This study explores how firms learn heuristics from negative outcomes. Prior literature has suggested that learning is strongly affected by whether attributions for negative outcomes are internal or external. Our data complement this view by revealing a new and different pattern. Specifically, they show that learning heuristics appears more dependent on whether attributions are convergent or divergent across hierarchical levels.
We use panel data on ISO 9000 quality certification in 85 countries between 1993 and 1998 to better understand the cross-national diffusion of an organizational practice. Following neoinstitutional theory, we focus on the coercive, normative, and mimetic effects that result from the exposure of firms in a given country to a powerful source of critical resources, a common pool of relevant technical knowledge, and the experiences of firms located in other countries. We use social network theory to develop a systematic conceptual understanding of how firms located in different countries influence each other's rates of adoption as a result of cohesive and equivalent network relationships.
Do firms learn from their failed innovation attempts? Answering this question is important because failure is an integral part of exploratory learning. In this study, we consider whether and under what circumstances firms learn from their small failures in experimentation. Building on organizational learning literature, we examine the conditions under which prior failures influence firms' R&D output, in terms of amount and quality. Our findings contribute to the organizational learning literature by providing a nuanced view of learning from failures in experimentation.
The practice of detailing in the marketing of prescription drugs is undergoing significant changes because of restrictions imposed by regulatory policy as well as by access restrictions placed by physicians. To analyze the strategic impact of these restrictions, we develop a structural model of how pharmaceutical firms compete dynamically to schedule detailing to physicians.
We discuss firm-level evidence based on UK data showing that within-firm pay inequality--wage differentials between top- and bottom-level jobs--increases with firm size. Moreover, within-firm pay inequality rises as firms grow larger over time. Lastly, using wage data from 15 developed countries, we document a positive association between aggregate wage inequality at the country level and growth by the largest firms in the country. We conclude that part of what may be perceived as a global trend toward more wage inequality may be driven by an increase in the size of the largest firms in the economy.
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).
Although both businessmen and scholars agree that the practice of corporate finance and corporate strategy should be closely coordinated and logically consistent, a large gap exists between the two functions. Although MBA programs routinely cover both subjects, they employ very different analytical and decision tools and the interaction between the two bodies of knowledge rarely receives the attention it deserves. The resulting Finance-Strategy gap can lead strategically oriented firms to de-emphasize or even discard classic finance techniques such as Net Present Value (NPV).
We show that firms increase their pollution intensity as they become more financially distressed. This is particularly the case in high-environmental liability risk locations, akin to a risk-taking motive. We then rationalize these facts by calibrating a dynamic model featuring endogenous default, and dirty vs. clean investment.
In this study, we ask if it is desirable to give greater freedom to firms in their choices of class shares. Making use of the 2011 Commercial Act amendment that significantly relaxed the regulation on class shares in Korea, we study the motivation and the effect of adopting two newly emerged class shares.
High rates of opioid abuse have had a significant impact on the United States including implications for firms which must now contend with a lower pool of available and productive workers. This paper documents a negative effect of instrumented opioid prescriptions and subsequent individual employment outcomes.
Nonwage benefits have become increasingly important and now represent 30% of total compensation (BLS, 2021). Using administrative data on health insurance, retirement, and leave benefits, we find dramatically lower within-firm variation in benefits than in wages. We also document sharply higher between-firm variation in nonwage benefits, compared to wages. We argue that this pattern can be a consequence of nondiscrimination regulations and the high administrative burden of managing too many or complex plans
First, we address the relationship between ownership and employees’ labor outcomes. Second, we present an overview of the literature studying the relationship between capital structure and labor markets, including the implications of financial distress. Third, we connect labor with the fast-growing literature on inequality within firms and investments in technology adoption.
Mark G. Little has been named executive director of the Frank Hawkins Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise at the University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School.
Please join us for an exclusive conversation with Worthington Industries President and Chief Executive Officer, Andrew Rose on Wednesday, February 16. This discussion is part of the Dean’s Speaker Series, hosted by Kenan-Flagler Business School Dean Doug Shackelford.
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”.
Brand naming challenges are more complex in logographic languages (e.g., Chinese), compared with phonographic languages (e.g., English) because the former languages feature looser correspondence between sound and meaning.
This study examines the importance of social perception of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and irresponsibility (CSI). Drawing from social psychology literature on stereotypes, we argue that two fundamental dimensions of social perception—warmth and competence—help explain the underlying processes and conditions under which CSR leads to specific outcomes.
We empirically investigate the effects of political uncertainty on corporate tax behavior. To identify the effects of political uncertainty, we construct a data set that tracks whether firms’ tax avoidance varies systematically around the occurrence of national elections. Our dataset includes firms exposed to 103 national elections in 30 countries. We find that corporate tax avoidance varies systematically across the election cycle, peaking in election years and declining the next year. The effect on tax avoidance is greatest for elections with greater electoral uncertainty, and for elections in countries with relatively lower quality of law, relatively weaker tax enforcement, and relatively lower book-tax conformity. The evidence suggests that firms use both conforming and nonconforming tax avoidance strategies, although the results for conforming tax avoidance are marginal.