Talent and/or Popularity: What Does It Take to Be a Superstar?

We show that both talent and popularity significantly contribute to stars' market values in German soccer. The talent-versus-popularity controversy on the sources of stardom goes back to Rosen (1981) and Adler (1985). All attempts to resolve the controversy empirically face the difficulty of accurately identifying talent. In professional sports, rank-order tournaments help in ascertaining talent. Analyzing a team setting, we use 20 different performance indicators to estimate a player's talent according to his ability to increase the team's winning probability

CEO-CIO Shared Understanding of the Role of Technology: Outcomes for Technological Innovation Value

In this paper, we propose that contextual “language style matching” between CEO and CIO - a form of similarity in verbal style based on the unconscious use of function words - can provide insight into the quality of collaboration between CEO and CIO. Following upper echelon and managerial cognition research, we argue that high levels of language style matching between the CEO and CIO when discussing the role of technology for the business reflects a shared understanding of the role of technology. As CEO-CIO shared understanding aligns technology innovation with overall business strategy, the economic value of the firm’s technological innovations increases. Counterintuitively, we expect the relationship to weaken when CEOs are overly optimistic, as CEOs are less likely to question technological innovation from a business standpoint. Thus, the shared understanding of the CEO and CIO is misguided. Using panel data, we find empirical support for these predictions

From Feelings to Funding: The Moderating Role of Category Membership in Crowdfunding Participation

This study investigates the impact of emotions conveyed in crowdfunding campaigns on the commitment of backers. Based on language expectancy theory and research on emotional psychology, we propose the effect of emotions depends on campaign category membership and varies between social and commercial crowdfunding campaigns. Empirical analyses of 12,862 Indiegogo campaigns using EmoRoBERTa, a pre-trained neural network algorithm specifically designed to identify emotions, reveal that gratitude and optimism have opposite effects on crowdfunding participation for social and commercial entrepreneurs. In particular, optimism is positively associated with backer participation in social and negatively in commercial campaigns. Counterintuitively, gratitude is positively associated with backer participation in commercial but negatively in social campaigns. Contrasting our analysis, we further examine the link between a factual, neutral tone and crowdfunding participation. Interestingly, a neutral tone has a positive relationship with crowdfunding participation in commercial campaigns. The association reverses for social campaigns

Incentivizing Creativity in Virtual Groups

Creativity is the key element of organizational success. Yet, adequately incentivizing people to be creative remains a problem without uniform solution. This study investigates the effect of incentive systems that rely on supervisor discretion on creativity of virtual groups. Adopting Social Interdependence Theory, we experimentally assess the effect of forced distribution rating systems (FDRS) and unrestricted distribution rating systems (UDRS) on idea generation and idea selection of groups collaborating in a virtual setting. We show that the competitive FDRSs – in which not every group member can obtain a top ranking - enhance idea generation, idea selection and overall creativity of virtual groups. We contribute to the literatures on creativity, virtual collaboration and incentive systems

Death-related publicity as informational advertising : evidence from the music industry

The sales of books, DVDs, and music albums frequently increase substantially after the death of an artist. Yet, the mechanism behind this stylized fact remains unclear. In this paper, we examine whether after-death sales increases reflect primarily an affective reaction of existing customers or informative advertising for previously uninformed new customers. In our main study, we use weekly sales data for 446 music albums of 77 artists who died between 1992 and 2010. We show that album sales increase on average by 54.1 % after death and that the relative increase in sales is higher for the artist’s better albums. This suggests that death-related publicity serves primarily as informational advertising that attracts new customers who buy the artist’s best albums after death. Complementary evidence from a survey study with more than 2,000 participants confirms this interpretation and shows that information-based motives are relatively more important for after-death consumption than affect-based motives

The liquidity advantage of the quote-driven market: Evidence from the betting industry

Even though betting exchanges are considered to be the superior business model in the betting industry due to less operational risk and lower information costs, bookmakers continue to be successful.We explain the puzzling coexistence of these two market structures with the advantage of guaranteed liquidity in the bookmaker market. Using matched panel data of over 1.8 million bookmaker and bettingexchange odds for 17,410 soccer matches played worldwide, we find that the bookmaker offers higherodds and bettor returns than the betting exchange when liquidity at the betting exchange is low

Forced distribution rating systems and team collaboration

This study provides three real-effort experiments on how a forced distribution rating system (FDRS) influences team collaboration. In the first and the second experiment, we examine the performance implications of an FDRS in a card sequencing task (1) when working alone and (2) when working in a team. In the third experiment, we test how an FDRS affects knowledge sharing within teams. Our findings show that an FDRS increases the speed of completing the card sequencing task when working alone and decreases the speed of completing the card sequencing task when working in a team. Beyond that, we find that an FDRS also significantly decreases knowledge sharing within teams. As the FDRS was perceived as unfair in collaborative settings but not when working alone, we provide evidence on the role of perceived justice concerning the effects of an FDRS and shed light on the psychological and economic consequences of introducing an FDRS in environments where team collaboration is essential for success. © 2021 The Author(s

Toolkits for innovation: how digital technologies empower users in new product development

In recent decades, toolkits for innovation have been increasingly used to integrate users into new product development processes. They promise to empower users in these processes by providing design freedom and iterative learning for the transformation of ideas into products. Despite these potential benefits, little is known about how these often digital toolkits compare to traditional design methods, and what role previous experience of users in new product development plays. To compare the effectiveness of toolkits for innovation with physical product modeling, we conducted a two-stage laboratory experiment in the form of an innovation challenge. One hundred non-expert and 46 expert users created new product designs, which were subsequently evaluated by an independent jury. Our results show that users with no experience in digital or physical design tasks develop more innovative product ideas when using a digital toolkit for innovation than when they use physical product modeling, while expert users seem to be able to use both methods with equal success. We, thereby, show that toolkits for innovation are a powerful way to translate users' solution information into a prototype. Moreover, our results indicate that the usage of a digital toolkit for innovation decreases the quality gap between the designs of non-expert and expert users in new product development