, this study also has implications for real option models and the broader dynamic capabilities literature.
Academy of Management Review · 2025-10-01 · Matthew B. Perrigino, Roshni Raveendhran
The popularity of remote work underscores its importance as a key strategic priority for organizations. This calls for new theory on how organizations effectively control work–nonwork boundaries while balancing employees’ demands for flexibility. We draw upon boundary control theory and the strategic human resource management (SHRM) perspective to posit that organizations will seek to influence where work occurs, when work occurs, and remote employees’ attention, based on strategic choices associated with (a) the organization’s view of its human capital and (b) the degree of work interdependence. We theorize how each strategic choice influences the configuration of HRM systems for remote work, encompassing remote work policies (allowing organizations varying degrees of control over where and when work occurs) and technology processes (allowing organizations varying degrees of control over remote employees’ attention). Further, we theorize how different combinations of remote work policies and technology processes enhance organizational performance, including how organizations resolve emergent tensions when considering the two strategic choices together. Taken together, we offer a framework for understanding how contemporary organizations strategically design HRM systems to establish where, when, and how work occurs.
Journal of Marketing · 2025-09-30T04:10:57+00:00 · Malika Malika, Durairaj Maheswaran
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. Managers often face the challenge of protecting the parent brand’s equity when launching brand extensions into low-fit categories. This article recommends that managers minimize any negative impact of low-fit extensions by using a unique segmentation ...
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. Consumers demonstrate a preference for products with glossy surfaces. This research examines how and why product glossiness influences consumers’ product preference in the firsthand versus secondhand markets. Six studies demonstrate that consumers ...
Journal of Marketing · 2025-09-15T12:18:17+00:00 · Nirajana Mishra, Sarah C. Whitley
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. With the advent of access-based platforms bringing phenomenal growth in rentals, consumers can rent products from person providers (e.g., Alex on Airbnb) and company providers (e.g., Apex Vacations on Airbnb). But does it matter from whom a consumer rents?...
Journal of Marketing Research · 2025-09-11T06:39:52+00:00 · Jay Naborn, Jonathan E. Bogard
Journal of Marketing Research, Volume 63, Issue 5 , Page 876-894, October 2026. People routinely make decisions based on predictions made by others (e.g., political pundits, market analysts), so it is in their best interest to identify high-quality forecasts. Experts characterize good forecasting as minimization of continuous error (...
Journal of Marketing · 2025-09-05T02:53:51+00:00 · Suh Yeon Kim, Rebecca W. Hamilton, TI Tongil Kim, Michael V. Lewis
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. Retailers frequently offer customers the opportunity to customize in addition to buying ready-made products. Although prior research shows that customization can increase product evaluations, purchase intent, and willingness to pay, customers often do not ...
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. In this article, the authors define and develop the concept of avant-garde market driving, a process whereby producers transform an industry by rebelling against the status quo as a means of social-industrial critique rather than in response to market ...
Journal of Consumer Research · 2025-09-01T00:00:00+00:00 ·
Abstract With the rise of environmental concerns in recent decades, many companies have joined the initiative to advertise and promote sustainable consumption. The current research examines how providing sustainability cues to consumers might have unintended consequences of which practitioners and policymakers may not be fully aware. One pilot study and 10 main studies, including two real-choice studies, show that a sustainability cue may delay consumption. That is, in an intertemporal choice, a sustainability cue can increase preference for a larger-later option over a smaller-sooner option. This effect occurs because a sustainability cue shifts a consumer’s temporal focus toward the future, leading to a shorter perceived wait time for the larger-later option. The findings further show that the delay does not emerge among those with strong green consumption values and can be circumvented if firms communicate the immediate need or instant payoff of sustainable actions. By investigating how sustainability cues shift consumer preferences between two options separated in time, the current research contributes to the literature on both sustainable consumption and intertemporal choice. The findings offer practitioners and policymakers guidelines to nudge consumers’ sustainable consumption more effectively.
Journal of Marketing · 2025-08-26T04:40:07+00:00 · Daniel Villanova, Rajesh Bagchi
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. Consumers are often faced with multiple unit offers (e.g., $40 for 5 lb of coffee) in the marketplace and must figure out how to evaluate them. Although the total price (e.g., $40) is always provided, the associated rate information is not (e.g., $8/lb of ...
Journal of Consumer Research · 2025-08-23T00:00:00+00:00 ·
Abstract Across two field experiments and several preregistered lab experiments, we demonstrate that confirmation nudges, which ask consumers whether they would like to confirm or change their initial choice, impact choice. First, consumers navigating a subscription company’s smartphone app were randomized to a control or confirmation nudge condition, which asked them to either confirm their initial choice or switch to an annual subscription. Confirmation nudges increased subscribers’ choice of the annual subscription by over 8 percentage points—an effect size similar to default effects tested by the same company. In experiment 2, conducted by a jewelry retailer, confirmation nudges had countervailing effects, increasing purchases of a nudged service plan add-on but decreasing originally planned jewelry purchases likely because it added a step and thus frictions to the purchase process. Confirmation nudges had larger effects when nudged options were desirable and among consumers who would benefit from the nudge (experiments 3 and 4). However, they were perceived as more manipulative than comparison conditions (experiment 5). We suggest that confirmation nudges undo tendencies to focus on initially preferred options, shifting attention toward alternatives relative to control conditions. Consistent with this, confirmation nudges were especially effective when the wording of the confirmation prompt focused on the “switch” option.
Journal of Marketing · 2025-08-13T11:34:01+00:00 · Hauke Roggenkamp, Johannes Boegershausen, Christian Hildebrand
Journal of Marketing, Volume 90, Issue 5 , Page 149-166, September 2026. This article introduces Digital In-Context Experiments (DICE), an experimental paradigm that enables researchers to study entire social media feeds while tracking users’ granular behavioral data at the post level. Current research paradigms (vignette-...
Journal of Marketing · 2025-08-09T01:29:03+00:00 · Jana Holthöwer, Jenny van Doorn, Stephanie M. Noble
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. Service robots on organizational frontlines, notably in health and elderly care settings, promise to tackle staff shortages. In such service contexts, compliance is crucial for consumer well-being, but compliance with robot advice remains problematically ...
Academy of Management Review · 2025-08-07 · Hugh Willmott
Two stories, revolving around the metaphors of jungle and myth, dominate accounts of mainstream management theory (MMT). An alternative metaphor, the hoax, is proposed as an alternative. Drawing parallels with the fable of the Emperor’s New Clothes, the analysis revives an explicit engagement of metaphors to theorize MMT as a phenomenon of interest. Four features of hoaxes relevant for theorizing MMT are proposed and explicated: mendacity; fantasies of control; stifling critical reflection; and normalized cynicism. The relevance of the hoax metaphor is further demonstrated by addressing its status as theory; its relevance to the study of “grand challenges”; the possibility of reconciling MMT and critical management studies (CMS); and the future of management education.
Academy of Management Review · 2025-08-07 · Dana Yagil
Role expectations about how employees should behave are essential for organizational functioning but may occasionally conflict with individuals’ personal inclinations. Role theory has examined the forces that encourage compliance with misaligned expectations, and prior studies have explored how such compliance affects various personal and work-related outcomes. Yet, employees sometimes choose not to comply with role expectations despite significant pressures that promote compliance, and extant literature provides little understanding of this behavior. Drawing on role theory, authenticity research, and self-determination theory, this paper introduces a theoretical framework that elucidates noncompliance with role expectations motivated by the need to express personal inclinations. At the core of the proposed framework is the concept of burdensome role expectations, defined as expectations that do not align with an individual’s self-concept or role perception, and which the individual is not intrinsically motivated to fulfill. The theoretical model proposes that burdensome role expectations engender noncompliance because they threaten basic psychological needs for genuine self-expression. The model then proceeds to explore how and when noncompliance manifests, and it elaborates on the personal consequences of noncompliant behavior in the presence of such expectations.
Academy of Management Review · 2025-08-07 · Jerker Denrell, Michael Christensen, Thorbjørn Knudsen, Chengwei Liu
Research on organizational learning emphasizes that slow learning fosters exploration and encourages recombination of knowledge and practices. However, the role that slow learning plays in the spread of knowledge in organizations remains underexplored. This gap is important because the learning mode that actors apply to select practices is critical for organizational performance gained through mutual learning. We identify two key learning modes: success-based (learning from successful peers) and norm-based (conforming to majority views). We analytically distill our insights into six propositions that explore how variations in learning modes, learning speeds, and network centrality shape organizational learning outcomes. Our findings reveal a critical coupling between learning modes and speed: Norm-based learners should adopt slow learning, while success-based learners should always learn faster. Contrary to prior studies emphasizing organizational structure, we show that effective knowledge utilization is primarily driven by the interaction of learning modes and speeds. Hierarchy emerges as a factor only when mixed learning modes interact with varying speeds. These insights enrich our understanding of slow learning by highlighting its contingent value in knowledge selection and assimilation. Our study offers testable predictions and practical guidance for organizational design in contexts such as multinational retail chains, manufacturing firms, and franchise organizations.
Academy of Management Journal · 2025-08-04 · Martin Götz, Christina Matz Carnes, Aaron D. Hill, Ernest H. O’Boyle
Despite using valid research designs informed by substantive and methodological theory, results across studies fail to converge at times. We introduce multiverse analysis as a tool to help catalyze theory development in situations with divergent theoretical explanations and associated evidence by (a) offering strong and precise inference testing, (b) identifying sources of variability across (dozens, hundreds, thousands, or even millions of) systematically and comprehensively derived valid alternative design decisions, and (c) allowing for the multifaceted nature of theoretical mechanisms. We use the theoretical and empirical divergence surrounding studies on how chief executive officer (CEO) gender relates to CEO pay to illustrate how multiverse analysis is a systematic and comprehensive method that is widely applicable, accessible, and flexible, making it a valuable catalyst for theory building.
Journal of Marketing · 2025-07-31T01:40:52+00:00 · Jordan W. Moffett, Natalie Chisam, Kelly D. Martin, Robert W. Palmatier
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. To address rising customer concerns about data privacy, some firms adopt strong privacy practices. However, such investments are costly, both financially and in terms of limiting the ability to leverage customer data, leading many firms to treat privacy ...
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. Charitable donations are increasingly shifting to online fundraising platforms, where numerous campaigns are displayed simultaneously. This research examines the role of campaign titles in attracting online traffic in this competitive environment, ...
Journal of Marketing · 2025-07-25T01:51:15+00:00 · Matt Meister, Nicholas Reinholtz
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. Experience with a product is shaped by two things: (1) aspects of the product itself and (2) aspects of the environment in which the product is consumed. This article documents evidence that when consumers translate their experiences into ratings of ...
Journal of Marketing · 2025-07-25T01:51:15+00:00 · Yashar Atefi, Sebastian Hohenberg, Saeed Janani, Wei Zhou
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. This article investigates “growth departments,” an increasingly popular governance structure in modern organizations. Using a multimethod approach, the authors examine the purpose, responsibilities, and effectiveness of these departments. In Studies 1a ...
Journal of Marketing · 2025-07-25T01:51:15+00:00 · Mariia Koval, Viacheslav Iurkov, Stefan Wuyts
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. Prior alliance research in marketing has largely focused on factors that enhance alliance stability. Yet alliance terminations can also be valuable, in that they are intricately linked with firms’ strategies to (re)allocate resources to create financial ...
Journal of Consumer Research · 2025-07-18T00:00:00+00:00 ·
Abstract People frequently perceive a trade-off between health and taste, leading to poor dietary choices. This research identifies a novel pathway to healthier eating: seeking beauty in food. Across seven preregistered field and lab studies, pursuing beautiful food systematically increased healthy choices without diminishing perceived taste. This effect arises because beauty is positively associated with both health and taste, effectively creating health–taste harmony instead of the commonly perceived conflict. Individuals who sought beauty in food consistently selected healthier options across diverse consumption contexts—including cafeteria meals, self-generated food ideas, grocery lists, and varied menus (with and without images)—and across populations, spanning both adults and children. Notably, the effect was stronger among individuals who more strongly associate beauty with health and weaker in choice sets in which the beauty–health association was less pronounced (e.g., morning cereals). These findings advance motivation theory by positioning beauty as a goal in itself, rather than merely a perceptual cue. We discuss theoretical and managerial implications for consumer behavior, food marketing, and public policy initiatives aimed at promoting healthier eating.
Academy of Management Review · 2025-07-18 · Michael G. Pratt, Luke N. Hedden, Hamza Khan
Organizations and their employees are increasingly engaging publicly with social issues, such as climate change, systemic racism, and LGBTQIA+ rights. Why does such engagement sometimes result in conflict and dysfunction in organizations? To build a theoretical foundation for answering this question, we bridge insights from research on opinion-based groups and psychological research on moralization to theorize a novel type of group—a moralized opinion-based (MOB) group—defined as an identity group that forms around a shared opinion that has been moralized by group members. We explain how the emotion of disgust affects opinion moralization, and why this makes MOB intergroup conflict uniquely dehumanizing, contagious, and difficult to resolve. We also explain how distinct configurations of MOB groups and formal groups in organizations can foster unique patterns of conflict—ultimately affecting members’ strength of identification foci, as well as their productivity. We offer practical suggestions for more productively engaging with social issues, and suggest a research agenda for better understanding the process and outcomes of MOB intergroup conflict in organizations.
Academy of Management Review · 2025-07-16 · Mark R. DesJardine
This paper introduces a multidimensional theoretical perspective for predicting shareholder activism. First, I outline a generalized process of activist targeting, divided into two stages: target identification and target engagement. Second, I argue that activist shareholders target firms based on three elements: problem, solution, and intervention. Synthesizing several strands of literature and insights from the target identification stage of the activist targeting process, I develop the baseline proposition that activists do not merely target firms with clear problems, but account for the availability of viable solutions and the opportunity to intervene in their targeting calculus. Third, I extend this problem × solution × intervention (PSI) model to develop propositions about variation in the types and outcomes of activism campaigns that manifest in different contexts. Drawing on insights from the target engagement stage of the activist targeting process, I argue that activism campaigns vary in terms of both tactics and outcomes based on the configuration of the three elements of the PSI model.
Journal of Marketing · 2025-07-11T03:17:55+00:00 · Lukas Jürgensmeier, Bernd Skiera
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. Digital platforms facilitate exchanges between platform actors, such as trading between buyers and sellers. However, providers of digital platforms also compete with other actors, referred to as third parties, on their own platforms. In such settings, ...
Journal of Consumer Research · 2025-07-09T00:00:00+00:00 ·
Abstract Consumers’ responses to seller’s prices, including perceptions of price fairness (PPF) and unfairness, are a crucial aspect of the marketplace. Although past literature has uncovered a variety of factors that influence PPF, the lack of an overarching conceptual framework has constrained understanding of when and why consumers are more likely to perceive prices as fair or unfair. The authors develop a conceptual model of PPF as moral judgments and propose that these moral PPF arise from consumer inferences of potential harm from a price. The conceptualization suggests that inferred harm—and thereby, PPF—is influenced by consumer vulnerability, product welfare impact and firm price strategy (e.g., costs and prices, differential pricing, and price promotions). The authors also propose that consumer political orientation and inferred firm self-defense motives moderate the relationship between inferred harm and PPF and that inferred firm motives for prices influence PPF. Eight studies test this conceptualization. The results support the moral harm model and provide novel insights, showing when unchanged prices, price increases, and price decreases are likely to be perceived as more unfair and when differential prices (including paying more than others) are likely to be perceived as fairer than equal prices.
Academy of Management Review · 2025-07-09 · Raina A. Brands, Martin Kilduff
This paper develops new theory on how dissonant ties—work relationships characterized by positive and negative valence—shape gender inequality in organizational networks. We introduce the concept of multiplex jeopardy to explain how dissonant ties disproportionately harm women, due to their overlap with gender stereotypes. Specifically, we argue that like–disrespect ties reinforce perceptions of women as warm but incompetent, whereas dislike–respect ties reinforce perceptions of women as cold but competent, leading to both passive harm and active backlash. We further theorize that these effects extend beyond direct relationships to shape women’s experiences and outcomes through indirect gender bias. This bias distorts reputations, stifles information flow, limits career advancement, and contributes to structural inequality by reinforcing gendered network positions. We offer three theoretical contributions: (1) a novel lens on gendered outcomes in informal networks, (2) a social psychological account of how stereotypes become embedded in everyday work relationships, and (3) insight into how informal dynamics sustain gender inequality in organizations.
Academy of Management Review · 2025-07-09 · Liuxin Yan, Daniel J. McAllister, Grace J. H. Lim, Kai Chi Yam
Despite the widespread appeal of underdog characters in popular culture, being labeled a workplace underdog can be both stressful and challenging. Drawing on the literature on emotion, the challenge–threat framework, and emotion regulation, we propose a comprehensive theory that unpacks the double-edged nature of underdog expectations. Specifically, we explain how individuals respond differently based on how they interpret and manage the negative emotions elicited by these expectations. We introduce four distinct underdog narratives, each characterized by a unique configuration of emotional activation (i.e., low or high) and cognitive appraisals (i.e., challenge or threat): (1) strategic underdogs, (2) paranoid underdogs, (3) deluded underdogs, and (4) resigned underdogs. Our framework illustrates how individuals within each configuration regulate their emotions and cope with underdog expectations. Furthermore, rather than viewing success or failure as static endpoints, we adopt a process-oriented and temporal perspective to examine the enduring effects of underdog expectations, exploring how interpretive schemas shape behavior differently for “overcomers,” who successfully defy underdog expectations, and “succumbers,” who fail to do so. Our theory sheds new light on underdog dynamics in the workplace and offers a systematic framework for future research.
Academy of Management Review · 2025-07-09 · Nathan A. Black, Daniel W. Newton, Jennifer D. Nahrgang
Scholars have exhibited enduring enthusiasm for voice and increasingly recognize the value of collective effort in the voice process. Despite this attention, research on collective voice remains fragmented across the organizational behavior and industrial relations traditions of voice, resulting in a problematic theoretical landscape marked by significant divergence regarding the nature, predictors, and outcomes of collective voice compared to aggregated forms of individual voice. To distinguish the coordinated nature of collective voice from aggregated individual voice, we leverage resource mobilization theory to propose an integrative theory of collective voice. Our integrative theory delineates open corporate opportunity structure, structural interdependence, and psychological safety as antecedents that drive employees’ opportunity, motivation, and ability to coordinate collective voice, respectively. Our theory then addresses a key trade-off of collective voice, which, compared to aggregated individual voice, is more likely to increase organizational effectiveness as well as organizational factionalism. Finally, we specify structural (i.e., centralization) and content (i.e., promotive voice and prohibitive voice) contingencies that shift these paradoxical effects. Our integrative theory has important implications for voice research and resource mobilization theory, unlocking future research directions to further expand our understanding of collective voice.
Strategic Management Journal · 2025-07-04T01:54:15+00:00 · Andrew A. King
Abstract Research Summary Scholars have long investigated the possible benefits of corporate social responsibility (CSR). One of the most influential of these studies tests and supports the hypothesis that CSR increases access to finance. Yet, I show here that the finding is unsound because the report's empirical method limits what can be inferred from its analysis. I rectify a key weakness and replicate the study. I observe a cross-sectional association but find no evidence that CSR increases access to finance. My analysis suggests new directions for research on the effect of CSR. Managerial Summary Numerous articles have explored the possible benefits of CSR. A highly influential study claims that CSR improves a corporation's ability to access capital, and this finding has been widely used by scholars, fund managers, and policymakers. Unfortunately, the finding is unsound because the study's research method used predicted values of access to capital rather than direct measures. A rectification and extension of the original analysis fails to uncover evidence that firm-level changes in CSR are associated with access to capital.
Journal of Marketing · 2025-06-26T06:09:04+00:00 · Wendy De La Rosa, Jackie Silverman, Abigail B. Sussman, Gwen Rino, Vince Dorie, Maximilian Hell, Eric Giannella, Lisa Dillman
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. Millions of eligible lower-income people do not apply for government benefits. Increasing interest in applying for these benefits is a crucial concern for marketers and policymakers, as the underutilization of benefits limits their effectiveness. This ...
Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. Firms are increasingly facing decisions about operations in markets affected by geopolitical conflicts that attract global attention, but research illuminating the consequences of these decisions remains scarce. In this article, the authors develop a ...
Journal of Marketing · 2025-06-09T10:17:24+00:00 · Uyen Tran
Journal of Marketing, Volume 90, Issue 5 , Page 99-124, September 2026. The proliferation of broadband internet has sparked concerns about the future of brick-and-mortar retail. This article explores consumer behavior in the U.S. consumer packaged goods sector during broadband's proliferation from 2004 to 2019. Using ...
Journal of Consumer Research · 2025-06-06T00:00:00+00:00 ·
Abstract Conventional wisdom and past research converge on the notion that product messages are more effective when they use a persuasive frame that directly addresses the product’s target customers to indicate a preference match (e.g., “If you like dark coffee, this is the coffee for you!”). In contrast, the current research identifies scenarios where consumers respond more favorably to dissuasive frames—that is, to messages that address the consumers not targeted by the product to indicate a preference mismatch (e.g., “If you don’t like dark coffee, this is not the coffee for you!”). Eight experiments using mixed methods demonstrate that the impact of dissuasive framing on consumer response is positive for target customers and negative for nontarget customers. This occurs because dissuasive framing increases perceptions of the product as a specialized offering intended for a more narrowly defined target segment (i.e., target specificity). Target specificity, in turn, increases (vs. decreases) the perceived fit between the product and target (vs. nontarget) customers, which drives their response. This research sheds light on a novel form of framing and introduces target specificity as a construct with important implications for consumers’ perceptions of fit with a product and their downstream responses.
Journal of Marketing · 2025-05-30T09:54:51+00:00 · Bart J. Bronnenberg, Trang Bùi, Barbara Deleersnyder, Lesley Haerkens, George Knox, Arjen van Lin, Max J. Pachali, Anna Paley, Robert W. Smith, Samuel Stäbler
Journal of Marketing, Volume 90, Issue 5 , Page 16-34, September 2026. The global food system has a large impact on the environment. By converting household grocery purchases into environmental cost factors like greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and land use, this study examines the sustainability of food purchases over a ten-...
Academy of Management Review · 2025-05-08 · Matthew Lee, Jennifer Whitson
We develop a theory of institutional migration based on the basic human motive to achieve personal control—the expectation that one’s actions will yield predictable outcomes. We propose that institutionalized action supports personal control, and that individuals migrating to a new institutional domain therefore suffer a personal control deficit. Institutional migrants are hence motivated to reestablish personal control through dual pathways: transposition of their previously acquired institutional knowledge (primary control) and internalization of the institutional rules of their new environments (secondary control). These pathways are moderated by a set of individual and institutional characteristics, respectively. A personal control perspective thus illuminates a crucial moment in institutional dynamics and augments the psychological grounding of institutional accounts.
Academy of Management Review · 2025-05-08 · Chad D. Coffman, Griffin W. Cottle, Sanwar A. Sunny
Although prior research has documented that some necessity-motivated ventures grow, and later develop into what researchers have traditionally called “opportunity-driven” ventures, the existing dichotomous framework offers no theoretical explanation for how this transition occurs. We build on the actualization view of entrepreneurship to describe the process by which an entrepreneur’s underlying needs—basic, psychological, and self-fulfillment needs—motivate both the desired future states that they envision, and their evaluation of the actions and conditions necessary to actualize the futures they imagine. We then extend actualization theory beyond the identification and evaluation of opportunities to include venture creation. We describe how needs effect the identification of key milestones, the pace at which milestones must be reached, and the level of uncertainty that entrepreneurs are willing to bear. In doing so, we illustrate how basic needs motivation leads to the selection of imitative or replicative actions, but that subsequent needs actualization can free necessity entrepreneurs to pursue voluntary forms of entrepreneurship once their basic needs have been met. Our model invites scholars to go beyond describing the antecedents and outcomes of necessity entrepreneurship, to research aimed at understanding the process through which necessity entrepreneurs transition to more voluntary forms of venturing.
Academy of Management Journal · 2025-04-08 · Jingjing Yao, Han Li, Zhi-Xue Zhang, Jeanne M. Brett
Decades of negotiation research support the theory linking trust and integrative negotiations: high levels of trust foster cooperation, which manifests in information exchange about interests and priorities, ultimately leading to insight and joint gains. In this research, we present a meta-analysis (Study 1) demonstrating that this Western-centric model may not generalize to non-Western cultures. To better understand the processes underlying integrative negotiations in East Asian cultures, we introduce two constructs to the theory. “Trust radius” refers to the width of the social circle within which people are willing to trust and cooperate. “Harmony concern” refers to the intention to cultivate and maintain a harmonious relationship that avoids conflict and discord with others. In four studies—a survey (Study 2), two experiments (Studies 3a and 3b), and a simulation (Study 4)—we show that trust radius, which tends to be wider in Western than in non-Western cultures, moderates the relationship between trust level and information exchange. We also find that harmony concern, rather than trust level, directly predicts information exchange in East Asian cultures but not in Western cultures. This research offers a novel perspective on the cultural differences between the West and East Asia in negotiation processes. It also highlights the theoretical distinction between trust level and trust radius in social contexts where people encounter unfamiliar counterparts.
Production and Operations Management · 2025-04-02T12:29:15+00:00 · Yonghui Chen, Ailing Xu, Qiao‐Chu He, Ying‐Ju Chen
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Motivated by the emerging mixed autonomous paradigm in cobotic order picking operations, we investigate the optimal information design to navigate human workers (HWs) who cooperate with autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) within an intralogistics system. We ...
Production and Operations Management · 2025-04-02T12:29:15+00:00 · Nakyung Kyung, Hyeokkoo Eric Kwon
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming healthcare operations. Nevertheless, particularly in the context of preventive care, little is known about how laypeople perceive and accept AI and change their behavior accordingly. Grounded in a solid ...
Production and Operations Management · 2025-04-02T12:29:15+00:00 · Timofey Shalpegin, Ajay Kumar, Tyson R Browning
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Economic sanctions and consumer boycotts are common tools to punish organizations for undesirable behavior and attempt to coerce them to change their actions. However, these tools occasionally spill over beyond the intended recipients and affect guiltless ...
Production and Operations Management · 2025-04-02T12:29:15+00:00 · Vamsi K Kanuri, Johannes Habel, Nawar N Chaker, Deva Rangarajan, Paolo Guenzi
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Business‐to‐business (B2B) sellers are increasingly transitioning to hybrid sales structures, by augmenting an in‐person field sales force with a direct online channel. During this transition, sellers frequently experience a cold‐start problem, wherein ...
Production and Operations Management · 2025-04-02T12:29:15+00:00 · Ye Shi, Hu Yu, Yugang Yu, Xiaohang Yue
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Motivated by a realworld practice of a China Post sortation center, this study considers the deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) technology to improve the efficiency of a human–robot hybrid sortation system. In this system, IoT technology enables ...
Production and Operations Management · 2025-04-02T12:29:15+00:00 · Maxim A Terekhov, Emre M Demirezen, Haldun Aytug
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. This paper summarizes emerging practice and research issues in the health insurance industry. We provide an industry overview, epitomize business analytics applications, and outline current and emerging problems of interest to key stakeholders and ...
Academy of Management Journal · 2025-04-02 · Ethan R. Burris, Taeya M. Howell, Stephen R. Stubben, Kyle T. Welch
Employees may raise concerns based on what they hear from others, yet conventional wisdom suggests that managers should be skeptical of these “secondhand accounts” of prohibitive voice. Drawing on the heuristic-systematic model of persuasion, we argue that managers’ beliefs about how they should evaluate secondhand versus firsthand accounts diverge from their actual judgments when encountering either type of prohibitive voice. We report qualitative and quantitative data on managerial lay theories, demonstrating that secondhand accounts are seen as less credible and therefore less likely to require managerial action than firsthand accounts. However, using archival data of over two million instances of employees speaking up through companies’ internal reporting systems, we show that manager behaviors are inconsistent with lay theories—managers are more likely to substantiate secondhand than firsthand accounts. Then, through four experimental studies, we (1) illustrate that despite lay theories that secondhand accounts should be discounted, managers are more likely to find credible and take action on voice from secondhand sources compared to firsthand sources; and (2) provide evidence of mechanisms underlying these effects. In highlighting this disconnect between manager lay beliefs and their actions, we suggest important considerations for voice researchers and practical implications for managers.
Academy of Management Journal · 2025-03-31 · Heewon Chae, Daphne Demetry, Deepak Nayak, Todd Schifeling
We investigate how an overall change in audience preferences for category spanning occurs by examining the role of new organizational forms. We suggest that a new organizational form that emphasizes category spanning in its products can enhance evaluations of category spanners in an established form. By promoting an alternative theory of value, the new form helps disrupt existing evaluative frameworks for the established form and shifts audience preferences toward spanning. Using the rise of gourmet food trucks in the U.S. restaurant industry, we analyze Yelp ratings and find an increase in returns to spanning by brick-and-mortar restaurants with the prevalence of gourmet food trucks in the same metropolitan area. A preregistered vignette experiment in the restaurant context provides additional evidence consistent with our argument. We contribute to research on category dynamics and organizational forms by investigating how outsiders influence audience evaluations of spanning, revealing how a new form can heterogeneously affect organizations within an established form. By employing a mixed methods approach that integrates qualitative, statistical, and experimental techniques, this study also makes a methodological contribution.
Academy of Management Review · 2025-03-28 · Borbala Csillag, Elizabeth M. Campbell, Le Zhou
We extend the predominantly individual view on time use and inequality by spotlighting and sharpening the view of time request processes in the dyadic context of interpersonal interactions. Despite its prevalence, little research has examined how requests for time—a scarce resource with economic, psychological, and collective social meanings—unfold in organizations. Drawing from and integrating time and status literatures, we work toward a theory that unpacks the processes of conceiving of, making, interpreting, and responding to time requests occurring between two coworkers. Further, we theorize how forms of status disparity derived from both cues for achieved status (i.e., task-based expertise) and cues for ascribed status (i.e., observable demographic characteristics) shape how an initiator and a responder engage in time request processes, affecting their relative expenditures in psychological resources and clock time. We specify how dyadic temporal contracts emerge over time from an interaction history of time request episodes, which in turn exert normative influence on future time requests in ways that can reproduce disparities between organizational members. We conclude by outlining how our theorizing can enable future research and inform practices about time use and inequality.
Academy of Management Review · 2025-03-24 · Frederik von Briel, Per Davidsson, Jan Recker
We develop new theory to explain the apparent mystery that societal crises recurringly and consistently give rise to extreme growth outlier organizations that reach prominent positions in their industries and markets. We argue that societal crises increase demand for the market offerings of a minority of organizations, which can help the negatively affected majority of economic agents adapt to the crisis conditions. Because the majority of economic agents struggle, this externally-enabled minority simultaneously benefits from mutually reinforcing improvements to resource supply and institutional legitimation—advantages that are usually not bestowed on organizations that experience demand surges under non-crisis conditions. We further argue that societal crises with a broad scope, sudden onset, and extended duration provide sufficient enablement to make extreme growth possible for a select few organizations. Finally, we argue that organizations must be internally dispositioned to leverage resource expansibility, flexibility, and distributability to actualize this external enablement. Our theory about the occurrence of crisis-enabled extreme growth outliers extends emerging conversations around the important minority of organizations that benefit from crises’ overall detrimental effects. It also invites more research into the essential and systematic impact of environmental changes on economic activity to extend existing agent-based theories.
Academy of Management Review · 2025-03-21 · Jack McGuire, Daniel J. McAllister, Jochen I. Menges, David De Cremer
Awe is a profound emotion that has captured significant attention within psychological research. While the potential for leaders to inspire awe in followers has received some recognition, systematic research on the nature and effects of awe in leadership—and within organizational contexts more broadly—remains limited. In this article, we offer a conceptual framework that explains the multifaceted and transformative nature of leadership through the power of awe. Specifically, we identify four leader behaviors—charismatic leadership tactics, exceptional performance, problem reframing, and self-sacrificial behavior—that elicit awe among followers. We further propose three variants of awe-inspiring leaders, describing how variation in a leader’s self-construal (independent, collective-interdependent, or humanity) differentially orients followers toward hero worship, in-group favoritism, or universal prosociality through follower identification processes. Finally, we argue that a leader’s zero-sum beliefs either intensify or weaken these behavioral consequences. By advancing this framework, we hope to stimulate further research on the effects of awe within organizations and deepen our understanding of how this transformative emotion shapes identity, behavior, and more.
Academy of Management Journal · 2025-02-11 · Lakshmi Goyal
According to the extant literature, organizational history binds strategic choices concerning problemistic search behaviors. To complement this line of inquiry, I draw from organizational imprinting theory to develop arguments regarding how institutional history impacts problemistic search behaviors. Using the regulatory punctuation of pro-market reforms characterizing the Indian economy as the research context, I examine how the timing of firms’ founding (i.e., in the pre- or post-reform period) explains their intensity of research and development (R&D) search following negative attainment discrepancy in the post-reform period. Furthermore, I explore how this relationship varies on the basis of the protectionist policies that characterized the industries in which firms operated during their founding. Overall, I find that firms that originated in the pre-reform period engage in less R&D search in response to negative attainment discrepancy; furthermore, this behavior is stronger among firms that were founded in more protected industries. Post hoc tests, however, reveal that when firms that originated in the pre-reform period face existential threats, they tend to commit greater resources to R&D search. These findings contribute to research at the intersection of history, institutions, and problemistic search theory, and provide novel insights into the problemistic search behaviors of emerging-economy firms.
Production and Operations Management · 2025-01-31T03:13:49+00:00 · Kanix Wang, Feng Mai, Zhe Shan, Dawei (David) Zhang, Xiaosong (David) Peng
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. The erosion of professional ethics in medicine has severe consequences for patients and society. Existing approaches often rely on retrospective analysis and lack the precision and timeliness needed to effectively identify and mitigate risks. Although ...
Production and Operations Management · 2025-01-30T09:14:11+00:00 · Yi Yang, Ying Wu, Xiangyu Chang, Mei Li, Yong Tan
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Scoring systems, as a type of predictive model, have significant advantages in interpretability and transparency and facilitate quick decision-making. As such, scoring systems have been extensively used in a wide variety of industries, such as healthcare ...
Journal of Marketing · 2025-01-13T02:49:17+00:00 · Christian Hotz-Behofsits, Nils Wlömert, Nadia Abou Nabout
Journal of Marketing, Volume 90, Issue 5 , Page 77-98, September 2026. Emotions are central to consumer communications, and extracting them from user-generated online content is crucial for marketers, given that such consumer opinions significantly shape brand perceptions, influence purchase decisions, and provide essential ...
Journal of Accounting Research · 2024-12-18T08:00:00+00:00 · ALEX G. KIM, VALERI V. NIKOLAEV
ABSTRACT To what extent does the narrative context surrounding the numbers in financial statements alter the informativeness of these numbers, that is, contextualize them? Answering this question empirically presents a methodological challenge. Leveraging recent advances in deep learning, we propose a method to uncover the value of contextual information learned from the (deep) interactions between numeric and narrative disclosures. We show that the contextualization of accounting numbers makes them substantially more informative in shaping beliefs about a firm's future, especially when numeric data are less reliable. In fact, the informational value of interactions dominates the direct informational value of the narrative context. We corroborate this finding by showing that stock markets and financial analysts incorporate the interactions between narrative and numeric information when making forecasts. We also demonstrate the value of our approach by identifying rich firm-year–specific heterogeneity in earnings persistence. We discuss a number of avenues for future research.
Strategic Management Journal · 2024-11-28T08:29:25+00:00 · Shivaram V. Devarakonda, Martin C. Goossen, Louis Mulotte
Abstract Research Summary This study explores the decision to centralize control over technological resources. We posit that opportunity costs arising from the firm's administrative structure impact this choice. These opportunity costs stem from differences in identifying and evaluating opportunity sets between the unit level (decentralized) and headquarters level (centralized). We propose that a resource's versatility increases the opportunity costs associated with decentralized control, thereby raising the likelihood of its control being centralized. Using a sample of patents acquired through corporate acquisitions in the medical device industry, we find that patents with greater technological and product-market versatility are more likely to be reassigned to the central level. These findings contribute to elucidating the interplay between resources, strategy, and structure. Managerial Summary In the process of integrating a newly acquired firm, acquirers must decide whether to retain the resources within the acquired subsidiary or reallocate them to the headquarters. Decentralizing resources enables managers at the divisional level to spot, sort, select, and seize opportunities in their specific product-market domains. However, centralizing resources can help exploit opportunities with a broad scope, spanning across divisions. The key consideration is determining which resources should be centralized after an acquisition? Analysis of data on 507 US acquisitions in the medical device industry undertaken between 1996 and 2015 reveals that acquirers tend to centralize versatile technological resources, especially when the acquirers themselves have a diverse technological base.
Production and Operations Management · 2024-09-20T06:51:39+00:00 · Vandith Pamuru, Wreetabrata Kar, Warut Khern-am-nuai
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Non-financial incentives such as badges, ranks, and status are often used to encourage user participation on online platforms. This study focuses on the effect of one such incentive, “status,” in the context of a third-party restaurant-review platform. In ...
Academy of Management Review · 2024-09-16 · Eric Y. Lee, John R. Busenbark, Michael C. Withers, Edward J. Zajac
Competitive dynamics (CD) research has long relied on the awareness-motivation-capability (AMC) framework to analyze competitive actions and responses. Rooted in the stimulus-response model from social cognition research, the AMC framework unsurprisingly emphasizes a focal firm’s ex post (i.e., emergent) awareness of a rival’s attack as the requisite stimulus for a focal firm’s competitive response. We extend both the AMC model and the CD literature by considering the competitive relevance of an alternative stimulus: a focal firm’s anticipatory awareness of rivals’ intentions. To elaborate the process by which anticipatory awareness can manifest itself, we advance a novel conceptual framework rooted in music theory (tonal harmony and rhythm perspectives) to explain how a listener, by recognizing consonance and dissonance in musical notes and patterns in timing, can anticipate what will come next. We apply our framework to discuss ways in which a focal firm can develop anticipatory awareness vis-à-vis competitor intentions, and we link this alternative stimulus to an under-researched but managerially important response that is also anticipatory: successful preemption. We conclude with a discussion of the multiple uses and extensions of our theoretical framework for research and practice on anticipated interactions between firms and their rivalrous (and non-rivalrous) counterparts.
Abstract Research Summary Resource-based-view scholars have mainly examined two resource allocation approaches for competitive advantage in multiunit firms: resource sharing and resource redeployment. These approaches emphasize allocative efficiency—the optimal allocation of resources to maximize their current value. In technology-intensive industries, firm success also requires achieving dynamic efficiency to increase its future value-creation. We propose that the redundant allocation of resources—the parallel deployment of non-scale-free resources towards the same objective—although allocatively inefficient, increases dynamic efficiency by stimulating inter-unit competition. Firms' structural features moderate these effects. An analysis of large pharmaceutical firms reveals that redundant R&D increases innovations with high firm-specific value but simultaneously increases project terminations to reduce wastage. Organizational proximity increases the former effect and decreases the latter. Firm's R&D centralization amplifies the effect of unit proximity. Managerial Summary In technology-intensive industries, multiunit firms often employ redundant allocation of R&D resources, that is, the parallel deployment of scientists and equipment in different units towards realizing the same business objective. Although common, there is little managerial guidance on how this practice impacts firms' R&D outcomes, and how organizational characteristics influence this relationship. An analysis of large pharmaceutical firms reveals that redundant allocation of R&D resources across units increases wastage but also stimulates competing units to create innovations with high firm-specific value. Organizationally proximate units are less likely to have their redundant projects terminated, while creating more high-value-innovations. Centralization of the firm's R&D amplifies the effect of unit proximity.
Abstract Research Summary While the literature highlights the benefits of internally redeploying resources, there is less empirical guidance on which resources are most likely to be redeployed. We examine the relationship between inventor characteristics and redeployment decisions, motivated by the tension between costs and benefits of keeping a resource at the source unit versus moving it to a new target unit. We argue that inventors with inventive breadth are more likely to be redeployed, whereas broker inventors are less likely to be redeployed. Moreover, we consider two source-unit characteristics that influence internal opportunity costs: resource slack and knowledge interdependence. We test our arguments on the redeployment of inventors following an exogenous profitability shift in the US petrochemical industry in 2012 and find support for our predictions. Managerial Summary Managers move resources between business units to respond to profitability shocks, but which specific resources do they move? Examining the inter-unit transfers (redeployments) of inventors between business units following the unexpected profitability disparity between ethylene-based business units and others in the US petrochemical industry, we find that generalist inventors are more likely to be redeployed, while brokers in the collaboration network (inventors who connect others) are less likely to be redeployed. In addition, conditions that alter opportunity costs at the source unit matter. Larger proportions of generalists (and brokers) facilitate redeployment of either type, and knowledge interdependencies in the source unit mitigate redeployment.
Strategic Management Journal · 2024-08-08T07:00:00+00:00 · Robert A. Burgelman, Pertti Aaltonen
Abstract Research Summary Our field study of new business development in a German-based global pharmaceutical company reveals that the emergence of co-selection bias in project-level stage-gate resource allocation engendered a corporate-level innovation portfolio imbalance. We show how the corporate portfolio imbalance resulted from incoherent managerial activities in the multilevel resource allocation process (RAP) decision context and how this caused fizzling out of the proactively established incipient strategic context of the favored-for-growth business unit. Moreover, we identify strategic RAP exploitation challenges that explain why sequential exploitation capability and exploitation drive deficits caused an exploitation trap that limited strategic discretion and stymied top management strategic intent to maintain the company's independence. Our integrated frameworks augment strategic management theory of corporate RAP and offer guidance for future research. Managerial Summary We draw attention to the little-noticed phenomenon of co-selection bias emerging in the project-level stage-gate resource allocation to new business development and maladaptive corporate-level innovation portfolio outcomes that it may produce. We show how top management can use the Bower–Burgelman RAP model to analyze the multilevel RAP decision context and identify the forces that may engender out-of-context managerial agency, such as co-selection bias. We highlight strategic RAP exploitation challenges that top management must meet by matching the RAP exploitation drive with a commensurate RAP exploitation capability to avoid an exploitation trap, thereby increasing the chances of company survival.
Abstract Research Summary Despite the importance of resource reallocation in shaping a variety of strategic outcomes, strategy scholars have paid only limited attention to the processes by which firms reallocate their resources across successive systemic innovations . To explore these processes, we conducted an in-depth historical case study on Rolls-Royce 's role in three distinct systemic innovations that marked the transition from piston engines to jet engines in the civil aviation industry: the turbojet, the turboprop, and the turbofan. The analysis helps explain how and why Rolls-Royce's central role stemmed from its ability to reallocate existing non-scale free organizational and technical resources. A key finding of this study is the identification of the horizontal transfer of functional modules as a critical process, especially during the incipient phase of a systemic innovation. The analysis also highlights the role that specific organizational arrangements, particularly a firm's integrative capabilities , have in shaping the effectiveness with which resources are reallocated. Managerial Summary Focusing on resource reallocation is important to understand why some firms effectively reallocate their resources through successive systemic innovations while others cannot, even if they have similar resources and face the same environmental conditions. By delving into the technological aspects of aeroengine development and exploring why Rolls-Royce had the capabilities to successfully integrate key functional modules across various modular levels, we clarify the relationship between technology and organization that underlies resource reallocation—a topic that has received only scant attention in the strategy literature.
Strategic Management Journal · 2024-05-27T02:54:36+00:00 · Jasmina Chauvin, Carlos Inoue, Christopher Poliquin
Abstract Research Summary Scarcity of productive factors poses a challenge for firms entering underdeveloped regions. We theorize that incumbent firms can overcome scarcity of skilled human capital in local labor markets by redeploying workers from existing units. We predict that redeployment is more valuable when factor markets exhibit large differences in resource scarcity. Redeployment is also more valuable when output is highly sensitive to worker skill and is responsive to complementarities between labor and other inputs. Important implications are that redeployment can endow firms with superior resources and enable them to enter more markets. Data on sugar mills in Brazil, where a sudden demand boom incentivized expansion, corroborate the predictions. Our research identifies a new mechanism of value-creation from resource redeployment across factor markets. Managerial Summary Firms entering underdeveloped regions often struggle to obtain inputs needed for production, such as skilled labor. We propose that incumbent firms expanding into such regions can overcome resource scarcity by redeploying resources from their existing units. Redeployment allows firms to move resources—such as skilled workers—from markets where resources are relatively abundant to markets where they are scarce. We show that such factor market “arbitrage” is most valuable when firms operate across markets with large differences in resource scarcity and when production is sensitive to worker skill and to complementarities between inputs. By redeploying into markets suffering from resource scarcity, firms can enter more markets and seed units with superior resources. This gives incumbent firms with redeployment capabilities an advantage over de novo entrants.
Production and Operations Management · 2024-04-22T01:15:35+00:00 · Yifan Dou, Xiaoyang Zhang, D.J. Wu
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Pricing represents a crucial element in the platform business model search, particularly for startups that face the “cold-start” problem in launching a two-sided marketplace. In a static setting, the literature recommends the “seesaw principle” (i.e., ...
Production and Operations Management · 2024-04-13T09:42:14+00:00 · Haoyan Sun, Eric (Er) Fang, Beibei Dong, Xiaoling Li
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Hybrid retailing is an emerging business model that melds traditional reselling with the newer platform approach. A platform owner resells directly to consumers (the reselling model) and also allows third-party retailers (TPRs) to sell on the platform for ...
Production and Operations Management · 2024-03-18T03:56:28+00:00 · Heng Xu, Nan Zhang
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. A key challenge facing the use of machine learning (ML) in organizational selection settings (e.g., the processing of loan or job applications) is the potential bias against (racial and gender) minorities. To address this challenge, a rich literature of ...
Production and Operations Management · 2024-03-06T12:46:24+00:00 · Hemant K Bhargava, Xinxue (Shawn) Qu, Yoonseock Son, Daewon Sun
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Online crowdfunding platforms have created new avenues for investors to finance existing businesses or new business ventures of project creators. Project creators who launch crowdfunding campaigns can provide progress updates to potential investors ...
Production and Operations Management · 2024-03-01T01:44:38+00:00 · Tong Wang, Fujie Jin, Yu Jeffrey Hu, Lu Feng, Yuan Cheng
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Medical crowdfunding is a popular channel for people seeking financial assistance to cover their medical expenses, allowing them to collect donations from a large number of donors. However, a mismatch between the supply and demand of donations creates ...
Production and Operations Management · 2024-02-09T01:45:06+00:00 · Andreas K Gernert, Andre P Calmon, Gonzalo Romero, Luk N Van Wassenhove
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Several low- and middle-income countries’ emergency transportation systems (ETSs) do not have a centralized emergency number. Instead, they have many independent ambulance providers, each with a small number of ambulances. As a result, ETSs in these ...
Production and Operations Management · 2024-02-09T01:44:05+00:00 · Yiying Zhang, Xiaosong (David) Peng, Xiande Zhao, Yang Lei
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. E-commerce platforms are playing an increasingly important role in influencing manufacturers’ supply chain and product decisions. An emerging supply chain innovation, known as the platform-based consumer-to-manufacturer (PC2M) model, has been initiated by ...
Production and Operations Management · 2024-02-07T01:31:43+00:00 · Yinchu Zhu, Ilya O. Ryzhov
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. We present a data-driven prescriptive framework for fair decisions, motivated by hiring. An employer evaluates a set of applicants based on their observable attributes. The goal is to hire the best candidates while avoiding bias with regard to a certain ...
Production and Operations Management · 2024-02-07T01:20:12+00:00 · Gaoyan Lyu, Lin Tian, Wei Wang
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. With two-sided platforms becoming an increasingly ubiquitous business model, quality is a vital factor for the success of high-technology platforms that face fierce competition. To maintain competency, high-technology platforms commonly use two quality ...
Production and Operations Management · 2024-02-07T01:06:32+00:00 · Kejia Hu, Nil Karacaoglu
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. In the dynamic e-commerce environment, social commerce has emerged as a revolutionary force, transforming how consumers interact and transact online. This paper investigates the differences in customers’ search and purchase patterns between a prominent ...
Production and Operations Management · 2024-02-06T10:10:51+00:00 · Yong Wang, Sandun C. Perera, Sachin K. Mangla, Linna Han, Malin Song
Production and Operations Management, Ahead of Print. Ensuring universal health coverage is one of the top priorities under the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The World Health Organization recognizes the critical role of the health workforce in promoting this mission. However, ...
Abstract Research Summary Using detailed plant- and individual-level data from a major Japanese cotton spinning company in the early 20th century, we examine the within-firm allocation of skilled human capital in conjunction with investment in physical capital, accompanying the firm's evolving strategic priorities. We show that the firm leveraged unit-level two-way complementarity between managerial talent and strategically important plants when the task was achieving large-scale output and positioning for a competitive cost advantage. The task of conducting product differentiation, however, ushered in “three-way complementarity,” where educated engineering human capital and capable managers needed to be bundled with specialized physical capital. A deeper dive into the “nano-economics” of resource allocation reveals that educated engineers experiencing product differentiation in pioneering plants were reallocated to other plants also pursuing product differentiation. Managerial Summary Effectively allocating critical resources, such as skilled human capital, across establishments in alignment with strategic priorities is a key managerial issue. Through an in-depth case study of a major Japanese cotton spinning company in the early 20th century, we illustrate how the company shifted the resource allocation policy in response to different strategic management priorities. Initially, the company assigned managerial talent to larger plants requiring operational improvement, leveraging a competitive cost advantage for a standard product. Yet, as the company transitioned toward product differentiation via new production technologies, skilled engineers and plant managers were allocated together to a few selected plants initiating product differentiation. Engineers' experiences in product differentiation in those selected plants were diffused to other plants also pursuing product differentiation through their reallocations.