Management & Organization Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2789
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Item COLLABORATIVE PROBLEM-SOLVING IN THE INNOVATION ECOSYSTEM(2022) Chen, Mo; Waguespack, David M; Zenger, Todd R; Business and Management: Management & Organization; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation, I use archival data and a formal model to investigate how actors (firms) organize their innovation and coordinate in an innovation ecosystem and what the evolutionary outcome of the ecosystem is. Empirically I study Linux Kernel, the most commercially important open-source project. As of 2017, Linux has more than 99% of the market share in supercomputing, more than 90% market share of public clouds, and around 82% market share of smartphone operating systems. With over 1700 subsystems and over 50000 files, the Linux kernel is one of the most complex systems in innovation history. Moreover, unpaid work only contributes 8.2% to Linux kernel development. Ten big corporations contribute around 40% of development efforts (The Linux Foundation, 2017). Characterized by diverse commercial interests and high-level knowledge heterogeneity and complexity, Linux Kernel provides an ideal setting to understand open collaboration and coordination in an ecosystem. The first chapter investigates how individual innovations evolve in a complex ecosystem. While innovation outcomes have been extensively studied in strategy and related literature, prior studies often abstract away from the interdependent nature of innovation within broader assemblies or systems of technologies. Adopting the problem-solving perspective, I study how three types of complexity — technological, cognitive, and incentive — impact the coordination process of a proposed innovation becoming integrated into the shared infrastructure of the ecosystem. By focusing on Linux Kernel development, a rare setting where the technological and actor interdependence are both observable, I provide evidence of how technological interdependence, a critical concept in organization design, is associated with difficulty in reaching satisfactory solutions. The research context provides a setting to study how heterogeneous interests and potential conflicts between system participants impact innovation outcomes. The results also show that cognitive complexity, measured by the uniqueness of innovation, has a U-shaped relationship with innovation integration. In the second chapter of my dissertation, I investigate the tradeoff between discovery and divergence in the open form of collaboration in the innovation ecosystem. Building on the insight from problem-solving literature, I argue that strategic knowledge accumulation, i.e., actors shape knowledge creation based on self-interest, can create potential conflicts between the system and individual actors and thus impact the open innovation outcomes significantly. I then use a simulation approach to investigate the appropriateness of various coordination mechanisms for innovation systems with varying degrees of complexity and different patterns of the same level of interaction. Results show that both the level of complexity and the way the attributions interact impact the effectiveness of coordination mechanisms. Without system-level incentives, granting veto power to the individual actor would increase strategic knowledge accumulation hazard and thus decrease performance when complexity exists. With the system-level incentive, the composite solution and veto power could improve the overall system performance for systems of a wide range of complexity and interaction pattern. Yet modularized or "core-peripheral" systems see the best performance when no coordination mechanism exists. In the third chapter, I explore the evolutionary pattern of an innovation ecosystem and its components. While research has investigated how interdependence at the system-level impacts innovation in the ecosystem extensively, little is known about how micro-structure interdependence and local social environment impact individual components' evolution within an ecosystem. Utilizing Design Structure Matrices (DSMs), I explore the development of the Linux Kernel technological system and the ecosystems it is embedded in. The results, while exploratory, suggest that component level interdependence and the alignment between technological structure and designed communication channel are associated with an increased chance of component survival. The results also show that local environments' social composition, such as commercial participation percentage and concentration of power, have implications for the component survival.Item PEER EFFECTS IN ORGANIZATIONS: THE ROLE OF INFORMATION, COMPETITIVE, AND SOCIAL ENVIRONMENTS(2020) LEE, HYEUN Jung; Beckman, Christine M; Ding, Waverly W; Business and Management: Management & Organization; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)My dissertation seeks to answer questions about how peers influence performance in organizations. Specifically, my research investigates the information environment in which firms operate, competition among peers, and the social environment in which organizations are embedded. These organizational conditions shape the extent to which peers share information and influence one another. Empirically, I examine my research questions in an educational setting and a corporate setting, featuring datasets collected from multiple years of fieldwork. In the first part of the dissertation, I focus on security analysts and explore reasons why female analysts reap systematically lower returns from peers compared to male analysts. I argue that women face challenges in accessing and processing information from their male peers due to segregation of information within organizations. I explore this information mechanism using a policy (Regulation Fair Disclosure) that changed the information environment among security analysts. In the second and third parts of my dissertation, I focus on how performance is evaluated among peers and the broader social environment in which organizations are embedded. Specifically, I ask: 1) What is the role of competition in predicting the direction of peer effects? 2) How do gender stereotypes in the social context influence the magnitude of peer effects? In exploring these questions, I leverage random roommate assignment as well as teacher assignments in an educational setting.Item Essays on Organizational Choices under Uncertainty(2017) Sharma, Siddharth; Beckman, Christine; Chung, Wilbur; Business and Management: Management & Organization; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Environmental uncertainty has been widely studied by organizational theorists and strategy scholars. In this dissertation, I aim to contribute towards a further understanding of the implications of environmental uncertainty on organizational choices. I develop a general framework, across the two chapters, which links the effect of uncertainty on organizational choices, mediated by changes in the competitive landscape. In my two chapters, I look at different types of uncertainty namely, state uncertainty and effect uncertainty. I explore how these types of uncertainties impact the competitive landscape either by compressing performance difference between organizations and changing the viability of positions on the landscape respectively. As a consequence of the changing landscape, I study the strategic behavior response of organizations as they engage in risk-taking or repositioning. I test my theoretical predictions across two interesting empirical constructs of Formula 1 car racing and the Consumer Electronics Show. Also, I also employ the use of a simulation model in my second chapter to supplement my empirical context.Item Essays on Motives and Market Outcomes(2015) Stroube, Bryan Kaiser; Waguespack, David M.; Business and Management: Management & Organization; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the existence of heterogeneous motives in markets, particularly how a tension between profit motives and other utility can shape outcomes for organizations and individuals. I explore this tension in the context of biases, organizational identity, and investment behavior. Each of the three empirical chapters employs decision-level data from a different online crowdfunding platform. Academic researchers and the general public are increasingly interested in the phenomenon of "crowdfunding." The term, however, encompasses an incredibly diverse set of activities---ranging from the facilitation of for-profit start-up investments to the charitable funding of medical procedures. This diversity can make it difficult to generalize research insights from studies of any particular instance of the phenomenon. In the introductory chapter I develop a general framework for understanding the source of observed behavior on crowdfunding platforms given some simple assumptions about platform policies.The goal is to provide context for the subsequent chapters of the dissertation. The first empirical chapter examines biases against demographic groups, which are typically explained by one of two mechanisms: either decision makers have a taste for one demographic group over another, or demographics are employed as informational proxies for other unobserved but economically important traits. These mechanisms are difficult to empirically untangle despite the theoretical and practical importance of separating them. I attempt to do so in a Chinese peer-to-peer lending market by leveraging a loan guarantee policy that reduces the economic rationale for lenders to discriminate on borrower demographics such as gender and geography. Comparison of pre- and post-policy periods therefore provides a fruitful tool for measuring the degree of taste versus informational bias. I find that female borrowers appear to receive a preferential informational bias but a negative taste bias, while lenders' geographic bias toward borrowers located in the same province appears to be driven predominately by informational processes and not taste. These findings have implications for multiple sets of decision makers and underscore the theoretical importance of accounting for motives. Chapter two examines the potentially conflicting investment motives found on a non-profit hybrid identity crowdfunding platform, where simultaneous market-like and charity-like motives may lead lenders to respond differently to funding requests from entrepreneurs who appear to have high economic ability and high personal need. I survey actual lenders on the platform to measure their stated preferences for borrowers who fit each of these categories. I find that 1) lenders vary in their preference for these categories and this preference is correlated with their demographics, and 2) past loans made by lenders with an above-average preference for both need and ability were funded faster than loans in other categories. These results highlight how actors' preferences are largely endogenous to the market in which they are observed. In the final chapter I present the results of a simple online experiment conducted in conjunction with a peer-to-peer lending website. Potential lenders were presented randomized versions of the platform's lender registration web page. The content of the page varied in whether it promoted the potential social benefit of lending versus only the financial benefit. No difference was found between the treatment and control groups. The experiment provides some insight into how lenders self-select into crowdfunding activity and may serve as a model for similar experiments on other platforms.Item THE BENEFITS AND BURDENS OF HIGH REPUTATION DURING DISRUPTIONS: THE ROLE OF MEDIA REPUTATION, ORGANIZATIONAL IDENTIFICATION, AND DISRUPTION TYPE(2012) Zavyalova, Anastasiya; Reger, Rhonda K; Business and Management: Management & Organization; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Organizational researchers are increasingly interested in the role of social approval assets, such as reputation and celebrity, for financial success of organizations. In this three-essay dissertation I examine the role of these assets when an organization is involved in negative disruptive events. In Essay 1, I introduce four media generated organizational types: celebrity, infamous, peripheral, and unfamiliar organizations and develop a theoretical framework and propositions that examine how stakeholder decisions whether or not to transact with an organization after disruptions depend on the type of organization under examination. In Essay 2, I argue theoretically and find empirically that stakeholder reactions to disruptions depend on the level of organizational identification. On a sample of on-campus murders in U.S. colleges and universities in 2001-2009, I find that universities receive fewer applications after murders, and this effect is stronger for ranked universities. Additionally, percentage of alumni donating to schools increases after on-campus murders, but only in ranked universities. I test the robustness of these findings using different operationalizations of disruptions and stakeholder groups. The results indicate that reputation is a liability during disruptions when stakeholders under examination have low levels of organizational identification and reputation is a buffer for reactions by high-identification stakeholders. In Essay 3, I argue that the amplifying role of organizational reputation is due to differences in news coverage of disruptions in high-reputation compared to low-reputation organizations. The results of empirical analysis of news coverage of 106 on-campus murders indicate that even after controlling for the characteristics of the event, disruptions in high-reputation organizations receive more coverage. I further examine this finding using content analysis of articles that covered four pairs of similar murders that took place in ranked vs. non-ranked universities. I find that not only do disruptions in high-reputation organizations receive more news coverage, but the coverage is more in-depth and the name of a high-reputation organization is more likely to appear in the article title. Taken together, the findings advance research on the role of media reputation, reputation, and organizational identification for organizations experiencing negative disruptions.Item Essays on high-status fallacies(2012) Malter, Daniel; Goldfarb, Brent; Business and Management: Management & Organization; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation comprises three essays. Each essay challenges some of the commonly held beliefs about and provides novel insights into the role of status in markets. In essay 1, I study the causal effect of producer status on the price premiums producers are able to charge for their products, the underlying cause for this premium, and producers' incentives to invest in quality under a fixed status hierarchy. In essays 2 and 3, I investigate on the organizational and individual level, respectively, how high-status affiliations affect an audience's evaluation of a social actor's identity. The contribution of these papers lies in highlighting reasons for, mechanisms through, and conditions under which high-status affiliations become a liability. Essay 1 addresses the recent debate about the causality, cause, and consequence of returns to status on the organizational level. I exploit the \textit{grand cru} classification of chateaux of the M\'{e}doc created in 1855 as an unambiguous and exogenous status signal. I study its effect on wine prices and the incentive to invest in quality over a period of time during which information about producer and product quality has become increasingly munificent. As for the causality of status effects, I find evidence for causal returns to organizational status, but these returns are substantially overestimated if quality and reputation are not accurately controlled on the product level. As for the cause of status effects, I find that uncertainty is not a necessary condition and the taste for high-status products is a sufficient condition for returns to organizational status. As for the consequence of status effects, I find that higher-status producers' greater incentives to invest in quality are insufficient to enforce a separating equilibrium in producers' quality choices. The study cautions that causality claims in the status literature hinge upon proper identification, that returns to status can have alternative root causes, and that status hierarchies need not enshrine the quality hierarchy among producers. In essay 2, I propose that an organization's growth potential may suffer if its identity is confounded with or eclipsed by the high-status organizations with which it collaborates and competes. I devise two network measures to capture the degree to which identities are confounded or eclipsed. The theory is then tested with data on U.S. venture capital firm syndication between 1995 and 2009. The more a VC firm's identity is confounded with the identities of co-syndicating high-status firms, the smaller is the likelihood that it is able to raise a new fund. Further, the likelihood that an eclipsed identity hurts a VC firm's chances to raise a new fund increases in the firm's status. These findings suggest that in status-based market competition an organization needs to justify its identity claim by distinguishing itself from the established elite. Essay 3 picks up on anecdotal evidence that some audiences discount actors with strong high-status affiliations. This contradicts the extant literature, which in its overwhelming majority finds that an actor's chance to find audience approval for his identity increases in the strength of his high-status affiliations. In this article, I develop a unifying theoretical framework that is able to reconcile such seemingly contradictory effects. I propose that the optimal strength of high-status affiliations depends on an audience's taste for uniqueness/conformity in identity and the audience's uncertainty about the actor. An experiment shows that taste and uncertainty have interdependent effects, suggests that the extant status literature rests on implicit assumptions about audience taste, and highlights two conditions under which strong high-status affiliations are detrimental. Studies of rank mobility in academia and in a fraternity provide corroborating evidence for one of these conditions. Conformity-seeking audiences penalize too strong high-status affiliations if their uncertainty about the actor is high. The implications for identity design and social structure are discussed.