Publications

SSRN

2019
Chapter

Merchants and the Origins of Capitalism

By: Sophus A. Reinert and Robert Fredona

N.S.B. Gras, the father of business history in the United States, argued that the era of mercantile capitalism was defined by the figure of the “sedentary merchant,” who managed his business from home, using correspondence and intermediaries, in contrast to the earlier... View Details

Keywords: Economic Systems; History; Business History

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October 2013
Case

Mitch Daniels and the State of Indiana

By: Robert Steven Kaplan and Wendy K. Winer

Mitch Daniels, Governor of the State of Indiana, knew he had to make a difficult choice as he sat in his office in December 2010. Should he aggressively push the state legislature to pass comprehensive education reform—a major priority of his administration—or,... View Details

Keywords: Education Reform; Priorities; Leadership; Education; Government and Politics; Public Administration Industry; Education Industry; Indiana

Educators

2014
Other Unpublished Work

No Margin, No Mission? A Field Experiment on Incentives for Public Services Delivery

By: Nava Ashraf, Oriana Bandiera and Kelsey Jack

A substantial body of research investigates the effect of pay for performance in firms, yet less is known about the effect of non-financial rewards, especially in organizations that hire individuals to perform tasks with positive social spillovers. We conduct a field... View Details

Keywords: Incentives; Non-monetary Rewards; Intrinsic Motivation; Mission and Purpose; Social Enterprise; Motivation and Incentives

February 2013 (Revised February 2013)
Case

Wayne Ferrari: iAutomation at a Crossroads

By: Jim Sharpe and Michael Norris

Wayne Ferrari has bridged the gap between being an independent entrepreneur and a "professional manager." After selling his business to a Private Equity (PE) firm, Ferrari takes on the role of CEO and with their support implements a roll-up strategy to attain growth... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurial Management; Entrepreneurial Organizations; Leveraged Buyouts; Roll-up; Career Planning; Acquisitions; Pricing; Pricing Policies; Pricing Strategy; Pricing Structure; Acquisition; Entrepreneurship; Private Equity; Distribution; Integration; System; Electronics Industry; Distribution Industry; United States

Educators

2013
Working Paper

Cross-Border Reverse Mergers: Causes and Consequences

By: Jordan Siegel and Yanbo Wang

We study non-U.S. companies that have used reverse mergers as a means to adopt U.S. corporate law (and sometimes U.S. securities law as well). Early adopters of cross-border reverse mergers and those firms that hired a Big Four auditor exhibited superior corporate... View Details

Keywords: Reverse Merger; Corporate Law; Corporate Governance; Nevada; United States

SSRN

2007
Working Paper

Incompatible Assumptions: Barriers to Producing Multidisciplinary Knowledge in Communities of Scholarship

By: Corinne Bendersky and Kathleen L. McGinn

Co-locating knowledge workers from different disciplines may be a necessary but insufficient step to generating multidisciplinary knowledge. We explore the role of assumptions underlying knowledge creation within the field of organizational studies, and investigate how... View Details

Keywords: Knowledge Management; Knowledge Sharing; Business Processes; Groups and Teams

2007
Book

Global Accountabilities: Participation, Pluralism, and Public Ethics

By: Alnoor Ebrahim and Edward Weisband

This edited volume contributes analytical depth to the diverse debates on accountability in modern organizations. It explores the nature, forms and impacts of accountability efforts in civil society organizations, public and inter-governmental agencies, and private... View Details

Keywords: Ethics; Globalized Firms and Management; Corporate Accountability; Business and Government Relations

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February 1998 (Revised February 1999)
Case

Amway Japan Limited

In April 1997, the president of Amway Japan (AJL, Tokyo, Japan), pondered how to reverse the first performance decline the company has experienced since entering the Japanese direct selling market in 1979. Established as the tenth overseas subsidiary of Amway Corp. of... View Details

Keywords: Strategic Planning; Motivation and Incentives; Business Subsidiaries; Distribution Channels; Customer Satisfaction; Consumer Products Industry; Michigan; Tokyo

Educators

15 Jul 2012
News

Productivity Trick: Hide!

18 Apr 2011
Research & Ideas

It’s Not Nagging: Why Persistent, Redundant Communication Works

moved the team faster, she says. Managers with power spent more time on damage control after assuming an employee had finished the work. That said, the results didn't show that either group was more successful with deadlines or meeting... View Details

Keywords: by Kim Girard

Web

Doing Business with China: Early American Trading Houses - A Chronicle of the China Trade

of pounds of Chinese tea were exported annually. The Portuguese, the first European traders to enter China, leased and controlled Macao; by the 1700s the center of Western trade shifted to Canton (now Guangzhou). The Chinese government... View Details

2023
Working Paper

An Experimental Design for Anytime-Valid Causal Inference on Multi-Armed Bandits

By: Biyonka Liang and Iavor I. Bojinov

Typically, multi-armed bandit (MAB) experiments are analyzed at the end of the study and thus require the analyst to specify a fixed sample size in advance. However, in many online learning applications, it is advantageous to continuously produce inference on the... View Details

Keywords: Analytics and Data Science; AI and Machine Learning; Mathematical Methods

2017
Working Paper

The Need for Speed: Effects of Uncertainty Reduction in Patenting

By: Mike Horia Teodorescu

Patents are essential in commerce to establish property rights for ideas and to give equal protection to firms that develop new technologies. Young firms especially depend on the protection of intellectual property to bring a product from concept to market. However,... View Details

Keywords: Startups; Natural Language Processing; Machine Learning; Patents; Business Startups; Risk and Uncertainty; Outcome or Result; Green Technology Industry

January 2017
Article

Should You Sleep on It? The Effects of Overnight Sleep on Subjective Preference-based Choice

By: Uma R. Karmarkar, Baba Shiv and Rebecca M.C. Spencer

Conventional wisdom and studies of unconscious processing suggest that sleeping on a choice may improve decision-making. Though sleep has been shown to benefit several cognitive tasks, including problem solving, its impact on everyday choices remains unclear. Here we... View Details

Keywords: Decision Making; Choice; Sleep; Choice Sets; Confidence; Consumer Psychology; Consumer Preferences; Decision Choices and Conditions; Consumer Behavior

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Many companies approach product development as if it were manufacturing, trying to control costs and improve quality by applying zero-defect, efficiency-focused techniques. While this tactic can boost the performance of factories, it generally backfires with... View Details

03 Jun 2013
Research & Ideas

The Power of Rituals in Life, Death, and Business

food—including food as mundane as a carrot. Future experiments will delve into whether rituals affect productivity and morale in the workplace. A Sense Of Control Norton and Gino teamed up to conduct a series of grief experiments, which... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

30 Nov 2015
Research & Ideas

Donors Are Turned Off by Overhead Costs. Here’s What Charities Can Do

“overhead-free” group, recipients were told that a donor had given a grant to cover all the overhead costs associated with raising money for the project. The results were significant. In the control group, 336 out of 10,000 letter... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

2023
Article

Balancing Risk and Reward: An Automated Phased Release Strategy

By: Yufan Li, Jialiang Mao and Iavor Bojinov

Phased releases are a common strategy in the technology industry for gradually releasing new products or updates through a sequence of A/B tests in which the number of treated units gradually grows until full deployment or deprecation. Performing phased releases in a... View Details

Keywords: Product Launch; Mathematical Methods; Product Development

2024
Working Paper

Platform Information Provision and Consumer Search: A Field Experiment

By: Lu Fang, Yanyou Chen, Chiara Farronato, Zhe Yuan and Yitong Wang

Despite substantial efforts to help consumers search in more intuitive ways, text search remains the predominant tool for product discovery online. In this paper, we explore the effects of visual and textual cues for search refinement on consumer search and purchasing... View Details

Keywords: Consumer Behavior; E-commerce; Decision Choices and Conditions; Learning; Internet and the Web