Illuminating the ‘Face’ of Justice: A Meta‐Analytic Examination of Leadership and Organizational Justice

A significant body of research has described effective leader behaviours and has connected these behaviours to positive employee outcomes. However, this research has yet to be systematically integrated with organizational justice research to describe how leader behaviours inform justice perceptions. Therefore, we conduct a meta‐analysis (k = 166, N = 46,034) to investigate how three types of leader behaviours (task, relational, and change) inform four dimensions of organizational justice (procedural, distributive, interpersonal, and informational) referenced to the leader and to the organization. Further, we examine the joint impact of leader behaviours and justice perceptions on social exchange quality (i.e., leader–member exchange), task performance, and job satisfaction. Our results suggest that leader behaviours differentially inform leader‐ and organization‐focused justice perceptions, and the joint effect of leader behaviours and justice perceptions offer more nuanced explanations for outcomes.     

The investment behavior of buyout funds: Theory and evidence

We analyze the determinants of buyout funds’ investment decisions. We argue that when there is imperfect competition for private equity funds, the timing of funds’ investment decisions, their risk-taking behavior, and their subsequent returns depend on changes in the demand for private equity, conditions in the credit market, and fund managers’ ability to influence perceptions of their talent. We investigate these hypotheses using a proprietary dataset of 207 U.S. buyout funds that invested in 1,957 buyout targets over a 30-year period. Our dataset contains precisely dated cash inflows and outflows in every portfolio company, links every buyout target to an identifiable buyout fund, and is free from reporting and survivor biases. Thus, we are able to characterize every buyout fund's precise investment choices. Our findings are as follows. First, established funds accelerate their investment flows and earn higher returns when investment opportunities improve, competition for deal flow eases, and credit market conditions loosen. Second, the investment behavior of first-time funds is less sensitive to market conditions. Third, younger funds invest in riskier buyouts, in an effort to establish a track record. Finally, following periods of good performance, funds become more conservative, and this effect is stronger for first-time funds.     

Integrating Negative Social Cues in Tobacco Packaging: A Novel Approach to Discouraging Smokers

Smoking is an international health crisis. Tobacco packaging is an important vehicle to convey antismoking messages, which to date have been predominantly limited to fear‐based health appeals. Using an experimental approach, we examine whether a novel alternative—using negative social cues on packaging—is effective at discouraging smoking. Our results support the notion that packaging which conveys to smokers that “others” view smoking negatively is sufficient to trigger feelings of self‐consciousness, which in turn reduces smoking intentions. This approach is particularly effective in “isolated” smokers who do not see smoking as identity‐relevant or congruent with their social self. These findings suggest that for a particular segment of the smoking population, the integration of negative social cues on packaging may be an effective complement to current fear‐based appeals.     

Understanding political−economic development in the American South

We propose an empirical strategy to adjudicate between competing explanations of political–economic development in the American South. This strategy evaluates the dynamic relationship between partisan control of representative institutions and economic performance, both before and after major partisan realignment forces and economic conditions had structurally transformed the American South. The political–economic development of low‐capacity Southern states since the early 1980s reflects a “virtuous cycle” of rising income growth and partisan balance of state legislatures mutually reinforcing one another. These findings reconcile conflicting claims regarding the catalytic nature of political–economic development coevolution in the American South and have broader implications for the study of comparative political–economic development.     

Word-of-mouth communication and search

We develop a word-of-mouth search model where information flows from the old to the new generation for an experience good with unknown quality. We study the features of the social network that determine product quality and welfare and characterize the demand-side (under provision of search effort) and supply-side (inefficient entry by firms) factors that result in inefficiencies. One striking result is to show that the more connected but also the less-unequal a friendship network is (in the sense of second order stochastic dominance of the degree distribution), the less can disreputable (low-quality) firms thrive in equilibrium.     

I guess that is fair: How the efforts of other customers influence buyer price fairness perceptions

Past research has demonstrated that consumers' price fairness judgments are influenced by comparisons between the offer price they receive and the prices paid by other consumers for the same product offering. In today's digital age, reference points for purchases are more prevalent than ever. However, investigations on how certain inputs of the transaction affect these judgments is lacking. Specifically, extant research has failed to account for how the purchase efforts of other consumers can influence one's own price fairness evaluations. Moreover, relatively little empirical research has endeavored to understand the simultaneous cognitive and affective processes that explain how consumers arrive at price fairness judgments. To address these gaps in the literature, we introduce two studies aimed at understanding the process through which the salient efforts of referent consumers serve to mitigate perceptions of price unfairness when two customers pay different prices for the same product. The findings support a dual‐process model whereby the efforts of other (referent) customers serve to simultaneously reduce buyer anger and increase buyer understanding of the price disparity, ultimately mitigating perceptions of price unfairness.     

‘Get paid,get out’: online resistance to call centre labour in Canada

This qualitative content analysis of 503 anonymous online reviews of 52 Canadian call centres posted on RateMyEmployer.ca explores how forms of resistance, alienation and emotional labour are expressed outside of the workplace. Our study finds that digital publics are producing emotive insurgencies and networks of support within marginalised communities that undermine employers’ attempts at deadening the workforce. The reviews exemplify worker awareness of exploitation as some connect these issues to broader socio‐economic factors that are beyond their control. While many offer tactics to challenge and destabilise their working conditions and culture as well as heartfelt and sarcastic warnings of what one might expect if they pursue call centre employment, others use the online space as a means of venting frustrations, eliciting empathies and expressing sentiments of hope(lessness).     

Uncertainty Estimation for Pseudo‐Bayesian Inference Under Complex Sampling

Social and economic studies are often implemented as complex survey designs. For example, multistage, unequal probability sampling designs utilised by federal statistical agencies are typically constructed to maximise the efficiency of the target domain level estimator (e.g. indexed by geographic area) within cost constraints for survey administration. Such designs may induce dependence between the sampled units; for example, with employment of a sampling step that selects geographically indexed clusters of units. A sampling‐weighted pseudo‐posterior distribution may be used to estimate the population model on the observed sample. The dependence induced between coclustered units inflates the scale of the resulting pseudo‐posterior covariance matrix that has been shown to induce under coverage of the credibility sets. By bridging results across Bayesian model misspecification and survey sampling, we demonstrate that the scale and shape of the asymptotic distributions are different between each of the pseudo‐maximum likelihood estimate (MLE), the pseudo‐posterior and the MLE under simple random sampling. Through insights from survey‐sampling variance estimation and recent advances in computational methods, we devise a correction applied as a simple and fast postprocessing step to Markov chain Monte Carlo draws of the pseudo‐posterior distribution. This adjustment projects the pseudo‐posterior covariance matrix such that the nominal coverage is approximately achieved. We make an application to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health as a motivating example and we demonstrate the efficacy of our scale and shape projection procedure on synthetic data on several common archetypes of survey designs.