Social media affordances in entry‐level employees’ socialization: employee agency in the management of their professional impressions and vulnerability during early stages of socialization

This study examined how entry‐level employees interacted with social media during three stages of organizational socialization. They navigated between four different media affordances (persistence, editability, visibility, and association) while experiencing them as both enabling and constraining in different socialization stages. Qualitative interview data analysis revealed during anticipatory socialization, job applicants realized visibility and persistence in relation to institutional and individualized socialization. During encounter, new employees managed personal and professional life boundaries carefully against the association and visibility affordances. Although some participants used both public and enterprise social media for obtaining job‐related information and understanding coworkers and company culture, during metamorphosis, most interviewees adopted passive information seeking strategies and experienced a paradoxical tension between the enabling and constraining affordances of social media. Findings are discussed with regards to employees’ exertion of agency in managing their professional impressions and coping with high levels of uncertainty and vulnerability during early stages of socialization.     

Timing the Start of Material Substitution Projects: Creating Switching Options under Volatile Material Prices

Firms developing new products often face the challenge of making investment decisions under uncertain input–cost conditions due to the price volatilities of the materials they use. These decisions need to be made long before the final products are launched on the market. Therefore, firms that invest in the opportunity to switch materials in a timely manner will have the flexibility to react to material price changes and realize competitive advantages. However, volatile material prices may also cause a firm to delay investment. Using real‐options reasoning, this paper studies the influence of input‐cost fluctuations on the timing decision to start new product development (NPD) and thus create the follow‐on opportunity to later replace an existing product. A model that combines waiting and switching options to derive influencing factors of the flexibility value that triggers the investment is developed and tested on a sample of material substitution projects from manufacturing firms. The results show how price uncertainty of the new and the old material, their joint price development, the expected project duration, and competitive preemption are related to the propensity to delay the start of NPD. The findings provide new insights on how timing in adopting materials can be used to hedge exposure to volatile material prices. The insights are relevant for adopters and producers of new materials, as well as for policy makers who strive for supporting the diffusion of new materials.     

The Impact of Employment on Parental Coresidence

We examine the extent to which parents use housing and shared living arrangements as a form of risk‐sharing for their adult children, using detailed data on children and parents in the Health and Retirement Study for 1998–2012. On average, a young man moving from full‐time to nonemployment raises the likelihood of coresiding with a parent by 1.5 percentage points; moving from full‐time employment to being part‐time employed raises the likelihood of coresiding with a parent by 2 percentage points. The implied elasticity of parental coresidence with respect to the son's income is ‐1.1; for daughters, the elasticity is ‐0.5.     

Using Experimental and Neurological Data to Gain a Deeper Understanding of Realization Utility Theory

Starting with the premise that realization utility theory helps explain trading behavior, this study combines a carefully crafted experimental design with functional magnetic resonance imaging technology to offer a more inclusive examination of factors that affect REIT trading behavior beyond whether a REIT is simply trading up or down. We add to the nascent field of neurological real estate by finding that local gains/loss domains are more relevant than are global gain/loss considerations, financial skewness is a significant determinant of trading behavior, and that performance inside the REIT market influences how hard subjects think when performing tasks outside the market.     

Rent Sharing and the Compensation of Head Coaches in Power Five College Football

The monopoly and monopsony power of intercollegiate sports create significant rents, but previous studies of intercollegiate football coaches’ salaries implicitly assume that coaches are paid their marginal revenue products. In a two-stage estimation, we show that coaches share in these rents. The first stage shows that several common measures of coaches’ productivity do not affect an athletic department’s variable revenue. When we include these measures in the second-stage salary equation, their impact on pay reflects bargaining power, not productivity. We also find that several measures of fixed revenue, which are independent of the coach’s performance, increase the coach’s pay.     

Preventives Versus Treatments Redux: Tighter Bounds on Distortions in Innovation Incentives with an Application to the Global Demand for HIV Pharmaceuticals

Kremer and Snyder (Q J Econ 130:1167–1239, 2015) show that demand curves for a preventive and treatment may have different shapes though they target the same disease, biasing the pharmaceutical manufacturer toward developing the lucrative rather than the socially desirable product. This paper tightens the theoretical bounds on the potential deadweight loss from such biases. Using a calibration of the global demand for HIV pharmaceuticals, we demonstrate the dramatically sharper analysis achievable with the new bounds, allowing us to pinpoint potential deadweight loss at 62% of the global gain from curing HIV. We use the calibration to perform policy counterfactuals, assessing welfare effects of government policies such as a subsidy, reference pricing, and price-discrimination ban. The fit of our calibration is good: we find that a hypothetical drug monopolist would price an HIV drug so high that only 4% of the infected population worldwide would purchase, matching actual drug prices and quantities in the early 2000s before subsidies in low-income countries ramped up.     

Explaining alliance success: Competences, resources, relational factors, and resource-advantage theory

Business alliances, by filling critical resource gaps, enable firms to have positional advantages that lead to superior financial performance. Some alliances, however, are more successful than others. The three prominent theoretical approaches to explaining alliance success rely on resources, competences, and relational factors. The authors theorize that the three approaches are interdependent and, using resource-advantage (R-A) theory as a framework, develop an integrative model. This model proposes that the three approaches are linked by means of relationships among (1) alliance competence, (2) complementary resources, (3) idiosyncratic resources, and (4) cooperation. A test of the model, using a sample of alliance professionals, finds support for the theory that the three approaches are, indeed, interdependent and that resources, construed in the manner of R-A theory, influence alliance success through positional advantage.     

The auditor’s strategy selection for negotiation with management: Flexibility of initial accounting position and nature of the relationship

The audit partner is usually the first mover in a negotiation with client management and has an intended strategy set going into such a negotiation. Negotiation strategies that make up the set may be integrative (both parties can gain or at least not lose) and distributive (there is a winner and a loser). We focus on five strategies: two integrative (expanding the agenda or problem solving) and three distributive (contending, conceding or compromising) and measure the audit partner’s intent to use these strategies’ associated tactics. We report the results of an audit negotiation experiment in which 140 highly experienced audit partners planned a negotiation in response to a case scenario that incorporated two key theoretical variables: the flexibility of the client initial accounting position and the nature of the prior relationship between the auditor and client management. In addition to intended tactics, we also examine these two variables’ effects on commitment to the goal of reducing net income. Our results indicate that in contrast to findings in the generic negotiation literature that show negotiators have a preference for distributive tactics and have difficulty employing integrative ones, our audit partners generally favored the use of integrative tactics over distributive ones when entering negotiations, irrespective of circumstance. However, the two theorized variables led to particular strategic choices when distributive tactics were intended; for example, when the audit partner perceived he or she was facing a client management that was inflexible in its initial accounting position, the partner was more likely to use contending tactics and less likely to use conceding and compromising tactics. Finally, we discuss implications of these results for practice and research.