Strategy

Organizations emphasize specific production practices to deal with authenticity pressures, but the practices that signal authenticity to audiences must be continually adapted when production environments are unstable. Changes in the environment can make production practices suddenly infeasible, compelling organizations to perform in different ways the highly visible practices that audiences have come to associate with authenticity.

We use topic modeling to construct novel news-based measures for tracking energy markets. Our parsimonious yet comprehensive set of indicators summarizes the information content of millions of news articles and forecasts oil spot, futures, and energy company stock returns, and changes in oil volatility, production, and inventories. Using an econometrically robust framework to evaluate both in- and out-of-sample predictive performance, we show that our measures are not spanned by existing text and nontext variables.

To appreciate how fundamental a role cement plays in human society, one must first understand the importance of the carbon cycle in the evolution of the planet. Carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the atmosphere dissolves in seawater and gets metabolized by living corals and plankton that eventually die and decompose into ocean sediments. The sediments are compressed over millions of years until they become limestone – a natural storage vault for elemental carbon, like coal, oil and gas.

Entering new markets is crucial for technology startups to scale, yet these ventures often face high uncertainty about demand in these markets. This study examines how the composition of initial users shapes startups’ new market growth amid such uncertainty. It theorizes that startups face a learning tradeoff when targeting a foreign market: Local initial users, who are more familiar to the startups, provide clearer signals due to shared language and norms; however, more representative foreign users provide more transferable insights about the target market.

We study the dynamic pooling of multiple orders into a single trip, a strategy widely adopted by online delivery platforms. When an order has to be dispatched, the platform must determine which (if any) of the available orders to pool it with, weighing the immediate efficiency gains against the uncertain, differential benefits of holding each order for future pooling opportunities. In this paper, we demonstrate the effectiveness of using the delivery distance as a proxy for opportunity cost via a potential-based greedy algorithm (PB).

Elected officials are increasingly extreme. Research trying to understand this trend has tended to focus on structural factors, such as primary elections and changes in the supply of candidates. Less emphasis has been placed on psychological perspectives. The current research advances such a perspective. Leveraging research on attitudes, we investigate when and why people prefer extreme over moderate candidates from their own party. We posit that the identity relevance of people's attitudes plays a key role.

In the Newsvendor problem, the goal is to guess the number that will be drawn from some distribution, with asymmetric consequences for guessing too high vs. too low. In the data-driven version, the distribution is unknown, and one must work with samples from the distribution. Data-driven Newsvendor has been studied under many variants: additive vs. multiplicative regret, high probability vs. expectation bounds, and different distribution classes. This paper studies all combinations of these variants, filling in many gaps in the literature and simplifying many proofs.

Constituency mobilization is a widely prevalent corporate political strategy, yet we lack systematic evidence on the scope of its effectiveness. One emerging form of constituency mobilization is user mobilization, wherein a company focuses on rallying political support among its users. This approach differs from traditional lobbying, which relies on tightly controlled insider strategies to exert influence over lawmakers. In our study of user mobilization by platform-based companies in the U.S.

Strategic fit is intrinsic to firm performance, but it is difficult to develop and maintain both external fit to a firm's environment, and internal fit—an alignment between firm objectives and activities. In this paper, we examine how scaling entrepreneurial firms develop strategic fit. We theorize that: 1) entrepreneurs at scaling firms are experienced in developing external, product-market fit, yet inexperienced in developing internal fit; 2) entrepreneurs can use firm strategy to create heuristics and assess the internal fit of novel opportunities.