T. Austin Finch, Sr. Professor of Business Administration, Duke University Fuqua School of Business, and 2024 Kenan Institute Distinguished Fellow
We characterize how wishful thinking affects the interpretation of information in economies with strategic and external effects. While players always choose to exhibit overconfidence in private information, their interpretation of public information depends on how non-fundamental volatility affects payoffs. When volatility increases payoffs, players may endogenously disagree: some under-react to public news, while others overreact.
Global risk and risk aversion shocks have distinct distributional impacts on capital flows with salient consequences for tail risk in emerging markets. Open-end mutual fund trading provides a key mechanism linking shocks facing global investors to extreme capital flow realizations. The effects are heterogeneous across asset classes and fund types.
This study explores the role of knowledge interdependencies on the termination of patented inventions. Termination refers to the abandonment of inventive efforts that are no longer deemed promising. We argue that high interdependencies between an inventive effort and the other inventions in the same research program will increase the cognitive burden on managers and decrease the likelihood of termination.
Employee spinouts, defined as startups founded by prior employees of an industry firm, play a critical role in firm creation and knowledge transfer. Their superior performance often arises from resources and knowledge accrued during employment in parent firms. An understudied question is whether prior employment in parent firms impacts an employee
While prior research highlights the importance of codifying alliance experience to achieve alliance success, it is unclear whether codification is equally useful in the different phases of an alliance. Based on a sample of 192 technology firms that report on over 3,400 strategic alliances, we find that in the partner selection and termination phases, reliance on codified knowledge is useful. However, in the partner management phase, reliance on codified knowledge is less beneficial and can be even negatively related to performance. Our findings have implications for the tension between flexibility and efficiency and the relationship between structure and performance.
This study examines the antecedents and consequences of knowledge sharing and monitoring based governance strategies on emissions reduction. We theorize, and empirically test, the impact of supply base diversity in industry and geographic locations on the governance strategy choices. We find that sector and regional diversity both have a significant impact on emissions reduction strategies, yet their direct and interactive impacts are different. Regarding consequences, we find that engaging suppliers is associated with GHG emissions reduction for both buyers and suppliers.
We consider an electric utility company that serves retail electricity customers over a discrete-time horizon. In each period, the company observes the customers' consumption as well as high-dimensional features on customer characteristics and exogenous factors. A distinctive element of our work is that these features exhibit three types of heterogeneity—over time, customers, or both. Based on the consumption and feature observations, the company can dynamically adjust the retail electricity price at the customer level.
When a business model innovation (BMI) appears, incumbent firms experience great uncertainty about its potential ramifications and their capacity to assimilate the new business model. To resolve such uncertainty, incumbents seek to learn from industry peers, which can spark organizational herding. Organizational herding in BMI contexts is distinct, relative to product/technology adoption contexts, because in addition to peer behaviors, incumbents actively attempt to evaluate peer outcomes, and the importance of peer behaviors and outcomes likely vary, both over time and across types of peers.
The Frank Hawkins Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise welcomed nearly 200 undergraduate business students, MBA candidates and members of the UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School community to the Kenan Center Dining Room for the institute’s annual open house event on Tuesday, Aug. 28.
This chapter investigates the pricing of key contract provisions of Puerto Rican debt. In doing so, the chapter contributes to a body of research that asks the questions: do investors price contract provisions? Does the pricing of contract provisions vary with credit risk? To our knowledge, this is the first study to address these questions for the case of Puerto Rico or any municipal issuer. Puerto Rico’s unique status as a U.S. territory implies that its subsidiaries, such as municipalities, cannot file for bankruptcy under Chapter 9 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code.
This unique Companion provides a comprehensive overview and critical evaluation of existing conceptualizations and new developments in innovation research.
There is a growing trend among consumers to serially consume small, incomplete “chunks” of multiple media types – television, radio, Internet and print – within a short time period. We refer to this behavior as “media multiplexing” and note that key challenges for integrated marketing communications (IMC) media planners are (1) predicting which media or combination their target audience is likely to consume at any given time and (2) understanding potential substitutions and complementarities in their joint consumption.
Small businesses are an undeniable engine of growth for the United States, comprising 99 percent of all U.S. firms and driving nearly half our total economic activity. Yet small business owners across the country lack sufficient capital to succeed, grow and scale. The Kenan Institute has conducted a new analysis on the role of the Small Business Administration’s SBIC program in providing capital to the often-overlooked small businesses operating outside of metropolitan centers, as well as those owned by women and underrepresented minorities. You can access an overview of our findings, as well as key takeaways for business and policy leaders, by clicking below.
A panel of experts convened by UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School and its affiliated Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise will be offering a press briefing via webinar on the vastly uneven impact of COVID-19 on different types of workers and organizations. Join tomorrow, Tuesday, May 5, at 11 a.m. EDT.
Companies are turning to ideation contests to engage ideators outside company boundaries to solve their complex problems. Our research focuses on how articulating the problem, specifically the number and type of constraints described within the problem statement (brief), is related to the number of ideas submitted by participants in ideation contests.
When the human mind is free to roam, its subjective experience is characterized by a continuously evolving stream of thought. Although there is a technique that captures people’s streams of free thought—free association—its utility for scientific research is undermined by two open questions: (a) How can streams of thought be quantified? (b) Do such streams predict psychological phenomena?
UIA Investment Management's Julie Curd, UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School's Sreedhari Desai and Camargo's Jennie Orr joined the Kenan Scholars class of 2022 on a Zoom panel on Friday, Oct. 16, 2020 to share their knowledge of the business world.
Sutcliffe, a Kenan Institute Distinguished Fellow, will highlight the state of knowledge about resilience, drawing together multiple sources of research that include a recent study of adventure racing.