This paper provides basic facts on worker flows between former Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) employees and large audit firms. Using a large sample of publicly available curricula vitae, we document that an increasing number of former PCAOB employees join U.S. audit firms in senior-level positions during recent years. We also find that the number of PCAOB employees hired by these firms is positively related to the number of deficiencies reported in their prior PCAOB inspection report, and that the number of deficiencies reported in firms’ future inspection reports is negatively associated with the number of former PCAOB employees hired.
We investigate a novel determinant of financial distress, namely individuals' self-efficacy, or belief that their actions can influence the future. Individuals with high self-efficacy are more likely to take precautions that mitigate adverse financial shocks. They are subsequently less likely to default on their debt and bill payments, especially after experiencing negative shocks such as job loss or illness. Thus, non-cognitive abilities are an important determinant of financial fragility and subjective expectations are an important factor in household financial decisions.
Using a nested multiple-case study of participating ventures, directors, and mentors of eight of the original U.S. accelerators, we explore how accelerators’ program designs influence new ventures’ ability to access, interpret, and process the external information needed to survive and grow. Through our inductive process, we illuminate the bounded-rationality challenges that may plague all ventures and entrepreneurs—not just those in accelerators—and identify the particular organizational designs that accelerators use to help address these challenges, which left unabated can result in suboptimal performance or even venture failure.
We explore the impact of Knightian uncertainty on contracting within a multi-layered firm. We study a setting where, absent uncertainty, division managers should be paid based on their division performance, but not other divisions' performance.
Most retailers operate under the assumption that stabilizing employees’ schedules would hurt their financial performance because instability is an inevitable outcome of variable demand patterns in retail stores. We tested the validity of this commonly held belief. The goal of our experiment was to determine if it is possible to improve schedule stability without hurting financial performance.
This chapter summarizes recent insights on entries and exits in the retail sector. Focusing on brick-and-mortar operations, it discusses four phenomena in the global retail industry: (i) local entry, (ii) international/regional entry, (iii) local exit, and (iv) international exit. It also identifies new trends related to online retailers that are in need of more research.
We argue that behavioral strategy can learn a great deal from the Theory of Computational Complexity and Artificial Intelligence. Also, a concept of “organizational intractability” may be useful in determining what analytical decision technologies are actually intractable in real organizations with constraints on time and managerial attention.
The contemporary workplace is characterized by transience: Organizational members frequently turn over and careers span multiple organizations. Consequently, workplace friendships that were once close become less close and intimate, that is they become peripheral and can deteriorate. While research has examined the benefits for employees who move on to new opportunities, less clear is how stayers, or employees who remain behind in the work setting, are affected. To understand stayers’ experiences and how they manage, we draw on theories of belongingess and to offer a three-part episodic process model, which explains how stayers’ engagement in the task and social domains are influenced.
Innovation, the implementation of creative ideas, involves a dialogue between two roles: creators - who generate creative ideas, and evaluators-who determine which ideas to implement. Although each role aids innovation, we reveal that each role may also shape creativity assessments in different ways. In two experiments, participants randomly assigned to either an evaluator or creator role rated the same idea described as having low or high levels of novelty.
Although private credit funds have rapidly grown into a standalone asset class over the last decade, little is known about the aggregate performance of these funds. To provide a first look at absolute and relative performance, we utilize the Burgiss database of 476 private credit funds with nearly $480 billion in committed capital, including a subset of 155 direct lending funds.
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.
Servicization is a business strategy to sell the functionality of a product rather than the product itself. It has been touted as an environmentally friendly strategy as it encourages manufacturers to take more responsibility for their products. We study when servicization results in a win-win outcome where it can simultaneously increase a firm’s profits and decrease its environmental impact compared with selling products.
Although teams benefit from developing plans and processes that boost efficiency and reduce uncertainty, they may become too attached to these plans and escalate commitment when an alternative response is needed. Drawing on theories of team leadership, team processes and escalation of commitment, we propose that a change in leadership can help the team reduce commitment to outdated plans and avoid further escalation over time.
We use data from a federally sponsored survey about teenagers' marijuana consumption in the United States. We find that, teenagers under predict future marijuana use and that this inaccuracy is moderated by the extent of use. We also find that misprediction is affected by both attitudes and the situation through main and interaction effects. We outline some policy implications of our findings.
While previous research has investigated various drivers of electronic word of mouth (eWOM), the firm's offline competitive environment has not been considered. The authors explore this new horizon and examine the different effects of firms’ geographic concentration, or agglomeration, on the volume of eWOM received. They distinguish three types of agglomeration—density agglomeration (number of firms in the industry in an area), product agglomeration (overlap in product types offered by the firms in the area), and temporal agglomeration (overlap in moment of consumption).
Marketing activities that influence shoppers along the various stages of their path-to-purchase are gaining attention from both manufacturers and retailers. Using a dataset with detailed information on 105 new products (NPs) launched in the U.K. by 44 leading brands and sold across 13 major retail banners, we provide strong support for the prominent role of both upper- and lower-funnel marketing actions that influence consumers before (upper) or during (lower) their shopping trip.
Hard discounters are stores that sell a limited selection of consumer packaged goods and perishables - typically fewer than 2,000 Stock Keeping Units - for prices that are usually 50-60% lower than national brands. The best known hard discounters are Aldi and Lidl, but global brands include Trader Joe's, EuroSpin, Biedronka, Netto, and Leader Price. Their rise has been monumental; they have irrevocably changed the face of retail in Europe and Australia, and are making steady inroads into the US. Retail Disruptors explores the very real threat that hard discounters pose to traditional retailers and brand manufacturers.
We prove that in equilibrium, imposing or increasing a market-based undersupply penalty rate in a period can result in a strictly larger renewable energy commitment at all prices in the associated day-ahead market, and can lead to lower equilibrium reliability in all periods with probability 1. We also show in an extension that firms with diversified technologies result in lower equilibrium reliability than single-technology firms in all periods with probability 1.
It is generally accepted that operating with a combined (i.e., pooled) queue rather than separate (i.e., dedicated) queues is beneficial mainly because pooling queues reduces long-run average throughput time. In fact, this is a well-established result in the literature, e.g., when servers and jobs are identical. We consider an observable multi-server queueing system which can be operated with either dedicated queues or a pooled one.