Columbia Business School Research

We examine how signals of a candidate’s capability affect perceptions of that person’s commitment to an employer. In four experimental studies that use hiring managers as subjects, we test and show that managers perceive highly capable candidates to have lower commitment to the organization than less capable but adequate candidates and, as a result, penalize high-capability candidates in the hiring process.

Consumer robots are predicted to be employed in a variety of customer-facing situations. As these robots are designed to look and behave like humans, consumers attribute human traits to them—a phenomenon known as the “Eliza Effect.” In four experiments, we show that the anthropomorphism of a consumer robot increases psychological warmth but decreases attitudes, due to uncanniness. Competence judgments are much less affected and not subject to a decrease in attitudes.

Do men and women generate the same benefits from using their social ties? This study addresses this question by examining how resources are allocated within social networks. Prior research has commonly attributed observed gender differences in network benefits to the tendency for women to be embedded in networks that are poorer in social and economic resources. Implicit in this explanation is that if women had access to more valuable networks they would receive similar benefits as do men.

While most research explaining the persistence of gender inequality has focused on how decision makers’ own biases perpetuate inequities, a growing body of work points to mechanisms of bias that may arise when a decision maker is concerned with satisfying a third party or audience. Using data from 2007 to 2013 on 2,310 members of a popular networking organization for entrepreneurs, I examine the extent to which the presence of third parties leads to gender inequality in resource exchange, or connections to potential clients.

Admission control and service rate speedup may be used during periods of congestion to minimize customer waiting in different service settings. In a healthcare setting, this can mean sending patients to alternative care facilities that may take more time and/or provide less ideal treatment. While waiting can be detrimental to patient outcomes, strategies used to control congestion can also be costly. In this work, we examine a multi-server queueing system that considers both admission control and speedup.

Across a field study and four experiments, we examine how social norms and scrutiny affect decisions about adding members of underrepresented populations (e.g., women, racial minorities) to groups. When groups are scrutinized, we theorize that decision makers strive to match the diversity observed in peer groups due to impression management concerns, thereby conforming to the descriptive social norm. We examine this first in the context of U.S. corporate boards, where firms face pressure to increase gender diversity.

The present research examines intercultural accuracy—people's ability to make accurate judgments about outgroup values—and the role of social projection processes. Across four studies, U.S. and British participants showed low overall levels of intercultural accuracy for Chinese students’ individualistic and collectivistic values. In line with recent changes toward individualism in China, we observed different levels of intercultural accuracy, hinging on whether the criterion values of Chinese were assessed before (2001) or after (2015) this shift.

This study proposes and tests a theoretical framework that relates a firm’s imitation strategy and its interaction with R&D resources to incremental and radical innovation. The analysis of a panel dataset of 1381 Chinese manufacturing firms in the period 2008–2014 shows that imitation strategy is positively related to incremental innovation but has an inverted U-shaped relationship with radical innovation.

This appendix provides a contrast to the variance decomposition approach for identifying the two types of news in accounting data. This approach, explained in Callen (2009), assumes the Vuolteenaho (2002) model, implemented in a vector autoregressive (VAR) scheme to capture the linear dependencies among multiple time series of indicator variables.

This paper modifies the standard returns-earnings regression in accounting research to show that financial reports convey both cash-flow news and discount-rate (expected-return) news. The paper points to the realization principle, associated as it is with the resolution of risk, as the accounting feature that conveys expected-return news. The modified returns-earnings regressions indicate that the information so conveyed pertains to priced risk.

This article provides a critical review of what is known about affect regulation in relation to consumption behavior. Based on numerous findings from psychology, communication research, and consumer research, we identify a core set of general principles of affect regulation in consumer behavior. First, we define affect regulation, clarify its relations to the concepts of coping and compensatory consumption, and refine the emerging concept of “displaced coping.” We then review the generic strategies used in the regulation of general negative affective states.

We develop theory on how a contentious moral market can develop, and we test it with data from a study of the commercialization of Buddhist temples in China from 2006 to 2016, as local government officials try to boost the local economy by transforming temples into tourist enterprises that charge admission fees. The practice is resisted by monks and the public such that the central government, which values public appearances of social justice, is pressured to support their resistance to local officials’ economic demands.

Maintenance service plans (MSPs) are contracts for the provision of maintenance by a service provider to an equipment operator. These plans can have different payment structures and risk allocations, which induce various types of incentives for agents in the service chain. How do such structures affect service performance and service chain value? We provide an empirical answer to this question by using a unique panel data covering the sales and service records of more than 700 diagnostic body scanners.

Firms exhibit heterogeneity in size, productivity, and internal structure, and this is true even within the same industry. It has been thought since the time of Adam Smith that a firm's internal structure affects its productivity through the channel of gains from specialization. Our paper provides evidence of a link between an organization's culture — specifically the trust environment — and its internal structure. We show experimentally that exogenously imposed culture endogenously leads to variation in organizational form.

We study the dynamic mechanism design problem of a seller that repeatedly auctions independent items over a discrete time horizon to buyers that face a cumulative budget constraint. A driving motivation behind our model is the emergence of real-time bidding markets for online display advertising in which such budgets are prevalent. We assume the seller has a strong form of limited commitment: she commits to the rules of the current auction but cannot commit to those of future auctions.

The authors propose a quantitative approach for describing entertainment products, in a way that allows for improving the predictive performance of consumer choice models for these products. Their approach is based on the media psychology literature, which suggests that people’s consumption of entertainment products is influenced by the psychological themes featured in these products. They classify psychological themes on the basis of the “character strengths” taxonomy from the positive psychology literature (Peterson and Seligman 2004).

Novel measures of technology popularity and usage were constructed and tested to assess the returns available from patenting within mainstream versus more-exotic technology-classification codes (or pairs of codes). <em>Popularity</em> suggested the frequency density with which technological codes (pairs) were most frequently found among competitors' patents. <em>Usage</em> measured whether firms dominated particular technology codes (or pairs of codes) relative to competitors.

We use five years of bidding data to examine the reaction of advertisers to widely disseminated press on the lack of effectiveness of brand search advertising (queries that contain the firm's name) found in a large experiment run by eBay (Blake, Nosko and Tadelis, 2015). We estimate that 11% of firms that did not face competing ads on their brand keywords, matching the case of eBay, discontinued the practice of brand search advertising.

As a result of the digital revolution, new topics and themes have entered consumer research, and, as the digital revolution enters a new phase, additional new concepts and research questions will emerge. To illustrate the variety of themes on digital technology that consumer researchers have studied, I am presenting a collection of five articles that represent this active new research area. Moreover, I will look into the future and propose a research agenda to address key consumer behavior issues occurring during the next phase of the digital transformation.

Using data on the entire population of businesses registered in the states of California and Massachusetts between 1995 and 2011, we decompose the well-established gender gap in entrepreneurship. We show that female-led ventures are 63 percentage points less likely than male-led ventures to obtain external funding (i.e., venture capital). However, investors' gendered preferences can, at most, explain about 35 percent of this differential (or 22 percentage points).

In this article, we provide a descriptive account of how people from different generations vary in their use of financial management technology, their access credit markets, and how they finance consumption and incur financial costs and penalties. We use a detailed panel of transaction-level data from Iceland on individual spending, incomes, balances, and credit limits from a personal financial management software. We find that technology adoption is faster for millennials, but use of consumer credit and financial penalties are higher for older generations.

In the modern fast-paced workplace, employees are required to be creative under various levels of stress. In understanding the relationship between stress and creativity, organizational scholars and practitioners have largely focused on how stress affects cognition, while overlooking the role that physiological responses to stress might play in creative performance.

This article studies contracts between a principal and an agent that are robust to information asymmetries about measurement quality. Our main result is that an information asymmetry about measurement quality not only reduces the usefulness of a given performance measure for stewardship purposes, it also qualitatively changes the way the performance measure is used if the information asymmetry is sufficiently large.

The aim of this paper is to examine how an acquirer’s diversification strategy shapes the multiple dimensions of inventive activity. Differing from prior research, we use a set of indicators to investigate this phenomenon. In particular, we consider three different but complementary dimensions of inventive quality: technological impact, originality of the synthesized knowledge streams, and generality of applicability across different technological domains.

Advances in information technology have enabled consumers to connect and communicate as they never have before. This chapter conceptualizes information and the digital machines that enable contemporary connection and communication as being part of a “Moveable Feast.” A brief historical review tracing the impact and evolution of information technology on consumers’ lives and the marketplace is first provided.

We introduce a novel approach to measure the founding strategic differentiation of startups and its relationship to follow-on performance. We use natural language processing and historical websites to estimate the similarity between the founding website of an individual startup, the historical website of public firms at the startup's founding year, and the founding website of other startups founded in the same year. We propose that distance in the value proposition stated in these websites represents differentiation in the market.

The current research explores the role of power in moral decision-making. Some work suggests that power increases utilitarianism; other work suggests power increases deontological judgments. Conversely, we propose that power can both increase and decrease both deontological and utilitarian decisions by building on two recent insights in moral psychology. First, we utilize the moral orientation scale to assess four thinking styles that jointly predict moral dilemma decisions.

Mass customization interfaces typically guide consumers through the configuration process in a sequential manner, focusing on one product attribute after the other. What if this standardized customization experience were personalized for consumers on the basis of how they process information? A series of large-scale field and experimental studies, conducted with Western and Eastern consumers, shows that matching the interface to consumers’ culture-specific processing style enhances the effectiveness of mass customization.

The second Global Business Anthropology Summit was held May 28-29, 2019 at Fordham University in New York City. The 2019 Summit brought together 160 industry practitioners and academic scholars to build upon the work of the 2018 Summit. The 2019 Summit was explicitly and emphatically forward thinking and action oriented to advance anthropological ideas in business.

We (1) propose that evidence linking grit and performance is mixed because the measure used to assess grit—the Short Grit (Grit-S) scale (2)—captures only perseverance, not passion, whereas the definition of grit encompasses both perseverance and passion (3). Our studies find that the combination of perseverance (measured through the whole Grit-S scale) and passion (measured through the passion attainment scale) predicted higher performance.

Over the past four decades, government debt as a fraction of GDP has been on an upward trajectory in advanced economies, approaching levels not reached since World War II. While normative macroeconomic theories can explain the increase in the level of debt in certain periods as a response to macroeconomic shocks, they cannot explain the broad-based long-run trend in debt accumulation. In contrast, political economy theories can explain the long-run trend as resulting from an aging population, rising political polarization, and rising electoral uncertainty across advanced economies.

We consider the compensation design problem of a firm that hires a salesperson to exert effort to increase demand. We assume both demand and supply to be uncertain with sales being the smaller of demand and supply and assume that, if demand exceeds supply, then unmet demand is unobservable (demand censoring).

Dietary variety increases food intake, but it is unclear if sensory differences elicit increases in eating-related behaviors. Using a 4×3 between-subject pilot experiment, we examined if increasing sensory variety (control, color, shape, both color and shape) and priming individuals to notice differences or similarities in the foods (positive, neutral, negative) influenced ad libitum proximal intake, liking, and willingness to purchase pears and peppers among 164 Greater Boston adults >18y/o.

When carefully planned, language can be a strategic tool for managing a brand’s communication to target customers and for building brand equity. This paper explains how and why managers should conduct a brand language audit -- a comprehensive inventory of the many and varied linguistic devices used by brands in the category -- and then use the findings from the audit to develop a brand language brief. The brand language brief is a blueprint for crafting a distinctive language for a brand.

The tendency to see life as zero-sum exacerbates political conflicts. Six studies (N = 3223) examine the relationship between political ideology and zero-sum thinking: the belief that one party's gains can only be obtained at the expense of another party's losses. We find that both liberals and conservatives view life as zero-sum when it benefits them to do so. Whereas conservatives exhibit zero-sum thinking when the status quo is challenged, liberals do so when the status quo is being upheld.

People's tendency to rate themselves as above average is often taken as evidence of undue self-regard. Yet, everyday experience is occasioned with feelings of inadequacy and insecurity. How can these 2 experiences be reconciled? Across 12 studies (N = 2,474; including 4 preregistered studies) we argue that although people do indeed believe that they are above average they also hold themselves to standards of comparison that are well above average.