2718 research outputs found
Sort by
Global Careers and Compensation: From Initial Penalties to a “Superglobal” Premium
No full textThis paper examines the relationship between international mobility and financial compensation for knowledge workers pursuing business careers. While some theoretical arguments suggest that international mobility may lead to higher pay, others suggest that it may lead to performance problems and lack of recognition, which could reduce financial rewards. Empirical research on the topic is limited, with cross-sectional data providing little insight into the relationship between international mobility and compensation over time. Our study overcomes this challenge by using a panel dataset on the career histories of 1,322 MBA graduates. The results reveal a curvilinear relationship between international mobility and compensation over time. Making one or two international moves can have substantial negative effects on pay. However, further moves are associated with pay growth, and there is some evidence that those who move countries multiple times (“superglobals”) obtain substantially higher pay. We discuss the implications of our findings for research on international mobility and business careers
Disruptions, Redundancy Strategies, and Performance of Small Firms: Evidence from Uganda
Get PDFWe study the impact of firm-specific business disruptions on the performance of small emerging market firms and test the effectiveness of building in redundancies to buffer against disruptions. Managerial disruptions result in the absence of the entrepreneur-owner, whereas operational disruptions lead to a shortage of critical resources, for example, inventory or electricity. We propose the use of relational redundancy—that is, the availability of a trusted and capable person with whom the entrepreneur-owner has an existing relationship, who can manage the business in his or her absence—to recover from managerial disruptions. We also examine whether resource redundancy—for example, maintaining safety stock or electricity backup—helps recover from operational disruptions. In the absence of publicly available data, we hand-built a panel data set by interviewing 646 randomly selected small firms over four time periods in Kampala, Uganda. We find that disruptions are highly prevalent and have a statistically and economically significant effect on firm performance. When a firm faces multiple exogenous and severe disruptions in a six-month period, its monthly sales decrease by 13.8% (p = 0.013), and its sales growth decreases by 18.8 percentage points (p = 0.070). Importantly, we find that both managerial and resource redundancies can help firms build resilience against the negative impact of disruptions. In some cases, firms with high levels of redundancy are able to completely overcome the negative effect of disruptions on sales and sales growth. We discuss implications for entrepreneurs, policymakers, and large multinationals that buy from or sell to small emerging market firms
Building synthetic worlds: lessons from the excessive infatuation and oversold disillusionment with the Metaverse
Get PDFThe metaverse comprises a range of technologies offering shared digital experiences based on immersive virtual worlds or decentralised economies. Brands, Big Tech, and investors made huge investments in the metaverse, but users did not share their excitement and the bubble duly burst. We explore this story by drawing on a wide range of data sources and first-hand knowledge. We consider the metaverse as a set of overlapping, partly competing ecosystems and expand the lens of industry architecture to Ecosystem Architecture to examine the rules, roles, and responsibilities involved. We find that incumbent firms rushed to embrace the metaverse in the hope of pre-empting disruption and safeguarding their competitive position, leading to over-investment. Greed among ecosystem orchestrators impeded contributors from creating value, while persistent technological shortcomings impaired the user experience. Our study throws new light on the dynamics of innovation and technology hypes and the challenges involved in cultivating and coordinating ecosystems
Hospital-Wide Inpatient Flow Optimization
Get PDFAn ideal that supports quality and delivery of care is to have hospital operations that are coordinated and optimized across all services in real-time. As a step toward this goal, we propose a multistage adaptive robust optimization approach combined with machine learning techniques. Informed by data and predictions, our framework unifies the bed assignment process across the entire hospital and accounts for present and future inpatient flows, discharges as well as bed requests – from the emergency department, scheduled surgeries and admissions, and outside transfers. We evaluate our approach through simulations calibrated on historical data from a large academic medical center. For the 600-bed institution, our optimization model was solved in seconds, reduced off-service placement by 24% on average, and boarding delays in the emergency department and post-anesthesia units by 35% and 18% respectively. We also illustrate the benefit from using adaptive linear decision rules instead of static assignment decisions
The Business Value of Gamification
Get PDFThis 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
A Multifactor Perspective on Volatility-Managed Portfolios
Get PDFMoreira and Muir question the existence of a strong risk-return trade-off by showing that investors can improve performance by reducing exposure to risk factors when their volatility is high. However, Cederburg et al. show that these strategies fail out-of-sample, and Barroso and Detzel show they do not survive transaction costs. We propose a conditional multifactor portfolio that outperforms its unconditional counterpart even out-of-sample and net of costs. Moreover, we show that factor risk prices generally decrease with market volatility. Our results demonstrate that the breakdown of the risk-return trade-off is more puzzling than previously thought
Mapping antitrust onto digital ecosystems
No full textThe assessment of “ecosystem power” has come to occupy centerstage in antitrust cases involving large digital firms, as regulators are finding traditional market-by-market analysis increasingly inadequate to capture how competition works between firms holding multiple “assets and capabilities”. While antitrust economics is lagging behind in developing usable tools for the analysis of “ecosystems”, this is an established and growing area of study for strategic management and business scholars. We describe how recent antitrust practice has tended to fall back on established “theories of harm” for expediency; we also identify various strands of the management literature that could contribute to antitrust analysis. We are still missing practical incentives for scholars to independently develop a multidisciplinary approach, and regulators should play an active part in convening discussions, providing data and accelerating progress
Algorithmic Trading of Real-time Electricity with Machine Learning
No full textAlgorithmic trading is becoming the dominant approach in many electricity spot and futures markets. This paper focuses on the emerging interest in the less documented real-time imbalance markets, by developing reinforcement learning agents to find profit-making opportunities algorithmically. We develop a repeatable experimental setting to compare different market participants and explore the applications of Q-learning with neural networks for three types of market participants: a non-physical trader, a gas generator, and a battery electricity storage system. We backtest all three agents using British data across summer and winter months to compare their profits, risks and various experimental design considerations
Do Robots Increase Wealth Dispersion?
Get PDFWe document significant negative effects of exposure to increased automation at work on household wealth accumulation. Beyond the income and savings channels, we uncover a novel mechanism contributing to the negative wealth effects of automation that arises through the endogenous optimal portfolio decisions of households. We show that households rebalance their financial wealth away from the stock market in response to increased human capital risk induced by pervasive automation, thereby attaining lower wealth levels and relative positions in the wealth distribution. Our evidence suggests that the portfolio channel amplifies the inequality-enhancing effects of increased automation