Backhanded compliments seem like praise but can leave a sting. This study explores the psychology of backhanded compliments. Flatterers deploy backhanded compliments to garner liking while conveying social status. Recipients view praise of this kind as strategic put-downs and penalize would-be flatterers even as the backhanded compliment undermines their motivation and perseverance.
Can simply upgrading a hospital’s accounting systems cut costs? A recent paper, which examined a healthcare IT database for a span of 24 years, argues so.
We examine how product market competition affects the disclosure of innovation. Theory posits that product market competition can cause firms to increase their disclosure of innovation to deter competitors. Consistent with this reasoning, we find that patent applicants in more competitive industries voluntarily accelerate their patent disclosures, which are credibly disclosed via the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Except for relatively short but intense episodes of high market risk, average idiosyncratic risk (IR) falls steadily after 2000 until almost the end of our sample period in 2017. The decrease has been such that from 2012 to 2017 average IR was lower than any time since 1965.
In the run up to the financial crisis, the essential functions financial intermediaries played seemed to become less important. Commercial and industrial loans, as well as residential mortgages, the quintessential banking products, were securitized and sold.
Why are downturns following high valuations of firms long and severe? Why do firms choose high debt when they anticipate high valuations, and underperform subsequently? We propose a theory of financing cycles where the importance of creditors’ control rights over cash flows (“pledgeability”) varies with industry liquidity.
We analyze the contribution of returns around earnings announcements to typical estimates of the “prices lead earnings” relation. We find that prior returns' ability to explain earnings is concentrated disproportionally in returns on earnings announcement dates, suggesting that a substantial portion of the estimated timeliness of returns in previous studies is empirically indistinguishable from the information content of earnings.
We study how an improvement in contracting institutions due to the 1999 U.S.-China bilateral agreement affects U.S. firms’ innovation. We show that U.S. firms operating in China decrease their process innovations—innovations that improve firms’ own production methods—following the agreement.
Competition between firms to invent and patent an idea, or “patent racing,” has been much discussed in theory, but seldom analyzed empirically. This article introduces an empirical way to identify patent races, and provides the first broad-based view of them in the real world.
We utilize the time period over which banking authorities discussed, adopted, and implemented Basel III to examine the financial reporting and operational decisions firms use to respond to proposed regulation. Our primary finding is that the banks affected by this proposal made strategic financial reporting changes and altered their business models prior to the regulation being enacted.
Higher education is in crisis and its leaders are handicapped by a lack of reliable data. We are entering an era that will require more informed decision making in higher education and unfortunately the underlying data, especially benchmarking performance information, do not exist to support such strategic thinking and change.
We analyze why companies that receive private equity investments outperform their rivals. We show that rivals experience a decrease in their stock prices and their operating performance around private equity (PE) investments in their industry.
Hart (2011) argues that the Aumann and Serrano (2008) and Foster and Hart (2009) measures of riskiness have an objective and universal appeal with respect to a subset of expected utility preferences, UH. We show that mean-riskiness decision-making criteria using either measure violate expected utility and are generally inconsistent with optimal portfolio choices made by investors with preferences in UH.
Scholars have long been interested in new industry emergence, highlighting that it could often be impeded by uncertainty across four dimensions: technology, demand, ecosystem, and institutions. Building on the insight that uncertainty stems from partial knowledge, we develop a conceptual framework that utilizes a temporal and a process perspective for knowledge generation and aggregation.
Volodymyr Babich, Professor of Operations and Information Management at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University, will present his co-authored paper with McDonough School Houston Professor Gilles Hilary “Linking the chains: can supply chain challenges become blockchain opportunities?” during a lunchtime seminar in Kenan Center 204.
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.
E-commerce platforms, such as Amazon, Alibaba and Flipkart, that match sellers and consumers at an unprecedented scale, operate their internal search engines to help buyers find relevant products from a large number of sellers, and also allow sellers to advertise to consumers for positions in the search listing. Determining an optimal ranking of products in response to a search query is a challenging problem for the platform because sellers have certain private information about their products that the platform does not have. Using a theoretical model, we show that sellers’ bids in ad auctions, through which sponsored slots are typically allocated, can reveal (some of) this private information to the platform (“information effect”), which it can optimally combine with information that it has about consumers to improve the placement of organic results, a practice we call “strategic listing”.
As live streaming of events (e.g., video games, political commentary, and makeup tutorials, among others) gains traction, pay-what-you-want (PWYW) pricing strategies are emerging as critical monetization tools. In this research, we assess the viability and efficacy of PWYW by examining the relationship between popularity (i.e., audience size) of a live streaming event and the revenue it generates under a PWYW scheme.
We evaluate the effects of two types of breaks (expected versus unexpected), and two distinct forms of unexpected breaks, and find that unexpected breaks can, under certain conditions, yield immediate post-break performance increases.
History informs us that some people, especially the wealthy, typically flee cities in response
to pandemics and other major catastrophes. Media accounts and preliminary empirical
research suggest that the response to the COVID-19 pandemic is no exception. Nearly a half
million people reportedly fled hard-hit New York City within two months of the World Health
Organization declaring the coronavirus disease a global pandemic.Some coronavirus pandemic refugees headed to nearby suburbs, others headed to second homes and vacation spots in other states, and still others moved back home to live with parents.