This paper studies an upstream supplier who quotes prices for a key component to multiple sellers that compete for an end-buyer's indivisible contract. At most one of the supplier's quotes may result in downstream contracting and hence produce revenue for her.
In this article, we lay out the challenges and research opportunities associated with business-to-business (B2B) buying. These challenges and opportunities reflect four aspects of B2B buying that the Institute for the Study of Business Markets (ISBM: www.isbm.org) has identified through a Delphi-like process: (1) the changing landscape of B2B buying, (2) the increasing sophistication of sellers, (3) the impact of technological changes, and (4) the increasing importance and growth of emerging markets. For each of these four areas, we identify the relevant background, key issues, and pertinent research agendas.
Learning from past experience is central to an organization's adaptation and survival. A key dimension of prior experience is whether an outcome was successful or unsuccessful. Although empirical studies have investigated the effects of success and failure in organizational learning, to date, the phenomenon has received little attention at the individual level.
In this paper, we examine how connecting to beneficiaries of one’s work increases performance, and argue that beneficiaries internal to an organization (i.e., one’s own colleague) can serve as an important source of motivation, even in jobs that — on the surface — may seem routine and low on potential impact. We suggest that this occurs because words of beneficiaries strengthen one’s sense of belongingness, a key driver of human behavior.
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.
Economic forecasting is a key ingredient of decision making both in the public and in the private sector. Because economic outcomes are the result of a vast, complex, dynamic and stochastic system, forecasting is very difficult and forecast errors are unavoidable. Because forecast precision and reliability can be enhanced by the use of proper econometric models and methods, this innovative book provides an overview of both theory and applications. Undergraduate and graduate students learning basic and advanced forecasting techniques will be able to build from strong foundations, and researchers in public and private institutions will have access to the most recent tools and insights
We examine the interplay of behavioral and environmental uncertainty in shaping the effectiveness of two key governance mechanisms used by strategic alliances: contractual and trust-based governance. We develop and test hypotheses, using a meta-analytic dataset encompassing over 15,000 strategic alliances across 82 independent samples. We find that contractual governance works best under low to moderate levels of behavioral uncertainty and moderate to high levels of environmental uncertainty, while it is detrimental to alliance performance when both types of uncertainty are low or high.
Whether fair value accounting should be used in financial reporting has been the subject of debate for many years. A key dimension to this debate is whether fair value earnings can provide information to financial statement users that is helpful in making their economic decisions.
North Carolina is one of the major migration destinations in the U.S. A newly created dashboard that uses 2015-2016 Internal Revenue Service (IRS) county-to-county migration data provides key insights into both the origins and economic characteristics of recent newcomers to the Tar Heel State.
Greg Brown and Olga Hawn discuss the rise of B Corporations and entrepreneurs who are using sustainability as a key selling point in this New York Times article.
Immigrant inventors produce more patents than native U.S. citizens, among other key findings, according to a new Entrepreneurship Center and Kenan Institute report.
We measure the racial/ethnic densities (RAEDs) of executives in a random sample of 523 US publicly traded companies and the S&P 500®. When we calibrate the RAEDs of executives as a whole against the RAEDs of the 2019 US population, we find that American Indians/Alaska Natives, Blacks and Hispanics are underrepresented and Whites are overrepresented. However, when we calibrate executive RAEDs against a benchmark that seeks to take into account key features of the demand for and supply of proto-executive talent, namely the RAEDs of the cohorts of students graduating with a bachelor’s degree from the broad New York Times 2017 list of the top 100 US four-year colleges and universities, matched to executives’ BA/BS graduation years, mostly different and at times opposite findings obtain.
As The Wall Street Journal reported this week, Congress is gearing up for a potential showdown with the largest tech companies in the U.S. And with a bipartisan group of representatives pushing for legislation that would dismantle the monopoly power of Big Tech, this week's Kenan Insight revisits research on how regulating Amazon, Apple and others may be key to reviving the economies of America’s held-back cities and regions.
The hits just keep coming for the cryptocurrency market following last week’s collapse of TerraUSD. The stablecoin, created to maintain its value equal to the U.S. dollar, today is worth an estimated 11 cents – a drop in market value from nearly $19 billion to roughly $1.3 billion. How could this have happened, and what could it – along with the wider market selloff – mean for the future of crypto? We invite you to join us at 11 a.m. ET this Friday, May 20, for a discussion with key experts.
London Business School Professor Alex Edmans, a 2022 Kenan Institute Distinguished Fellow, followed up his recent virtual presentation on “The Power of Purposeful Business” by answering key questions from the audience. This week’s Kenan Insight offers a curated Q&A with a few of our favorites, with Professor Edmans tackling topics such as which issues government is best equipped to regulate and which may require shareholders to step in, the limits of using data in ESG measurement, and how best to encourage purposeful thinking throughout an organization.
If companies are going to provide equitable advancement opportunities for remote and hybrid workers, managers must be mindful and leaders must lead, say Jami Stewart of Cisco Systems Inc. and Jes Averhart of Jes & Co., speakers at a recent discussion hosted by the Kenan Institute-affiliated UNC Entrepreneurship Center and the Research Triangle Foundation. Also: A company’s commitment to social impact can be a key to adding and keeping talented young employees.
Bradley Staats, UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School professor of operations and faculty director of the institute-affiliated Center for the Business of Health, spoke to The Well about Amazon’s next move in health care. The online retail giant announced in July that it was acquiring primary care provider One Medical and will now shut down its Amazon Care telehealth service. Staats and co-author Robert S. Huckman recently wrote in Harvard Business Review about three key components to Amazon’s playbook for entering new businesses.
A new personal gift from Bruce Van Saun, Citizens Financial Group Inc. chairman and CEO, and his wife, Kathleen (Katie) Van Saun, will support the Kenan Institute’s annual grand challenge. Starting in 2023, the three-year gift will support the institute’s Distinguished Fellows, who advance thought leadership around the grand challenge’s theme, a key issue that affects business and society. The program is making its debut this year with an exploration of stakeholder capitalism and ESG investing. The Van Sauns earned their MBAs from UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School in 1983 and were married in 1985.
Thought leaders, policymakers, business leaders, experts, government officials, researchers, scholars and other key stakeholders convene for a two-day event focused on the latest issues impacting the fintech ecosystem.
Health care costs in the United States make up a larger proportion of gross domestic product (GDP) than in any other developed country and continue to rise. We examine whether the use of consistent metrics in costing information systems across hospitals provides one avenue to reduce these costs. We refer to such consistency as “costing information consistency” or CIC and empirically measure it by identifying whether hospitals in a multihospital system share the same costing system vendor. Using M&A activity among vendors as an instrument for exogenous changes in hospital CIC, we find that CIC is associated with a 13.3% reduction in operating expenses, suggesting that increased cost comparability from CIC helps hospitals identify ways to reduce operating expenses by identifying clinical and administrative best practices.