All Publications
Movies are often sequentially offered through different distribution channels such as theaters, video sales and rentals, and online streaming. This research answers the question of how the advertising budget should be allocated across the various distribution channels to maximize overall profit. An extant allocation model is limited because of maximizing the logarithms of sales minus costs rather than true untransformed profit. Overcoming this limitation, my research offers a simple, near-optimal rule which takes into account not only the various effectiveness measures of advertising in terms of elasticities and, both, carryover and spillover effects, but also the size of the channels (expected profit) and truly maximizes profit. Due to its cascading property, the rule can be extended to any number of sequential distribution channels. This article also explains how the parameter values for the rule can be obtained and what profit improvement can be gained depending on the data structure.
Cognitive demands are increasingly prevalent in today’s complex work environments. With research having established that cognitive demands lead to strain, we introduce and test error management as a strain buffer for cognitive demands. We examined our theoretical model with two field studies. Across both studies, we found that when error management was low, cognitive demands were positively related to strain, while the relationship between cognitive demands and strain vanished when error management was high. This interaction was unique for cognitive demands, as error management did not influence strain in response to workload. Errors in cognitively demanding tasks were seen as more internal, but more controllable and less stable than errors when working with high workloads. Yet, we could not find error management influencing error attributions as we assumed to be the underlying theoretical mechanism. In sum, we suggest error management as a tangible mean by which organizations and employees can mitigate the strain-inducing effect of cognitive demands, which needs further research to be better understood.
User-generated content (UGC) is generally understood as an expression of opinion in many forms (e.g., complaints, online customer reviews, posts, testimonials) and data types (e.g., text, image, audio, video, or a combination thereof) that has been created and made available by users of websites, platforms, and apps on the Internet. In the digital age, huge amounts of UGC are available. Since UGC often reflects evaluations of brands, products, services, and technologies, many consumers rely on UGC to support and secure their purchasing and/or usage decisions. But UGC also has significant value for marketing managers. UGC allows them to easily gain insights into consumer attitudes, preferences, and behaviors. In this article, we review the literature on UGC-based decision support from this managerial perspective and look closely at relevant methods. In particular, we discuss how to collect and analyze various types of UGC from websites, platforms, and apps. Traditional data analysis and machine learning based on feature extraction methods as well as discriminative and generative deep learning methods are discussed. Selected use cases across various marketing management decision areas (such as customer/market selection, brand management, product/service quality management, new product/service development) are summarized. We provide researchers and practitioners with a comprehensive understanding of the current state of UGC data collection and analysis and help them to leverage this powerful resource effectively. Moreover, we shed light on potential applications in managerial decision support and identify research questions for further exploration.
Sustainability has become a critical concern of many societies worldwide. The need for a more sustainable mode of producing and consuming goods and services while balancing related environmental, social, and economic consequences (i.e., the triple bottom line) is evident. Although research offers insights into many aspects of this necessary transformation, little is known about the extent to which firms and consumers stress environmental, social, and economic sustainability in their communication. This research addresses these questions by conceptualizing the interplay between sustainability-related firm-generated and user-generated content as a signaling phenomenon. In addition, the authors develop a custom dictionary that enables researchers and practitioners to identify and analyze sustainability-related textual data. An illustrative application based on major data sources (corporate websites, Amazon, and YouTube) indicates significant divergence in how firms and consumers communicate about sustainability. Building on this first conceptual and empirical foray into sustainability-related firm-generated and user-generated content, this research outlines open research questions and potential use cases for the provided analytical tool.
In this research, we set out to uncover why silver ceilings exist in organizations. Drawing on systematic–heuristic processing theory and recent psychological findings, we propose that “older” workers (aged 45 or more) are less likely to receive promotions because these decisions are based on potential appraisals, which are susceptible to managers’ heuristic (stereotypical) thinking. We test our hypotheses using two-wave field data (Study 1) from a large financial organization and an experiment (Study 2) in which we manipulate age while holding all else equal. Both studies show that employee age has a negative effect on promotion likelihood and that this relationship is mediated by managers’ potential appraisals. Moreover, Study 2 also provides evidence for our theoretical rationale showing that the central effect is driven by managers’ heuristic processing and work-related age stereotypes. Across both studies, our results provide consistent support for our hypothesis that appraisals of potential constitute a potent pathway via which managers’ age stereotypes can affect promotion decisions in organizations. We discuss theoretical contributions to the literature on workplace aging, employee appraisals, and personnel decisions, and formulate practical recommendations to help organizations tackle silver ceilings in the workplace.
Global container shipping is integral to international trade, and a nuanced understanding of the role of strategic alliances and market concentration is crucial for the continuous and secure functioning of global logistics across different trades. We investigate the spatio-temporal evolution of alliance deployment and market concentration in the container shipping industry. This study introduces an innovative methodological approach - clustering trade routes using Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) based on alliance deployment and market concentration metrics rather than relying on predefined geographic boundaries. The approach uncovers previously unexplored structural relationships between alliance strategies and market dynamics, providing a more nuanced understanding of the container shipping industry's competitive landscape and potential vulnerabilities. We address important questions on how alliance deployment, market concentration, and inequality correlate or differ across global trade lanes and the implications for a potential threat of market power or collusive behavior for international trade and market accessibility. Our findings reveal that extensive alliance deployment does not inherently lead to a heightened market concentration or inequality. On major East-West trade routes, high levels of alliance deployment correspond with relatively low market concentration and inequality, indicating competitive environments where multiple carriers actively compete for market share. Conversely, niche markets exhibit higher market concentration and inequality, with increased potential for collusive behavior, especially where alliance deployment is minimal or absent. Our results underscore the need for regulatory bodies to foster fair competition, mitigate anti-competitive practices under a differentiated approach, and enhance market accessibility in the context of global trade flows. Finally, our research reveals the risk of power imbalances between regulators of small countries and leading global shipping lines.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are at the core of present-day health and humanitarian logistics. Aid organizations advocate inclusive people-centered approaches to ensure that affected communities receive appropriate aid in an effective and equitable way. Tensions and even conflicts can arise if affected communities perceive the distribution of aid as inequitable. These perceptions are driven by people’s so-called distributional preferences. These preferences are shaped by culture, social bonds, and experiences, and they describe how an individual’s well-being and behavior are impacted by potential inequalities. Their importance is increasingly recognized by aid organizations, but research on equity in health and humanitarian logistics remains focused on equal access and prioritizing needs. Using current examples from the Syrian and Rohingya refugee crises, we show the importance of recognizing and managing distributional preferences. Based on these examples and in line with DEI principles, we discuss several ways that we, as the operations community, can help conceptualize inclusive and people-centered approaches that account for distributional preferences.
The success of entertainment products such as movies or books varies tremendously, and managers strive to increase the odds by deciding on the right marketing input. Aiming to improve managerial decision making, we suggest and test a quantile regression framework to detect outcome heterogeneity effects of marketing inputs in the entertainment industry. By analyzing the spread of the .9 and the .1 conditioned quantile to the .5 (median) conditioned quantile, we study how much an increase (decrease) of an input factor (star power and quality) changes the spread of the expected outcome (revenues and sales). The spread serves as an indicator for the heterogeneity effect of the input factor regarding the outcome. In two empirical studies, we show how marketing instruments increase (or decrease) outcome heterogeneity by estimating quantile regressions and provide generalizable findings regarding the outcome heterogeneity effects of star power (increases outcome heterogeneity) and quality evaluations (reduces outcome heterogeneity) in the entertainment industry.
We study the role of inventory in corporate resilience to Covid-19 in 2020, which triggered exogenous shocks to consumer demand, commodity prices and supply chains. Unexpected drops in consumer demand and commodity prices increase the costs of inventory. Conversely, inventory holdings can buffer against supply disruptions. Empirically, US firms with higher inventory experienced more negative stock market responses early in the crisis due to falling consumer demand. However, since May 2020, inventory has become valuable as a hedge against supply disruptions, improving firm performance. During Covid-19, unlike other crises, inventory played a unique role as a hedge against supply disruptions.
Various entities, such as startups, suppliers and governments, face substantial difficulties in convincing nanostore shopkeepers to adopt digital technologies. Given the informal status of nanostores, we posit that shopkeepers experience Tax Privacy Concerns from their operational records potentially becoming transparent to the tax authorities, which hampers their inclination to digitize. Through the application of a survey and vignette experiments in the field with hundreds of shopkeepers across three cities in Latin America, we find consistent evidence for the negative role of Tax Privacy Concerns, above and beyond shopkeepers' willingness to share data with various entities, trust in the government and other entities, and general privacy concerns.
Further, we show that having entities that shopkeepers trust and are willing to share data with offer technological solutions does not mitigate shopkeepers' Tax Privacy Concerns and boosts digitization. In contrast, positive word of mouth that data are unlikely to be shared with the tax authorities does mitigate Tax Privacy Concerns. Overall, our findings provide novel evidence for the existence and influence of privacy concerns for operational data among microentrepreneurs, which answers calls in the extant literature to explore privacy concerns.beyond the consumer context.
This article examines the relationship between employee demographic diversity and firm performance measured by future stock returns for a large sample of US public companies. We use novel demographic data extracted from employees' online profiles and resumes and focus on three key aspects of employee demographic diversity: age, gender, and ethnicity. We find no evidence supportive of an outperformance associated with greater employee-diverse companies, neither using portfolio-sorting approaches nor cross-sectional and panel regressions. We also find no significant associations between employee demographic diversity and ROE, gross profit, and labor productivity.
In this essay, our analysis takes important insights on diversity and inclusion from the behavioral literature but critically contextualizes them against the reality of humanitarian operations. Humanitarian operations are characterized by system immanent diversity, particularly between local and expatriate aid workers, who not only bring valuable different perspectives to the table but also differ along multiple dimensions of diversity into a so-called diversity faultline. Such a faultline, however, provides fertile ground for continued conflict resulting in relational fractures and, ultimately, inefficient collaboration. While, in theory, inclusion could help overcome the negative effects of faultlines, in practice, the time pressure for humanitarian organizations to quickly respond to disasters makes it effectively impossible to engage in it. Against this background, we argue, humanitarian organizations should take preemptive action before disaster strikes. Specifically, we posit that the pre-disaster phase presents an opportunity to engage in inclusion in order to cultivate relational resilience between local and expatriate aid workers. Such resilience would enable them to not only better weather the inevitable relational fractures during a disaster response (and thus stay more functional throughout), but also quickly realign with each other in the post-disaster phase. We conclude with a set of concrete recommendations for practicing inclusion in the pre-disaster phase.
Traditionally, leadership scholars often study snapshots of leaders in organizations. However, academic publishing offers a unique, more controlled context to study leadership with implications for leadership scholars and scholarship. Hence, we present a descriptive overview of women’s representation across 33 years in 11 top management journals across levels of leaders in academic publishing (i.e., editors, associate editors, and editorial board members) and authors. To do so, we curated an archival dataset tracking women’s representation over time and across these four levels (i.e., 21,510 authors and 4,173 leaders) with 51,360 data entries for the authors and 320,545 for the leaders. Overall, women’s representation increased over time, which was explained by simple time trend effects. Only 32 of 135 editors were women (i.e., 23.7 %), and the share of women associate editors showed particularly drastic fluctuations. We did not observe a “leaky pipeline” except from the associate editor to editor step, as well as notable fluctuations—particularly after new editor appointments—and between journals. We discuss the influential roles editors and publishers have on women’s representation in academic publishing and science more broadly as well as implications for future research and policy.
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 contexts lack coordination and ambulances. Using a free-entry equilibrium model, we show that in such decentralized systems, the probability that any given call can be served by at least one ambulance, that is, its coverage, is at most 71.54%, regardless of the ETS’s profitability. We examine three business models that can address the ETS’s lack of coordination and ambulances: (i) a competitor-only business model, where an entrepreneur enters the ETS and acquires ambulances to compete with existing providers; (ii) a platform business model, where an entrepreneur coordinates existing providers; and (iii) an innovative platform-plus business model, where an entrepreneur combines (i) and (ii): setting-up a platform and acquiring platform-owned ambulances. We also examine a government-run platform that takes no commissions from providers. Using a game-theoretic approach, we find that it is optimal for all platform models to incentivize all providers to join. However, only the government-run platform may incentivize providers to acquire additional ambulances. Furthermore, a government-run platform offers higher coverage than a platform-plus only when the platform’s power to coordinate ambulance providers is moderate. Our results can help entrepreneurs and policymakers in LMICs navigate various tradeoffs in improving their countries’ ETS.
This study introduces a simulation-based analysis of the decarbonization options for the road freight transport sector. It focuses on exploring the impact of operational and management measures on fleet renewal strategies aimed at achieving net zero goals by 2050. The proposed approach integrates current and planned future policy changes, operational practices, and technology renewal into the modeling process to offer a macro-level perspective on the decarbonization challenge. Specifically, the proposed modeling approach takes into account the reduction of empty trips, the optimization of cargo consolidation, and the promotion of eco-driving practices based on national freight transport data (i.e. covering more than 7.99 million trips). The proposed approach examines the effect of introducing contemporary vehicle technologies, such as new diesel vehicles (EURO VI or higher), new natural gas vehicles (EURO VI or higher), electric vehicles and hydrogen vehicles, as feasible replacements for aging vehicles powered by conventional fossil fuels. The adoption of these cleaner and newer technologies demonstrates the potential for emission reductions of up to 13% (2,070,000 tons CO2e) by 2030 and 47% (13,232,000 tons CO2e) by 2050. In addition, the results obtained from this research can serve as an exemplary case study for other emerging economies.
Despite extensive research streams on leadership and team processes, there is a surprising paucity of studies at their intersection. Both research streams share an increasing attention to the social interactions at the core of these phenomena. Leveraging this behavioral lens, this study draws on respectful inquiry theory to explore how specific leader communication behaviors affect team interaction dynamics during decision-making, as one important team process. We conducted a laboratory study with 22 four-person teams and a confederate leader who engaged in a hidden profile task in a personnel selection scenario. We manipulated the leader’s question asking behavior (open questions vs. statements only) and listening behavior (listening attentively vs. not listening) and randomly assigned teams to one of the four conditions. Team interactions were video-recorded and analyzed at the micro-level of communication. Specifically, we explored how leader communicative behaviors affected (1) the quality of team decision-making, (2) the conversational structure (via speaker turns), and (3) constructive communication patterns. We found that team’s yielded the lowest performance in the “disrespectful inquiry”-condition (i.e., asking questions but not listening). This condition was also characterized by increased levels of interaction amongst team members that could be interpreted as an attempt to compensate for the lack of functional leadership. By adopting a consistent, micro-level behavioral perspective, our findings bridge the literature of leadership and team interactions and suggest an update to extant theorizing on leadership substitutions.
Manufacturing firms face complex after-sales challenges, including spare part shortages. While additive manufacturing (AM) offers a solution by minimizing costs and complexity, not all firms adopt AM equally, and research on differences in AM adoption in the context of spare part shortages is surprisingly scarce. To close this knowledge gap, we apply the awareness-motivation-capability (AMC) perspective. Our comparative case study of AM applications in 17 firms identifies three approaches how firms adopt AM—the corrective, preventive, and anticipatory approach. We find that the specific configuration of contextual factors related to a spare part shortage determines the approach firms follow. Using the AMC perspective, we discover and explain why firms differ in adopting AM despite suitable spare part characteristics and similar contexts. Through uniquely analyzing spare part shortages, our study contributes to AM research by challenging the assumption that economic justification is the sole driver of AM adoption and instead revealing that it is a context-dependent process, with awareness and motivation serving as critical yet underexplored antecedents.
