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Designing Innovation Contests
Get PDFFirms are increasingly organizing contests for crowdsourcing solutions to problems associated with sustainable growth. The effectiveness and efficiency of these contests relies on the decisions taken at the operational level by the firm. The current dissertation consists of three essays related to this theme. In the first essay, I focus on the case where a firm wants to leverage the latent employee expertise across the organization, going beyond core R & D teams. Such intra-enterprise design contests offer a contrast with external contests where firms pose questions and engage an outside world of solvers not contractually employed by the firm. Internal contests, where solution-seeking firms internalize some or all of the participant opportunity costs, pose new opportunities and challenges, managing which forms the focus of this paper. While internal contests allow firms to pursue proprietary concepts, I learned from field studies that employee participation in internal contests requires carefully coordinated decision making. How can managers architect contests by setting participation cost-sharing policies, contest awards and specifying problems to ensure optimal outcomes from contests? An application-driven model is formulated and analyzed for managerial decisions and insights about when to resort to internal contests, how to structure and specify them, and when and how to cover the participant opportunity costs. I find that budget constraints combined with intellectual property considerations make internal contests increasingly attractive for solution-seeking firms. Interestingly, the contest reward in internal contests is curvilinear in the design problem uncertainty. Solutions of better average and extreme quality can be obtained with an internal contest under budget constraints. Firms with larger contestant pools can share more of their opportunity costs with employees, making internal contests more appropriate for larger firms. Also, a contest designer can under most cases exert less effort to specify the contest challenge problem in an internal contest relative to posing the problem to an external group. Curiously, it is optimal for open ended contest problems to be organized with smaller rewards in internal contest settings. We discuss how managers of solution-seeking firms can benefit with the careful design of innovation contests.In the second essay I employ the perspective that innovation is a multi-stage processthat may be usefully split into an exploration phase followed by an execution phase. I analyze the open innovation settingwhere a seeker sources innovations from outside solvers through a contest. The interaction between exploration and execution phases leads to insights into the effort decisions by agents competing in the contest. While the execution efforts follow the usual trends with costs and rewards, the implications on the optimal exploration efforts are more interesting. The model predicts that from the seeker's perspective, increasing the reward beyond a threshold can decrease the probability of finding the solution. I also use this exploration-execution model to study contest architecture along two dimensions (i) Reward structure and (ii) Information structure. Recommendations are provided for contest design based on the objective of the innovation seeker. In the third essay, I focus on the individual and study the process that she employs while searching for a solution associated with creative problem solving. The objective is to start a research program focused on understanding behavioral patterns while performing tasks requiring creativity. The knowledge gained can then be used to create an optimized incentive and task design for increasing efficacy of innovation sourcing mechanisms. I use laboratory experiments to collect data on the process path adopted by participants while solving a unique insight problem on the computer. I observe that piecerate incentives lead to a better performance on the puzzle relative to an equivalent incentive based on competition. Analysis of the process path employed by participants shows that they spend less effort on the puzzle in the competition case and spend more effort when incentivized with an equivalent piecerate incentive. The performance on the puzzle task is observed to increase with an increase in the time spent on the puzzle. Several other process measures are defined and compared across treatments
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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Essays in Prosocial Behavior
Get PDFThis dissertation examines empirical questions related to charitable giving and prosocial behavior. Chapter 1 examines the effect of mandated choice on organ donation registration rates. Chapter 2 examines the association between intra-household bargaining and charitable giving. Chapter 3 takes a machine learning approach to predict the likelihood of households engaging in intra-household bargaining
Determination of the solution structure of antifreeze glycoprotein fraction 8 (afgp8) in deuterated dimethyl sulfoxide (dmso) using nuclear magnetic resonance (nmr) spectroscopy
Get PDFFish native to the polar regions produce biological antifreezes called antifreeze glycoproteins (AFGPs) to prevent themselves from freezing at supercool temperatures (-1.9˚C). AFGP lowers the freezing point of water in a non-colligative manner. AFGP’s ability to induce thermal hysteresis (change in freezing point with little to no effect on the melting point) makes them about 500 times more effective than traditional colligative antifreeze, such as salts and sugars. By understanding the antifreeze mechanism of AFGP, it is possible to model molecules that can mimic AFGP. The structure-function paradigm states that the function of a protein can be related to its structure. The primary sequence of AFGP is highly degenerate consisting of multiple repeats of the same tripeptide Ala-Ala-Thr*, in which Thr* is glycosylated with the disaccharide beta- D-galactosyl-(1,3)-alpha-N-acetyl-D-galactosamine. The smallest number of tripeptide repeats called AFGP fraction 8 (AFGP8) was studied. In addition to its highly degenerate primary sequence, AFGP seems to function as an intrinsically disordered protein which presents challenges in determining their native structure. In this thesis work, a different approach was used to elucidate the three-dimensional structure of AFGP8 from Arctic cod Boreogadus saida and Antarctic notothenioid Trematomus borchgrevinki. Dimethyl sulfoxide, a non-native solvent, was used to make AFGP8 less dynamic in solution and induced a non-native structure which was determined via nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR
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Competitive and collaborative supply chains: the strategic role of product innovation, secondary markets and channel structure
Get PDFtextInnovation in product and process development is regarded as a key avenue
for growth, profitability, and competitive advantage in many industries.
With lifetimes of products shortened by both the accelerating pace of technological
change and global competition, firms are forced to invest continually
and ever-increasing amounts to maintain their competitive edge. However,
due to increasing complexity of offerings and intensifying competition, successful
development and distribution of products also depends on the strength
of a firm’s relationships with its partners. In this dissertation, we examine the
strategic interactions between a firm’s technological capabilities, its product offerings
and collaborative and competitive forces in supply chains. Specifically,
this dissertation examines three stages of a product development problem and
characterizes the role of product innovation, secondary markets and distribution
channels in determining the structure of inter-firm relationships. In the
first essay, we look at the different approaches that firms take while collaborating
with suppliers in new product development. Following the development
of a new product, a key decision for a firm is its product positioning strategy.
The second essay of the dissertation analyzes the product positioning problem
of a firm under both monopoly and competition. Secondary markets also
play a significant role in determining the nature of inter-firm relationships.
The final essay of the dissertation probes this issue further and examines the
strategic role of intermediaries upon the distribution strategy adopted by a
firm. In summary, this dissertation illustrates how product characteristics and
inter-firm relationships play a crucial role in the success or failure of firms.
Hence, it is important for firms to recognize these factors while making design,
development and distribution decisions.Managemen
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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