Management Papers

To be successful in a changing global economy, managers must view the total enterprise and understand the forces shaping the firm’s direction, policies, and goals and at the same time exercise personal leadership in managing employees.

Wharton’s Management Department applies basic social science disciplines and research methods to these management and leadership problems in the public and private sectors.

 

Search results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 347
  • Publication
    Design is Everything?
    (2011-05-01) Ulrich, Karl
    This essay attempts to demarcate the industrial practice of product design and situate it in the context of academic research. The term product design presents definitional challenges, as it is used in practice in different ways, and even varies in usage regionally. For this article, product design is “conceiving and giving form to goods and services that address needs.” The activity of product design can be thought of as comprising several key decisions. Because the decisions of product design do not map cleanly to any one academic discipline, the subject has not garnered enough attention in any one field to develop fully its own academic identity. Scholarly research in product design has often been cultivated by the emergence of a methodological paradigm. While several such paradigms are in use, several others offer substantial promise.
  • Publication
    Alternative Securities Trading Systems: Tests and Regulatory Implications of the Adoption of Technology
    (1996) Clemons, Eric K; Weber, Bruce W
    Reasons for the mixed reactions to today's electronic off-exchange trading systems are examined, and regulatory implications are explored. Information technology (IT) could provide more automated markets, which have lower costs. Yet for an electronic trading system to form a liquid and widely used market, a sufficient number of traders would need to make a transition away from established trading venues and to this alternative way of trading. This transition may not actually occur for a variety of reasons. Two tests are performed of the feasibility and the desirability of transitions to new markets. In the first test, traders in a series of economic experiments demonstrate an ability to make a transition and develop a critical mass of trading activity in a newly opened market. In the second test, simulation is used to compare the floor-based specialist auction in place in most U.S. stock exchanges today to a disintermediated alternative employing screen-based order matching. The results indicate that reducing the role of dealer-intermediaries can actually diminish important measures of market quality. Our findings suggest that the low trading volumes on many off-exchange systems do not result from traders' inability to break away from established trading floors. Rather, today's off-exchange trading systems are not uniformly superior to the trading mechanisms of traditional exchanges. Thus, regulatory actions favoring off-exchange trading systems are not warranted; but, improved designs for IT-based trading mechanisms are needed, and when these are available, they are likely to win significant trading volume from established exchanges.
  • Publication
    Institutions and the Internationalization of US Venture Capital Firms
    (2010-02-01) Güler, Işın; Guillén, Mauro F
    In recent years, venture capital firms have increasingly turned to foreign countries in search of investment opportunities. The cross-border expansion of venture capital firms presents an interesting case of internationalization, because they are at variance with both conventional portfolio and direct investment models. Given the specific nature of venture capital investing, a new theoretical perspective is needed to understand foreign venture capital investments. This paper contributes to international business research by examining the features of the institutional environment that influence venture capital firms’ foreign market entry decisions, and how their effect changes as firms acquire experience. We report results on 216 American venture capital firms potentially investing in 95 countries during the 1990–2002 period. We find that venture capital firms invest in host countries characterized by technological, legal, financial, and political institutions that create innovative opportunities, protect investors’ rights, facilitate exit, and guarantee regulatory stability, respectively. We also find that as firms gain more international experience, they are more likely to overcome constraints related to these institutions.
  • Publication
    Coordinating and Competing in Ecosystems: How Organizational Forms Shape New Technology Investments
    (2013-03-01) Kapoor, Rahul; Lee, Joon Mahn
    We consider firms in the context of their business ecosystems and explore how differences in the ways in which firms are organized with respect to complementary activities affect their decision to invest in new technologies. We argue that, in addition to creating differences in incentives and bureaucratic costs, firm-complementor organizational form plays an important role in the firm's ability to coordinate accompanying changes in complementary activities so as to shape the benefits from investing early in the new technology. We test our predictions in the U.S. healthcare industry from 1995–2006. The study makes a strong case for viewing firms' competitive strategies in the context of their business ecosystems and for the existence of an important link between firms' coordination choices and their strategic investments.
  • Publication
    Perceptions of High Integrity Can Persist after Deception: How Implicit Beliefs Moderate Trust Erosion
    (2017-09-01) Haselhuhn, Michael P; Schweitzer, Maurice E; Kray, Laura J; Kennedy, Jessica A
    Scholars have assumed that trust is fragile: difficult to build and easily broken. We demonstrate, however, that in some cases trust is surprisingly robust—even when harmful deception is revealed, some individuals maintain high levels of trust in the deceiver. In this paper, we describe how implicit theories moderate the harmful effects of revealed deception on a key component of trust: perceptions of integrity. In a negotiation context, we show that people who hold incremental theories (beliefs that negotiating abilities are malleable) reduce perceptions of their counterpart’s integrity after they learn that they were deceived, whereas people who hold entity theories (beliefs that negotiators’ characteristics and abilities are fixed) maintain their first impressions after learning that they were deceived. Implicit theories influenced how targets interpreted evidence of deception. Individuals with incremental theories encoded revealed deception as an ethical violation; individuals with entity theories did not. These findings highlight the importance of implicit beliefs in understanding how trust changes over time.
  • Publication
    An Identity-Based Approach to Social Enterprise
    (2017-07-01) Wry, Tyler; York, Jeffrey G
    Social enterprise has gained widespread acclaim as a tool for addressing social and environmental problems. Yet because social enterprises integrate social welfare and commercial logics, they face the challenge of pursuing frequently conflicting goals. Studies have begun to address how established social enterprises can manage these tensions, but we know little about how, why, and with what consequences social entrepreneurs mix competing logics as they create new organizations. To address this gap, we develop a theoretical model based in identity theory that helps to explain (1) how commercial and social welfare logics become relevant to entrepreneurship, (2) how different types of entrepreneurs perceive the tension between these logics, and (3) what implications this has for how entrepreneurs recognize and develop social enterprise opportunities. Our approach responds to calls from organizational and entrepreneurship scholars to extend existing frameworks of opportunity recognition and development to better account for social enterprise creation.
  • Publication
    How are U.S. Family Firms Controlled?
    (2009-08-01) Villalonga, Belén; Amit, Raphael
    In large U.S. corporations, founding families are the only blockholders whose control rights on average exceed their cash-flow rights. We analyze how they achieve this wedge, and at what cost. Indirect ownership through trusts, foundations, limited partnerships, and other corporations is prevalent but rarely creates a wedge (a pyramid). The primary sources of the wedge are dual-class stock, disproportionate board representation, and voting agreements. Each control-enhancing mechanism has a different impact on value. Our findings suggest that the potential agency conflict between large shareholders and public shareholders in the United States is as relevant as elsewhere in the world.
  • Publication
    Explaining Africa's (Dis)Advantage
    (2014-11-01) Harrison, Ann E; Lin, Justin Y; Xu, Lixin C
    Africa’s economic performance has been widely viewed with pessimism. In this paper, firm-level data for around 80 countries are used to examine formal firm performance. Without controls, manufacturing African firms perform significantly worse than firms in other regions. They have lower productivity levels and growth rates, export less, and have lower investment rates. Once geography, political competition, and the business environment are controlled for, formal African firms lead in productivity levels and growth. Africa’s conditional advantage is higher in low-tech than in high-tech manufacturing, and exists in manufacturing but not in services. The key factors explaining Africa’s disadvantage at the firm level are lack of infrastructure, access to finance, and political competition.
  • Publication
    Leaning In or Leaning On? Gender, Homophily, and Activism in Crowdfunding
    (2015-01-01) Greenberg, Jason; Mollick, Ethan
    Female founders seek and receive less startup capital than male entrepreneurs. One reason for this disparity is a lack of female representation among funders of startups, and a potential solution is to increase the proportion of women in decision-making roles. Both the problem and the solution implicitly rely on homophily – that women will support other women given a chance. However, a lack of clarity over when and how homophily influences individual choices makes it uncertain when better representation is actually advantageous. Using data from crowdfunding, we empirically examine whether higher proportions of female funders lead to higher success rates in capital-raising for women. We find that women outperform men, and are more likely to succeed at a crowdfunding campaign, all other things being equal. Surprisingly, this effect primarily holds for female founders proposing technological projects, a category that is largely dominated by male founders and funders. This finding stands in stark contrast to expectations concerning homophily. A laboratory experiment helps explain how this pattern might emerge and allows us to theorize about the types of choice homophily driving results. We find that a small proportion of female backers disproportionately support women-led projects in areas where women are historically underrepresented. This suggests an activist variant of choice homophily, and implies that mere representation of female funders without activism may not always be enough to overcome the barriers faced by female founders.
  • Publication
    Dealing With Complexity: Integrated vs. Chunky Search Processes
    (2013-01-01) Baumann, Oliver; Siggelkow, Nicolaj
    Organizations are frequently faced with high levels of complexity. While the importance of search for dealing with complex systems is widely acknowledged, how organizations should structure their search processes remains largely unexplored. This paper starts to address basic questions: How much of the entire system, and thus complexity, should be taken into consideration at any given time during a search process? Should a problem solver pursue an integrated search and be concerned with the whole system right from the start, or should a problem solver incrementally expand the “search domain,” i.e., the subset of system elements and interdependencies that are included in the search efforts? If the latter, how “chunky” should these steps be? Our analysis of a simulation model yields four insights: (1) expanding the search domain in smaller steps can yield a distinct advantage in final system performance, (2) following a completely incremental expansion pattern is not necessary as long as larger chunks are added early on in the process, (3) the value of chunky search is particularly high if highly influential system elements are considered first and highly dependent elements are added later, and (4) under time pressure, chunky search can lose its performance advantage over more integrated search processes. We discuss the implications of our findings for managing organizational search and complex systems more broadly.