Using Social Media to Identify the Effects of Congressional Viewpoints on Asset Prices

We use a high-frequency identification approach to document that individual politicians affect asset prices. We exploit the regular flow of viewpoints contained in Congress members’ tweets. Supportive (critical) tweets increase (decrease) the stock prices of the targeted firm and the corresponding industry in minutes around the tweet. The bulk of the stock price effects is concentrated in the tweets revealing news about future legislative action. The effects are amplified around committee meeting days, especially when the tweet originates from committee members and influential politicians. Overall, we show that Congress members’ social media accounts are an important source of political news. (JEL D72, G14

Perilous and unaccountable: the positive relationship between dominance and moral hazard behaviors

Moral hazard involves a context where decision-makers engage in behaviors that prioritize self-interest while allowing the associated risk to be primarily borne by others. Such decision-making can lead to catastrophic consequences, as seen in the 2008 global financial crisis after hedge fund managers indiscriminately invested their clients’ money in subprime mortgages. This research examines which decision-makers are most likely to engage in moral hazard decision-making and the psychological mechanism driving this behavior. Drawing on the dual model of social influence, we posit that individuals associated with dominance, but not prestige, will engage in greater moral hazard behaviors. We further contend that these behaviors are driven by dominant decision-makers’ enhanced focus on end goals (outcomes) rather than the means (process) that they use to pursue such goals. We find support for our hypotheses across 13 studies (*NObservations* = 26,880; of which eight were pre-registered and six studies are reported in the Supplementary Information (SI)), using both correlational and experimental designs. Additionally, we vary the moral hazard context (e.g., a financial setting, a health and safety issue, etc.) and capture both behavioral intentions and actual behaviors, while also ruling out several alternative explanations. These findings demonstrate that dominant decision-makers engage in moral hazard behaviors because of their tendency to prioritize outcomes over processes

The Motherhood Wage Penalty and Female Entrepreneurship

The need to resolve work–family conflict has long been considered a central motive for women’s pursuit of entrepreneurship. In this paper, we propose and empirically uncover a novel mechanism driving female entrepreneurship: reduced earnings opportunities in wage employment due to motherhood status. Combining insights from career mobility research and the motherhood penalty literature, we propose that women who become mothers will disproportionately launch a new business to reduce the motherhood penalty they would otherwise incur in wage work due to employer discrimination. We further predict that this tendency to launch a new venture will be more pronounced for women who occupy high-paying or managerial positions, given the higher opportunity cost of staying in wage work and the higher potential payoffs from entrepreneurship that accrue mothers occupying such positions. Using matched employer–employee data from Sweden that distinguish new-venture founding from self-employment, we find support for our arguments. Overall, this study sheds light on the two antecedents of female entrepreneurship and contributes to a more thorough understanding of what motivates women to pursue irregular and atypical careers, such as entrepreneurship. Funding: This work was supported by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation (Ewing Marion Kauffman Junior Faculty Fellowship) and the Wharton Dean’s Research Fund. Supplemental Material: The e-companion is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.1657

Status and Consensus: Heterogeneity in Audience Evaluations of Female - versus Male-Lead Films

Extant research finds that status characteristics such as gender are frequently related to average quality evaluations by external audiences, but little is known about whether such characteristics are also related to consensus in quality evaluations. We examine 383 million film ratings by consumers to assess (1) whether female-lead movies elicit less consensus in quality evaluations than male-lead movies, and (2) the potential performance consequences for producers. We find that female-lead movies are rated lower on average, yet elicit ratings distributions with higher standard deviations. In split-sample analyses we find that male raters are more negative than female raters about female-lead titles, and that the two audiences differ on dispersion and skew. We also find that independent studios yield greater box office revenue from female-lead movies

Shared Service Delivery Can Increase Client Engagement: A Study of Shared Medical Appointments

Problem definition: Clients and service providers alike often consider one-on-one service delivery to be ideal, assuming, perhaps unquestioningly, that devoting individualized attention best improves client outcomes. In contrast, in shared service delivery, clients are served in batches and the dynamics of group interaction could lead to increased client engagement, which could improve outcomes. However, the loss of privacy and personal connection might undermine engagement. The engagement dynamics in one-on-one and shared delivery models have not been rigorously studied. To the extent that shared delivery may result in comparable or better engagement than one-on-one delivery, service providers in a broad array of contexts may be able to create more value for clients by delivering service in batches. Methodology/results: We conducted a randomized controlled trial with 1,000 patients who were undergoing glaucoma treatment over a three-year period at a large eye hospital. Using verbatim and behavioral transcripts from more than 20,000 minutes of video recorded during our trial, we examine how shared medical appointments (SMAs), in which patients are served in batches, impact engagement. On average, a patient who experienced SMAs asked 33.3% more questions per minute and made 8.6% more nonquestion comments per minute. Because there were multiple patients in an SMA, this increase in engagement at the individual patient level resulted in patients hearing far more comments in the group setting. Patients in SMAs also exhibited higher levels of nonverbal engagement across a wide array of measures (attentiveness, positivity, head wobbling, or “thalai aattam” in Tamil: a South Indian gesture to signal agreement or understanding, eye contact, and end-of-appointment happiness), relative to patients who attended one-on-one appointments. Managerial implications: These results shed light on the potential for shared service delivery models to increase client engagement and thus enhance service performance

Externalities and complementarities in platforms and ecosystems: From structural solutions to endogenous failures

Platforms and ecosystems provide structures for constellations of economic actors to engage and interact as they seek to create and capture value. We consider how the constructs of platforms and ecosystems relate and explore why they have become more ubiquitous by focusing on the nature of their value-add. We propose that they emerge as a response to distinct market failures, which we identify, and we explain which specific externalities they help overcome. We also identify post-hoc endogenous functional and distributional failures that platforms and ecosystems, in turn, generate. We discuss implications for theory and practice

Business Group Spillovers

We compare the investment of standalone firms across regions after a positive shock to the investment opportunities generated by a large-scale highway development project. We show that the standalones' investment sensitivity is lower in regions with a higher density of business groups in the local area. We investigate mechanisms driving our results and find support for a financing mechanism whereby banks allocate capital preferentially to group-affiliated firms in responding to the increase in credit demand. Overall, our study documents that business groups have spillover effects on standalone firms

A strengthened primal-dual decomposition algorithm for solving bilevel SCUC problem

Efficient nodal pricing models and short-term unit commitment planning face continuous needs for improvement as operational requirements evolve. This paper develops a Bilevel Security-Constrained Unit Commitment (BL-SCUC) model to include both revenue-adequacy and Fast Frequency Reserve (FFR) constraints. The upper level of the BL-SCUC model represents the non-convex UC decisions as well as the revenue-adequacy constraints of the market participants (generators, loads, and battery-storage owner). The lower level is a convex economic dispatch model which produces the nodal electricity prices. To solve the proposed BL-SCUC model, it is first reformulated as a single-level Mixed-Integer Linear Program (MILP) using the standard strong-duality approach. The resulting MILP model is hard to solve using standard off-the-shelf solvers such as Cplex, partly because the Big-M parameters’ optimal tuning for linearization in the strong duality method is NP-hard. To solve this, we propose a strengthened Primal-Dual Decomposition (PDD) algorithm, which takes benefit from both Benders-like and Lagrange Dual-like algorithms. The new PDD algorithm eliminates the Big-M parameters without affecting optimal values. Accordingly, the computational burden and optimal solution sensitivity resulting from Big-M parameters are mitigated. Results from the modified IEEE 24-bus system demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed BL-SCUC model with its PDD algorithm, whilst results from the IEEE 118-bus system show the superiority of the proposed strengthened PDD algorithm over the classic Benders algorithm

The inside track: entrepreneurs’ corporate experience and startups' access to incumbent partners’ resources

Startups are increasingly turning to incumbent firms for venture capital, anticipating access to the investor’s knowledge and complementary assets. However, startups' eventual access to these resources varies widely. This paper highlights one important driver of such variance, whether startups' managers were previously employed by an incumbent in the same industry. Using data from the life-sciences, I find that such corporate experience can precipitate technical knowledge flows to startups by enabling the generation of relational capital with incumbent firm managers. It also helps startups navigate incumbents’ decision-processes to formalize access to downstream complementary assets via alliances. The former effect is stronger when corporate experience is technology-focused, the latter when it is commercialization-focused. Corporate experience at the investing incumbent firm amplifies informal knowledge-flows but not formal alliances

The Business Value of Gamification

This article analyzes the connection between gamification and business success, focusing on customer retention, new customer acquisition, and transforming user perceptions. Based on a qualitative comparative analysis of 40 high-profile gamification projects, it shows that a combination of three key features—virtualization, social comparison, and tangible rewards—explain the various pathways to success. Each pathway requires the presence—and sometimes absence—of different design features, and firms do best when they focus on one or two objectives rather than all three at once. The article presents a framework for designing and implementing gamification more strategically and effectively, noting the ethical questions that arise