Financial contracts as coordination device

We study the use of financial contracts as bid‐coordinating device in multi‐unit uniform price auctions. Coordination is required whenever firms face a volunteer's dilemma in pricing strategies: one firm (the “volunteer") is needed to increase the market clearing price. Volunteering, however, is costly, as inframarginal suppliers sell their entire capacity whereas the volunteer only sells residual demand. We identify conditions under which signing financial contracts solves this dilemma. We test our framework exploiting data on contract positions by large producers in the New York power market. Using a Monte Carlo simulation, we show that the contracting strategy is payoff dominant and provide estimates of the benefits of such strategy.     

Person or Job? Change in Person-Job Fit and Its Impact on Employee Work Attitudes over Time

Fit is generally conceptualized as a dynamic construct, but most research on person-environment fit has focused on fit in the current moment. We addressed this oversight by examining the dynamic relationships among person-job (PJ) fit, demand-ability (DA) fit, need-supply (NS) fit, and employee work attitudes over time using a three-wave survey design over a 12-month period. Results from 168 employees revealed that change in PJ fit was significantly related to changes in job satisfaction and affective organizational commitment. In addition, DA and NS fit changes were significantly and indirectly associated with job satisfaction and commitment changes through PJ fit change. We also found that increases in job demands and employee abilities significantly decreased DA fit, and increases in employee needs significantly decreased NS fit whereas increases in job supplies significantly increased NS fit. Finally, we examined age as an important moderator for employees’ reactions to PJ fit changes, and found that younger employees reacted more strongly to increases/decreases in PJ fit than did older employees.     

Consumer Attitudes toward Sponsors’ Counterambush Marketing Ads

Since the existing measures to prevent ambush marketing are widely ineffective, sponsors can use countercommunications, a public response to an ambushing attempt that aims to strengthen their own brand, relative to the ambusher. This research examines consumer responses to three types of counterambush marketing ads: humorous complaining, naming and shaming, and consumer education. Three experimental studies using both real and fictitious brands as well as different event settings indicate that a humorous counterad (vs. naming and shaming and consumer education counterads) results in more favorable consumer evaluations of the countermessage. The studies also show that perceptions of the advertising tactic's appropriateness mediate these effects and that a humorous counterad is only advantageous when consumers hold positive (vs. negative) attitudes toward the practice of ambush marketing. In addition, comparing the three types of counterads with a common sponsorship leveraging ad suggests that a humorous counterad and simply ignoring the ambusher produce equal perceptions of tactical appropriateness and similar positive indirect effects on consumer attitudes toward the ad. The studies thus provide implications for how sponsors can respond to ambushers.     

Choosing Your Object of Benevolence: A Field Experiment on Donation Options*

In a large natural field experiment, we explore the effect of providing donors with the opportunity of choosing the target country for their donations. We find that our treatment manipulation affects neither the average donation size nor the response rate. Only a small fraction of donors (3.5 percent) actually choose their object of benevolence. These donors give more than those who do not specify a recipient. However, based on previous donations, we can only provide indicative evidence that this might be a causal effect rather than a mere selection effect.     

Betting against sentiment? Seemingly unrelated anomalies and the low-risk effect

The negative CAPM alphas of high-beta and high-variance stocks are attributable to an unaccounted factor in the CAPM. We use eight seemingly unrelated anomalies to construct a composite factor in the spirit of the optimal orthogonal portfolio (FOP). Accounting for FOP re-establishes a positive relation between beta and average returns in time series regressions as well as cross-sectional and explains the negative alphas of high-beta and high-variance stocks. To analyze economic drivers behind FOP, we perform a horse race between leverage constraints, investor sentiment, and disagreement. Our results highlight investor sentiment as the most promising explanation for the low-risk effect.     

Retail customers' self-awareness: The deindividuation effects of others

The presence of others often affects retail shopping behavior. Other customers tend to increase one's self-awareness and cause negative self-conscious emotions. This research's findings suggest fellow customers also mitigate focal customers' evaluative concerns. Deindividuation theory, which posits that other customers create anonymity and reduce self-awareness, helps explain this phenomenon. A laboratory experiment and a quasi-experimental field study in a retail setting support the notion that the presence of other customers creates a deindividuation effect on a focal customer during unwanted social evaluation from salespeople. Results show a small group of other customers resulted in lower levels of emotional discomfort and behavioral inhibition than either an empty store or a larger group size, suggesting a U shape relationship.     

Shaping the Next Incarnation of Business Intelligence

The body of knowledge generated by Business Intelligence (BI) research is constantly extended by a stream of heterogeneous technological and organizational innovations. This paper shows how these can be bundled to a new vision for BI that is aligned with new requirements coming from socio-technical macro trends. The building blocks of the vision come from five research strings that have been extracted from an extensive literature review: BI and Business Process Management, BI across enterprise borders, new approaches of dealing with unstructured data, agile and user-driven BI, and new concepts for BI governance. The macro trend of the diffusion of cyber-physical systems is used to illustrate the argumentation. The realization of this vision comes with an array of open research questions and requires the coordination of research initiatives from a variety of disciplines. Due to the embedded nature of the addressed topics within general research areas of the Information Systems (IS) discipline and the linking pins that come with the underlying Dynamic Capabilities Approach such research provides a contribution to IS.     

Imperfect legal unbundling of monopolistic bottlenecks

We study an industry with a monopolistic bottleneck supplying an essential input to several downstream firms. Under legal unbundling the bottleneck must be operated by a legally independent upstream firm, which may be partly or fully owned by an incumbent active in downstream markets. Access prices are regulated but the upstream firm can perform non-tariff discrimination. Under perfect legal unbundling the upstream firm maximizes only own profits; with imperfections it is biased and to some extent accounts also for the incumbent’s downstream profits. We show that increasing the incumbent’s ownership share increases total output if the upstream firm’s bias is sufficiently small, while otherwise effects are ambiguous. Stronger regulation that reduces the bias without changing ownership shares generally increases total output. We also endogenize the bias and show that it can depend non-monotonically on the ownership share.