Search

Theoretical and empirical evidence point to the ability of political leaders to manipulate economic policies and leverage local firms to elevate their political careers. Despite this, there is limited understanding of how these career incentives impact the operational dynamics of the firms involved. This empirical study delves into this gap, revealing that city leaders with fewer promotional incentives are more inclined to mobilize state-owned enterprises (SOEs) within their jurisdiction to pursue sustainable development, as indicated by heightened corporate operational efficiency. Our analysis further indicates that the career prospects of city leaders significantly influence the operational efficiency of SOEs by driving a shift in focus from rapid growth to sustainable development and firms' adoption of disruptive technologies. We posit that this increase in operational efficiency not only benefits the SOEs but also generates unique value for stakeholders, resulting in elevated market capitalization and reduced stock price crash risk. Our findings carry direct relevance to the ongoing discourse on political incentives and contribute to operations management research, shedding light on the intricate ways in which the political environment can impact the operational performance of firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online arbitrage, a recent trend on e‐commerce platforms, occurs when a firm (the "arbitrage firm") copies the product description of another firm (the "designer firm," who is the original seller of the product) and sells the product at a marked‐up price on a different platform from the designer firm. Once receiving a consumer's order, the arbitrage firm creates an order at the designer firm with a fake account and the consumer's shipping information. In this process, the designer firms fulfill all the purchase orders, and the arbitrage firm earns a profit without even touching the product. While the designer firm can enjoy a market expansion benefit, it also suffers from a high volume of product returns as some consumers eventually learn the true product price (from the receipt) and return the product they ordered from the arbitrage firm. We analyze the online arbitrage practice with a game‐theoretic model and show how the entry of an arbitrage firm can hurt the designer firm's profit. In the current practice, many designer firms cope with this issue by simply adjusting the price, but we show that such a strategy does not necessarily alleviate the problem. We propose a different strategy: the designer firm adjusts its refund policy to curb the greedy behavior of the arbitrage firm. We show that the proposed strategy leads the arbitrage firm to decrease its retail price, resulting in a smaller number of returns and higher profit for the designer firm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An increasing number of companies are using corporate online communities, a new information technology tool, to facilitate internal knowledge sharing. The corporate online community also offers companies a novel source to understand employee's behaviors such as voluntary turnover, an important part of workforce management. Little is known, however, about whether and to what extent an employee's voluntary turnover is related to their knowledge‐sharing activities in the corporate online community. In this study, we address this critical issue by jointly considering in‐degree ties (i.e., knowledge acquisition) and out‐degree ties (i.e., knowledge contribution), which we combine into two novel knowledge‐sharing indicators: (i) the existence of bidirectional (vs. unidirectional) knowledge‐sharing ties and (ii) the equivalence of knowledge‐sharing ties (i.e., the balance between in‐degree centrality and out‐degree centrality). We theorize the relationships between these two indicators and the likelihood of voluntary employee turnover, and we test our hypotheses by collaborating with a large company to collect official voluntary turnover records and a unique dataset of detailed knowledge‐sharing behaviors in its corporate online community. A survival model and a series of robustness checks consistently indicate that voluntary turnover is less likely among employees who establish bidirectional knowledge‐sharing ties (rather than unidirectional ties) and that voluntary turnover is less likely among those with a higher equivalence of knowledge‐sharing ties. In light of the critical role of workforce management and the extensive use of online communities, our study offers important managerial implications and can help companies better understand or predict employees' voluntary turnover from their online knowledge‐sharing activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the growth of online mental healthcare platforms, health professionals have been providing online consultation services during their spare time. However, little is known about the prosocial behaviors of health professionals on these platforms and their effect on professionals' economic performance. In this research, we aim to identify and quantify the main effect of prosocial behaviors (i.e., offering free services) on future economic performance and the potential mediation effects of relationship capital and reputation capital in an online mental healthcare platform. Based on signaling and commitment theories, we use a panel dataset from a Chinese online mental healthcare platform to test our hypotheses. Our findings show that a mental health professional's previous prosocial behavior has a positive impact on economic performance and that this effect may manifest through the relationship capital pathway. However, reputation capital generated from prosocial behaviors does not significantly mediate the impact of prosocial behavior on economic performance. Our research provides important implications for healthcare operations concerning service offerings and healthcare providers' performance on online mental healthcare platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As one of the most important financial innovations in the last two decades, credit default swap (CDS) contracts have been initiated and actively traded in the market to hedge against credit risks. However, little is known about how these financial innovations affect an underlying firm's operations. In this empirical study, we find that an underlying firm's operational efficiency is significantly improved with the inception of CDS trading. Our results are robust to multiple causal identification strategies. Further analysis suggests that the inception of CDS tends to enhance the operational efficiency of a firm through the supply chain financing capability and trade credit. We also postulate that CDS leads to enhanced efficiency through institutional monitoring and improvements in management effectiveness. We then obtain suggestive evidence. Our findings have direct implications concerning the ongoing policy debate surrounding CDS. We contribute to operations management research by exploring how innovations in the financial market would, in turn, affect the operational performance of firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Care coordination involves shaping patient care activities and sharing information among all participants concerned with a patient's care to achieve safe and effective care. The objectives of care coordination are to promote sharing of patients' clinical information, keep patients and families informed, and manage effective referrals and care transitions. Failures in care coordination account for a large amount of waste per year in the United States. Many innovative healthcare organizations have recently recognized the danger of poorly coordinated care and have implemented analytics to improve it. Therefore, more analytics‐based research (especially combining explanatory analytics with predictive analytics) is needed to direct efforts to improve care coordination. This paper focuses on systematically studying the extant literature to understand how analytics play a role in improving care coordination. Our goal is to identify a set of key research questions that would lead to new research areas in the use of analytics for care coordination. Based on these questions, we offer new analytics solution pathways to care coordination problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reduction in hospital readmissions has long been identified as a target area for healthcare public policy reform by the US government. In October 2012, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) established the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP) program, which requires the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to reduce payments to hospitals with excess readmissions. Even with recent changes in ACA, the HRRP program is still in place. In this study, we empirically examine the effectiveness of the introduction of the HRRP on hospital readmission and mortality rates. We observe that, in general, the introduction of the HRRP has significantly reduced readmission rates. However, the introduction of the HRRP does not necessarily decrease the mortality rates, which highlights the unintended consequences of public policy. What is more interesting is that the impact of the HRRP is heterogeneous in hospital size and racial groups. First, after the HRRP introduction, large hospitals have experienced a greater reduction in readmission rates than small hospitals. Second, after the introduction of the HRRP, the zip code regions with a higher percentage of Hispanic and African‐American populations have experienced a larger reduction in readmission rates. These results contribute to both theory and practice in public policy and provide important and nuanced policy implications for evaluating the effectiveness of the HRRP. Policy‐makers also need to pay close attention to these results for future implementations of policies similar to the HRRP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The new sharing economy model has introduced a dramatic, disruptive impact on the traditional industries by matching the demand and supply in real time. In this study, we examine how the entry of Uber, a ride‐sharing services digital platform, brings new disruptive changes in public transportation operations. Significant debate has surrounded whether the new ride‐sharing model siphoned riders from public transit or made public transit feasible for more riders, but no consensus has been reached. One reason could be that the commonly used difference‐in‐differences empirical strategy fails to account for time‐varying unobserved confounders. To address this issue, we introduce a class of counterfactual estimators (CEs) to strengthen our causal identification and perform diagnostic tests to validate model assumptions for each CE. A significant drop in passenger trips with buses is found after Uber entry from both the conventional two‐way fixed effects model and the CEs. Moreover, we provide empirical evidence that the entry of Uber has not significantly affected public demand response transportation, which indicates that Uber is not directly competing with other transportation services that aim to solve the "last‐mile problem." Last, our additional analyses suggest that the effect of Uber entry is not uniform for different urban areas. All these empirical findings can be coherently explained in our framework of the substitution effect of Uber. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The digital technology underlying the concept of Industry 4.0 has brought new disruptive changes to the economy. As an innovative service model, the unique characteristics of the space‐sharing economy require the understanding of emotional and psychological aspects in managing such a disruptive service model. We empirically examine the impact of unstructured emotional information that service providers offer (i.e., marketer‐generated content) on the popularity and sales of services in space‐sharing platforms (e.g., Airbnb) above and beyond objective qualities such as guest ratings or the size and amenities of the properties. For this, we leverage a unique dataset of a large‐scale sample of Airbnb listings from New York City (NYC). The results of a panel analysis and a series of robustness checks reveal a curvilinear association between the affective expression of service providers and the sales of their services, that is, the effect of emotional expressions is positive at low levels, but it diminishes at high levels. To address the potential endogeneity, we use a 2SLS‐IV approach, and the results validate our findings. Moreover, we conduct a randomized experiment to further establish causal inference. This study makes valuable contributions to the literature on service operation management and the sharing economy. Our findings shed light on how operations managers and service providers can use emotional information in space‐sharing platforms. We provide practical examples to guide their actions. These insights also have implications for other platform owners and users to leverage emotional information and improve outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The operations management literature has recently begun to analyze how novel data sources help practitioners better understand product demand. We extend this stream of research by analyzing how air quality, a prominent environmental factor that has received little attention in prior studies, can impact product demand. Specifically, we examine how air quality affects the demand for different product color options, and find a greater demand for blue‐color product option on air‐polluted days (vs. clear days). We attribute this pattern to compensatory consumption induced by need deprivation. Specifically, poor air quality deprives people of the visual experience of seeing a blue sky, leading them to seek compensation by acquiring blue‐color options. By analyzing a three‐year purchase‐related dataset from an online retailer (Study 1) and conducting a field experiment (Study 2) and two laboratory experiments (Studies 3 and 4), we establish the external validity, internal validity, and robustness of this finding. We also provide empirical support for deprived visual experience as the mechanism: The proposed effect is driven by air quality indicators that affect visibility (Study 1) and is mediated by experienced visibility (Study 3). We further identify a theoretically relevant individual difference variable as a moderator: prior experience with air pollution, which strengthens the proposed effect in the laboratory setting because prior experience enables people to "relive" the deprived visual experience more vividly (Study 4). Given the prevalence of air pollution across the globe, our research sheds light on how practitioners can improve their operational decisions by factoring in air quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditionally, consumers purchase physical music (often in the form of CDs or cassettes) from local retailers. With the development of Internet technology, the market share of digital music has grown rapidly in recent years. Unlike physical music, digital music is provided by several emerging digital music providers through the Internet to consumers. Pricing models of digital music are also drastically different from those of physical music. In this study, we identify three common schemes for selling digital music: ownership, subscription and mixed pricing models. Under the ownership model, consumers purchase and download their preferred songs and enjoy music using their local devices. Under the subscription model, music is provided through an online streaming service. The mixed pricing model is a combination of the previous two. Our paper explores and compares the three pricing models. Through a stylized model, we find that several factors, including the advertisement revenue rate and consumers' reservation value for the music service, have crucial effects on the comparison of the three pricing models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online platforms are prone to abuse and manipulations from strategic parties. For example, social media and review websites suffer from sentiment manipulations, manifested in the form of opinion spam and fake reviews. The consequence of such manipulations is the deterioration of information quality as well as loss in consumer welfare. We study one of movie studios' operation activities, sentiment manipulation, in the context of movie tweets. Using the movie release and movie studios' earning announcement dates as sources of exogenous shocks, we find that both the average Twitter sentiment and the proportion of highly positive tweets exhibit a significant drop on the movie's release day or movie studios' earnings announcement day. In addition, independent productions and low budget movies tend to experience a larger drop than major studio productions and high budget movies. To examine the effect of competition on firm manipulation, we construct a movie competition measure based on both the time and theme dimensions through topic modeling, and we find that a higher level of competition leads to a larger drop in Twitter sentiment. Overall, these observations suggest that firms might be actively managing online sentiment in a strategic manner. Our study sheds light on the reliability of sentiment analysis and contributes to our understanding of potential strategic manipulation in the operation of movie studios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing pervasiveness of social networks allows users to share purchase behaviors with their online friends. In this study, we examine optimal pricing strategies of a monopolistic firm using an analytical model that accounts for behavioral observational learning in social networks. We show that a seller could potentially control the information available to future customers and induce behavioral observational learning, using an information-revealing pricing strategy. This result suggests that offering introductory discounts is not always an effective method to boost purchases in social networks. It could prevent the behavioral observational learning that would increase future customers' willingness to pay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deadline: B April 15, 2022 b BACKGROUND Building on the Internet and mobile services, social technologies are being developed to facilitate social interactions among individuals and between individuals and firms. How social media platforms or internal social networks within a firm affect a firm's operational decisions and strategies. For example, researchers can quantify the impact of firms' social media strategies on operations and guide the design of future social media strategies. [Extracted from the article]

For example, researchers can quantify the impact of firms' social media strategies on operations and guide the design of future social media strategies. Generating business intelligence through social media analytics: Measuring brand personality with consumer-, employee-, and firm-generated content. How social media platforms or internal social networks within a firm affect a firm's operational decisions and strategies. Building on the Internet and mobile services, social technologies are being developed to facilitate social interactions among individuals and between individuals and firms. [Extracted from the article]

Generating business intelligence through social media analytics: Measuring brand personality with consumer-, employee-, and firm-generated content. How social media platforms or internal social networks within a firm affect a firm's operational decisions and strategies. Building on the Internet and mobile services, social technologies are being developed to facilitate social interactions among individuals and between individuals and firms. For example, researchers can quantify the impact of firms' social media strategies on operations and guide the design of future social media strategies. [Extracted from the article]

Generating business intelligence through social media analytics: Measuring brand personality with consumer-, employee-, and firm-generated content. Building on the Internet and mobile services, social technologies are being developed to facilitate social interactions among individuals and between individuals and firms. For example, researchers can quantify the impact of firms' social media strategies on operations and guide the design of future social media strategies. How social media platforms or internal social networks within a firm affect a firm's operational decisions and strategies. [Extracted from the article]

Generating business intelligence through social media analytics: Measuring brand personality with consumer-, employee-, and firm-generated content. Building on the Internet and mobile services, social technologies are being developed to facilitate social interactions among individuals and between individuals and firms. For example, researchers can quantify the impact of firms' social media strategies on operations and guide the design of future social media strategies. How social media platforms or internal social networks within a firm affect a firm's operational decisions and strategies. [Extracted from the article]

Generating business intelligence through social media analytics: Measuring brand personality with consumer-, employee-, and firm-generated content. Building on the Internet and mobile services, social technologies are being developed to facilitate social interactions among individuals and between individuals and firms. For example, researchers can quantify the impact of firms' social media strategies on operations and guide the design of future social media strategies. How social media platforms or internal social networks within a firm affect a firm's operational decisions and strategies. [Extracted from the article]

Building on the Internet and mobile services, social technologies are being developed to facilitate social interactions among individuals and between individuals and firms. Generating business intelligence through social media analytics: Measuring brand personality with consumer-, employee-, and firm-generated content. For example, researchers can quantify the impact of firms' social media strategies on operations and guide the design of future social media strategies. How social media platforms or internal social networks within a firm affect a firm's operational decisions and strategies. [Extracted from the article]

How social media platforms or internal social networks within a firm affect a firm's operational decisions and strategies. For example, researchers can quantify the impact of firms' social media strategies on operations and guide the design of future social media strategies. Generating business intelligence through social media analytics: Measuring brand personality with consumer-, employee-, and firm-generated content. Building on the Internet and mobile services, social technologies are being developed to facilitate social interactions among individuals and between individuals and firms. [Extracted from the article]

Generating business intelligence through social media analytics: Measuring brand personality with consumer-, employee-, and firm-generated content. How social media platforms or internal social networks within a firm affect a firm's operational decisions and strategies. For example, researchers can quantify the impact of firms' social media strategies on operations and guide the design of future social media strategies. Building on the Internet and mobile services, social technologies are being developed to facilitate social interactions among individuals and between individuals and firms. [Extracted from the article]

How social media platforms or internal social networks within a firm affect a firm's operational decisions and strategies. Building on the Internet and mobile services, social technologies are being developed to facilitate social interactions among individuals and between individuals and firms. Generating business intelligence through social media analytics: Measuring brand personality with consumer-, employee-, and firm-generated content. For example, researchers can quantify the impact of firms' social media strategies on operations and guide the design of future social media strategies. [Extracted from the article]

Generating business intelligence through social media analytics: Measuring brand personality with consumer-, employee-, and firm-generated content. • How social media platforms or internal social networks within a firm affect a firm's operational decisions and strategies. For example, researchers can quantify the impact of firms' social media strategies on operations and guide the design of future social media strategies. Building on the Internet and mobile services, social technologies are being developed to facilitate social interactions among individuals and between individuals and firms. [Extracted from the article]

Building on the Internet and mobile services, social technologies are being developed to facilitate social interactions among individuals and between individuals and firms. • How social media platforms or internal social networks within a firm affect a firm's operational decisions and strategies. For example, researchers can quantify the impact of firms' social media strategies on operations and guide the design of future social media strategies. Generating business intelligence through social media analytics: Measuring brand personality with consumer-, employee-, and firm-generated content. [Extracted from the article]

Building on the Internet and mobile services, social technologies are being developed to facilitate social interactions among individuals and between individuals and firms. • How social media platforms or internal social networks within a firm affect a firm's operational decisions and strategies. For example, researchers can quantify the impact of firms' social media strategies on operations and guide the design of future social media strategies. Generating business intelligence through social media analytics: Measuring brand personality with consumer-, employee-, and firm-generated content. [Extracted from the article]