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Education, with its multifaceted role, is a key social policy instrument that has been used to address inequality of opportunities and the structure of society. Such policies are strongly predicated upon the assumption of significant positive peer effects. We analyse one such example, where university access is used as a (non-cash transfer) social policy to help large and financially constrained families. To gain university entry, students in Greece participate in a national examination system. Based on their grades and their declared preferences, students get allocated to different universities and departments. After this allocation, the Ministry of Education operates a special transfer system, as part of its social policy, to assist large and financially constrained families. This policy is giving students from such families the opportunity to "transfer" to a similar subject university department in (or near) their hometown, in case they had successfully gained entry to a university department far from home. The policy purpose was to help financially those families to pool their resources, by not needing to maintain a second household in a different city. However, transferred students were of lower academic quality than receiving students, thus raising the possibility of exerting a negative externality on their receiving peers. Various recent changes in the relevant legislation meant that there was a large, quasirandom, variability in the number of transferred students over time, creating serious problems both at the leaving and at the receiving departments. In this paper, we present the first systematic examination of transferred university students' impact on the academic performance of receiving students. We construct a novel dataset from a top undergraduate economics department in Greece, by linking students' personal and pre-university academic performance characteristics with their entire university academic performance record until graduation. Analysing the data, both at the aggregate (course) level and at the individual student level, we provide consistent evidence showing that transferred students exert a large negative externality on receiving students. This effect is larger as the percentage of transferred students increases, and is stronger at the lowest quartile of the ability distribution and becomes less intense as we move to higher quartiles, leaving the top quartile intact. In other words, we find consistent evidence that it is the weakest students that are mostly affected. Finally, we highlight that in our setting the negative externality mainly operates through courses that are heavy on mathematics and statistics. Overall, our research shows how a social policy that is meant to help financially constrained families and to alleviate inequalities has gone bad educationally, by lowering the academic achievements of receiving students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper empirically explores relations between social capital and human capital development in organizations using data from a longitudinal mixed-methods study of 14 public schools in the same school system. Based on an analysis of data on work-related interactions among school staff over five years, we theorize how organizational arrangements at the system and school levels enable interactions that contribute to change in beliefs about teaching. Annually, from 2010 through 2013, we surveyed all staff in 14 elementary schools. In addition to social network questions, the survey items asked respondents about their day-to-day work, their perceptions of their schools, and their work-related interactions. The survey also included items that measured teachers' beliefs about teaching mathematics. Further, we conducted semistructured interviews with a purposeful sample of 33 school staff across five schools, selected to maximize variation on dimensions thought to be important to work-related interactions. The analysis shows that teachers across all 14 schools, on average, did change their beliefs about teaching over time and that these changes were associated with interacting with a peer. Specifically, teachers on average across the school system developed more inquiry oriented beliefs about mathematics teaching consistent with the school system's mandated mathematics curriculum and vision for instruction. We then theorize how the formal organization at the system and school levels enabled interactions among peers that contributed to changing beliefs about teaching. Our paper is significant for at least two reasons. First, it explores the relationship between human capital and social capital in non-profit organizations--schools. Second, our analysis focuses on knowledge development in a knowledge intensive enterprise--human improvement and schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we quantify the social interaction (peer) effect from friends' and strangers' product adoption decisions. While a large literature has separately documented the importance of the observed adoptions of friends [1,2,8,9] and strangers [3,4,6,7] for spurring further product adoption, by analyzing both together we are able to benchmark their relative magnitudes, evaluate how these two types of peer effects interact, and provide managerial guidance on how firms can jointly leverage both types of peer effects in product seeding campaigns. Our context is an online multiplayer gaming app, where product adoptions correspond to microtransactions for in-game cosmetic items. We observe a rich panel of players' in-app purchases, friendship networks, interactions with friends, and, unique to this setting, interactions with strangers. Correlated adoptions may represent correlated unobserved shocks and not peer effects; we leverage the game's quasi-random assignment of strangers onto players' teams during matchmaking to generate conditionally exogenous exposure to strangers' adoptions. For peer effects from friends, we use the panel structure of our data to account for homophily and the reflection problem [5], and conduct placebo tests to check causality. Our baseline result shows that observed adoptions by friends and strangers both have positive effects on focal consumers' purchasing, and that the marginal peer effect from friends is nearly twice as large as the effect from strangers. We show that peer effects from friends and strangers are substitutes. More encounters with strangers who have adopted the product diminish the marginal peer effect from friends who have adopted the product, and vice versa. The substitution is not symmetric: encounters with friends can completely substitute for encounters with strangers. We analyze the mechanism behind the transmission of peer effects, and find evidence that while encounters with friends and strangers both raise awareness of the product, encounters with friends also lead to a mere exposure effect. We rule out learning about unobserved quality as a primary mechanism, but find that visibility of the product is important. To analyze how peer effects inform counterfactual product seeding strategies, we estimate a model of product diffusion using the observed in-app social network. We evaluate two seeding strategies which are designed to leverage peer effects from strangers and friends respectively: the first strategy seeds products to individuals who are more active on the app and therefore interact with more strangers, and the second strategy seeds products to individuals who have more friends. While both strategies improve on simple random seeding, seeding to well-connected individuals substantially outperforms seeding to active individuals, confirming the value of collecting social network data for marketing campaigns. The full paper is available at: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4116806 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sets out to investigate whether firms learn from their peers with respect to managing the cost of their R&D process. In particular, we consider to what extent R&D active firms in Belgium mimic their peers' decision to adopt a newly introduced tax exemption for wages of R&D employees. Analysing time until first use of the R&D tax credit, we find significant peer effects, operating at the level of regions and sectors, on a firm's probability of accessing the R&D tax credit. Furthermore, we show that the peer effect is discontinuous: it requires a critical mass of adopting peers before there is any impact on a firm's probability of adopting the tax credit, with the peer effect further accelerating once this tipping point is crossed. Nonetheless, very high peer adoption rates have no impact on the decision of firms who have not yet adopted the measure: most of the peer influence has materialized once about a third of companies in a sector and region has adopted the tax credit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social advertising uses information about consumers' peers, including peer affiliations with a brand, product, organization, etc., to target ads and contextualize their display. This approach can increase ad efficacy for two main reasons: peers' affiliations reflect unobserved consumer characteristics, which are correlated along the social network; and the inclusion of social cues (i.e., peers' association with a brand) alongside ads affect responses via social influence processes. For these reasons, responses may be increased when multiple social signals are presented with ads, and when ads are affiliated with peers who are strong, rather than weak, ties. We conduct two very large field experiments that identify the effect of social cues on consumer responses to ads, measured in terms of ad clicks and the formation of connections with the advertised entity. In the first experiment, we randomize the number of social cues present in word-of-mouth advertising, and measure how responses increase as a function of the number of cues. The second experiment examines the effect of augmenting traditional ad units with a minimal social cue (i.e., displaying a peer's affiliation below an ad in light grey text). On average, this cue causes significant increases in ad performance. Using a measurement of tie strength based on the total amount of communication between subjects and their peers, we show that these influence effects are greatest for strong ties. Our work has implications for ad optimization, user interface design, and central questions in social science research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Todays online social networks (OSNs) allow a user to share his photos with others and tag the co-owners, i.e., friends who also appear in the co-owned photos. However, it is not uncommon that conflicts may arise among the co-owners because of their different privacy concerns. OSNs, unfortunately, offer only limited access control support where the publisher of the shared content is the sole decision maker to restrict access. There is thus an urgent need to develop mechanisms for multiple owners of the shared content to collaboratively determine the access rights of other users, as well as to resolve the conflicts among co-owners with different requirements. Rather than competing with each other and just wanting ones own decision to be executed, OSN users may be affected their peers concerns and adjust their decisions accordingly. To incorporate such peer effects in the strategy, we formulate a model to simulate an emotional mediation among multiple co-owners. Our mechanism, called CAPE, considers the intensity with which the co-owners are willing to pick up a choice (e.g. to release a photo to the public) and the extent to which they want their decisions to be affected by their peers actions. Moreover, CAPE automatically yields the final actions for the co-owners as the mediation reaches equilibrium. It frees the co-owners from the mediation process after the initial setting, and meanwhile, offers a way to achieve more agreements among themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents abstracts on technology and innovation management topics which include the way modularity works in real world organizations, the effect of external learning on radical innovation in the high-technology industry, and the organizational antecedents and consequences of absorbing technological knowledge.

The article presents abstracts on entrepreneurship topics which include the influence of tie-order on network emergence, a complexity science-based model for innovation and the formation of entrepreneurial enterprises, and fuzzy-set hierarchical classification of family businesses.

Using a sample of youth in grades seven through 12 (n =15,355), this paper looks at how the size of one's peer network relates to what specific risk behaviors a student is most likely to do. Unlike most work on student risk behaviors, the paper compares different risk behaviors separately instead of as one scale of risk. Social involvement (defined by how many times one is nominated as a friend by one's peers) is somewhat related to overall risk behaviors, but its results are much more robust when one looks at specific risk behaviors. Using the concept of prosocial and antisocial behaviors, the paper finds that students with a large friendship network are more likely to participate in prosocial risk behaviors such as drinking alcohol. The paper then considers implications for future research in risk behaviors and social capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine whether and how individual-level friendship networks affect high school students' academic outcomes, and distinguish the effects of different levels and aspects of the friendship characteristics. Using nationally representative panel data from the restricted data set of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), the authors find: (1) the relationship between school-level racial composition and achievement levels and racial/ethnic differences in academic outcomes is mediated through the racial heterogeneity and average GPA of students' best friends; (2) the achievement levels of students' best friends have significantly positive effects on the academic outcomes of students of all races/ethnicities; and (3) African American and Hispanic students benefit more than Whites from a diverse racial composition in their friendship networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At every step along the engineering career pipeline, women exit at rates higher than men. Studies of exits from the profession at the early credentialing stage have identified failures in forming a professional identity as an engineer to be the most consequential reason for exit - exceeding measures of performance and ability, and that cultivating an engineer identity is more difficult for women than for men. Policy recommendations addressing this disparity must be informed by an understanding of the mechanisms of professional identity formation, and how they may be gendered. Theories of role identity formation from both the macro and micro perspectives emphasize the importance of social interactions, but are ambiguous regarding the causal role of peers. This paper uses a quasi-experimental design, in the form of assigned roommates, to investigate the role of peer influence on identity formation among men and women engineering students. I find both a causal role for peers in professional identity formation and that peer influence is gendered, being less influential for women than for men. I discuss the implications of these findings for policy and future research. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While violence and disorder are frequently studied as consequences of neighborhood disadvantage, they have rarely been studied as mechanisms by which neighborhoods may affect adolescent outcomes in other domains such as education or fertility. And while peer effects on adolescents are a frequent topic of study, few empirical studies have examined peers as potential mechanisms of neighborhood effects. Using data from Addhealth, this study investigates the role of neighborhood violence and same sex out of school peers in mediating the effects of neighborhood disadvantage on high school graduation and teenage pregnancy. Findings indicate that violence and, to a lesser extent, out of school peers are mechanisms for neighborhood effects but that there are differences by outcome and by gender. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the effect of the deposit insurance scheme (DGS) harmonization in the Netherlands. In particular, we evaluate the effect on savings of a deposit insurance limit increase. We discuss the detail of the DGS reform and we look at the micro incentives of depositors. We develop a 2 period theoretical model of wealth allocation in a DGS environment and we derive equilibrium conditions for the optimal allocation sets and the optimal number of contracts. For the empirical part, we use Dutch National Bank Household Survey (DHS) data on income and wealth of the Dutch households. The descriptive analysis points in favour of our theoretical model: we see that the deposit distribution has a frequency peak in correspondence of the insurance limit, which has been found to be a reference point of the optimal allocation sets. Moreover, we find descriptive evidence of strategic reallocation. Then, we evaluate the general effect of the reform using a Difference in differences (DiD) where treatment and control are defined on the basis of the deposit amount held. The DiD able us to detect the differential response change of deposits above the insurance limit, i.e. of deposits that are still partially at risk. Results show a general positive effect on saving of the DGS reform, the result is consistent with the policy aim of boosting the confidence towards the banking system. We perform a battery of robustness checks that point in favour of our identification strategy. To shed light on the strategic reallocation found in the descriptive part, we start from a stylized fact in Household Finance: financial decisions are taken under financial illiteracy and few awareness. Social networks and peers can help in taking these decisions. To investigate this, we employ a Triple differences estimator (TD) that able us to look at within T group response heterogeneities. In particular, we evaluate the differential response change of T units having financially sophisticated peer effects inside the social circle. The channel is the following: gathering information on bank regulation is an expensive activity, so financially sophisticated peers carry the most informational content because group members can easily take advices from them. Results show that, contrarily to T units having non-sophisticated friends, respondents with sophisticated friends tend not to increase their insurance balance saving (with someone reducing it): the result point toward the bunching behaviour found in the descriptive part. Eventually, we look at possible indirect effects other than saving. We do not find significant effect on stock market participation and we do find indirect effects on the probability of having big expenses in durable consumption. Again, the effects depend on the characteristics of the social circle. The overall results point towards precautionary saving behaviours of the Dutch households. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is it beneficial to have more able peers? I suggest that the benefits of the peer depends not only on ability and knowledge of the peer, but also emotional and psychological constraints resulting from peer comparisons. Using data from a quasi-experimental setting where random assignment of peers occur, I test how peers with different ability levels influence the level of individual's academic achievement. My findings show that smart peers might be disruptive, more so when they outperform the individual by a high margin. The study emphasizes that cognitive as well as non-cognitive processes have to be considered in examining the benefits of peer relations. More broadly, the study contributes to the nuanced understanding of learning and how to maximally benefit from peers in the organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines firm strategic motivations to engage in corporate social responsibility (CSR) through the lens of peer effects. The concept of CSR has long intrigued management scholars; the literature is replete empirical analyses of corporate social performance (CSP) and has established a rich set of theories to explain why profit- oriented firms seek to voluntarily provide public goods beyond the requirements of law. Two prominent lines of research suggest that firms engage in CSR for profit motives and for ensuring legitimacy with stakeholders. However, many disagreements exist between studies in terms of the degree to which these motivations are conflicting or complementary, and the contextual drivers in which firms seek to improve performance. To address these concerns, in this study I develop a theoretical framework of firm strategic motivations based on performance feedback relative to a purposefully selected group of relevant peer firms. This framework yields a number of predictions regarding firm behavior that I test using an empirical model of peer effects based on tenets of the behavioral theory of the firm. The model uses instrumental variables estimation, based on unique properties of an innovative approach to industry peer group definition, to resolve endogeneity concerns not fully addressed by extant literature on performance feedback and aspirations. Results indicate that purposeful selection of peer groups based on relevant strategic context may uncover important aspects of firm behavior that are otherwise masked by generic definition of industry peers. The study also finds that the usage of conventional aggregate measures of CSP may likewise mask subtleties of firm strategic behavior that are evident along more narrowly defined dimensions of CSP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study finds evidence within a widely used dataset of independent corporate social performance (CSP) ratings that the actions of a firm's industry peers influence its subsequent choice of CSP. Using a unique empirical approach, I am able to separately identify endogenous peer effects from both exogenous firm characteristics and the strong path dependence in a firm's choice of CSP over time. The results indicate that firm behavior is subject to peer influence in the selection of CSP, supporting other emerging evidence of peer effects in the determination of non-market corporate strategies. This study is among the first to identify peer effects in CSP, and contributes to a notable research agenda on the drivers of corporate social responsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using banks in the syndicated lending market as an example, we discuss a firm- specific strategy that has been overlooked by the literature, namely, that self- regulated firms pressure other non-self-regulated firms in an attempt to reduce effort asymmetries when collaborating. We develop a framework that shows when such a strategy is likely to be present. This framework is built on the view that the costs and benefits of collaboration are equally shared among self- regulated firms that collaborate. However, when self-regulated firms collaborate with non-self-regulated firms, the effort they exert differs and is not equally shared. In particular, we find that when firms collaborate, self- regulating firms pressure non-self-regulated firms to become self-regulated with the purpose of reducing effort asymmetries, and such pressure increases with the duration of collaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Good governance in family business is crucial to prevent the potentially detrimental effect of family control on external stakeholders. Why are some family firms better governed than others? I show that a family firm's board appointments are strongly influenced by neighboring companies. Confirming the role of geographic proximity, I find that this effect becomes smaller when the distance between a firm and its peers increases, and insignificant when firms are randomly allocated to geographic areas. Studying the mechanisms at play, I suggest that peer effects are driven by imitation of leading firms and by social interactions within the local community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Peer influence through word-of-mouth (WOM) plays an important role in many information systems but identification of causal effects is challenging. We identify causal WOM effects in the empirical setting of game adoption in a social network for gamers by exploiting differences in individuals' networks. Friends of friends do not directly influence a focal user, so we use their characteristics to instrument for behavior of the focal user's friends. We go beyond demonstrating a large and highly significant WOM effect and also assess moderating factors of the strength of the effect on the sender and receiver side. We find that users with the most influence on others tend to be better gamers, have larger social networks, but spend less time playing. Interestingly, these are also the users who are least susceptible to WOM effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using hand-collected data on divisional managers at S&P 1500 firms, we study how changes in one divisional manager's compensation affect the compensation of other divisional managers inside the same conglomerate. Our identification exploits industry shocks to managerial pay in select divisions, such as the discovery of shale gas deposits. A pay increase for a manager affected by the industry shock generates large within-firm spillovers on the pay of other divisional managers, who receive pay raises of 54-87 cents for each dollar increase in the treated manager's pay. These spillovers operate only within firm boundaries and are non-existent for the same industry pairs in stand-alone firms. The intra-firm convergence in executive pay is associated with weaker governance and lower firm value. Overall, our findings highlight how peer-effects within organizations contribute to the overall diffusion of high managerial pay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the interaction between professional imprinting and age in the context of industry-science collaboration. Specifically, we examine the impact of localized and personal peer effects on academics' involvement with industry and how these effects are moderated by the career age of the scientist. We suggest that both localized and personal peer effects drive industry involvement but that the effects from such imprinting are more pronounced for younger researchers, suggesting that professional imprinting takes place in the early stages of a scientist's academic career. Based on a sample of 330 German academics in the field of biotechnology and publication data from the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE), we find that scientists with industry-oriented co-authors are more likely to be involved with industry (personal peer effect). Moreover, we find that the scientist's involvement increases with the orientation of the scientist's department towards industry (localized peer effect). Only the latter effect turns out to be moderated by scientist's age. While personal peer effects are independent of the scientist's age, localized peer effects emerge for younger researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research has explored behavioral peer group influences on academics' engagement with industry, but has not explicitly addressed under which circumstances these influences are more pronounced. Analyzing multi-source data for 1200 UK academic scientists and engineers, we find that peers' behavior shape individual engagement behavior, yet the effect of social learning is stronger for individuals in the early stage of their career, while it is weaker for star scientists and academics who have worked in industry in the past. While peer effects appear to be strong, we find no organization-level effects. We explore implications for research on professional organizations and policies designed to encourage academics to engage with industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]