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Open Access
The Influence of Affect Regulation on Professional Skepticism
(2023-03-28) Osecki, Errol David; Thorne, Linda
Variances in professional skepticism are a primary cause of audit deficiencies, and thus understanding how these variations happen is of keen interest to practitioners, standard-setter, and regulators so that they can better manage professional skepticism. To this end, academics have created successively more explanatory professional skepticism models. One factor known to cause variations in professional skepticism is affect, yet how it causes these variations is still not understood as the most current models cannot explain why negative affect has been found to both increase and decrease professional skepticism. The purpose of this dissertation is to build a more explanatory model of professional skepticism with respect to affect by asking and answering the question, how does affect produce variations in professional skepticism? To answer the question, I first conduct a review of professional skepticism literature and relevant affect literature to identify affect regulation as a notable theory currently excluded from professional skepticism models. Affect regulation predicts people anticipate affect as it is being generated and change their behaviour to either up- or down-regulate the affect in service of some goal. This is notable as it can explain the contradictory results with respect to negative affect and professional skepticism observed in the literature. I further investigate this with an interview study, the results of which further support the inclusion of affect regulation into a new model of professional skepticism. Then, these insights are combined to create a new model of professional skepticism. Finally, I calibrate the model with an online experiment, the results of which fail to find significant results. Taken together, the new model of professional skepticism developed herein better explains how variations in professional skepticism occur and is of use to those looking to better manage affect to optimize professional skepticism.
Open Access
I'll Believe It When I See It: Widespread Use of Organizational Diversity Statements Undermines Perceived Sincerity and Organizational Attraction
(2022-12-14) Varty,Christianne; Hideg, Ivona
As diversity has become highly valued, organizational diversity statements as a means to attract prospective applicants have become widespread and normative. Consequently, it is critical to understand in this context whether they are effective at enhancing applicant attraction. Drawing on and integrating a signalling perspective of organizational initiatives (Bowen & Ostroff, 2004; Leslie, 2019) with the literature on authenticity (Lehman et al., 2019), I theorize that awareness of the prevalence of organizational diversity statements undermines a prospective applicant’s attraction to the organization because of lower perceived sincerity of the organization’s commitments. In Study 1 using qualitative methods and a sample of organizational diversity statements (i.e., Fortune 100), I establish that statements are indeed highly prevalent and sophisticated. I follow up on this finding with an experiment in Study 2 testing the negative effects of awareness of this prevalence on applicant attraction via decreased perceived sincerity. Next, I identify and test potential factors to mitigate this negative effect on applicant attraction to the organization by intervening on the proposed mediator of perceived sincerity. In Study 3, I appeal to values and particularly diversity as a social responsibility (vs. the business case for diversity) which I expect to be perceived as more sincere and which should thus increase applicant attraction even for those made aware of the prevalence of statements. Finally, in Study 4, I examine whether providing evidence of an organization’s accountability for making progress (i.e., workforce demographic data) can boost perceived sincerity by helping applicants see the organization as living up to its claims. Theoretical and practical implications of this work will be discussed.
Open Access
Governance and Responsibilities in the Context of Digital Platforms: Three Essays on the Interplay between Platform Governance and the Political Role of the Corporation
(2022-12-14) Fadlallah, Hussein; Phillips, Robert; Matten, Dirk
This dissertation sheds light on the critical research topic of platform governance defined broadly as the manner in which platform owners incentivize and influence the participation of autonomous users within their respective digital platforms. Platform governance – especially as it pertains to the exercise of voice – presents important challenges to traditional conceptions of the roles and responsibilities of private corporations. The dissertation comprises of three essays (chapters 2, 3, and 4) that collectively study (i) the political underpinnings of platform governance, (ii) the political roles and responsibilities that platform owners undertake within their respective platforms, and (iii) the intellectual structure that denotes extant research into the political role of the corporation. The first essay (chapter 2) reviews extant research into the political role of the corporation as a precursor for the study of platform governance. Using Web of Science to source a dataset of political articles published in management outlets and bibliometric techniques, I highlight the gaps and opportunities that denote extant research and propose a subsequent research agenda. The second essay (chapter 3) examines the limitations of underpowered conceptions of platform governance and proposes an alternative conception informed by political research within management. The study develops the arguments through invoking multiple literature strands coupled with three mini case studies that are leveraged for illustrative purposes. The third essay (chapter 4) examines the political mediator role of platforms owners through which they govern the engagement between platform communities and their respective political sphere. Using an inductive qualitative study of Twitter, I unpack the political practices and activities that denote platform governance. The practices are further contextualized by several factors that influence their adoption by platform owners. Collectively, the essays contribute to platform governance research through bringing fresh insights into extant understanding of the expansive roles and responsibilities of corporations in the digital age.
Open Access
Digitization of Financial Services and Firm Performance
(2022-12-14) Cao, Ting; Rungtusanatham, M. Johnny
This dissertation focuses on the digitization of financial services in financial institutions (FIs) and investigates whether and how digitization efforts can help firms improve their performance. We conduct two studies each answering key questions from a different angle. Study 1 starts with the increasing digital investments of FIs and investigates whether FIs can gain positive returns from their investment in emerging digital technologies. Given the lack of proper tools to measure how well FIs have utilized their digital investments, we propose a new approach using data envelopment analysis to capture returns on investment in digital technologies. Additionally, we adopt a two-stage analysis to further investigate the factors that could potentially improve the returns. Our findings show that FIs have had decreasing returns on investments in digital technologies over time. Particularly, it is the inefficient resource management, rather than the invested technologies themselves, that prevent FIs from realizing the benefits of digital investment. We suggest that it is essential for FIs to continuously assess and monitor the implementation of their digital investments and learn how to optimally deploy technological resources internally. Our study also shows that FIs can gain better performance by actively enhancing their innovation capability and collaborating with FinTech firms. Study 2 turns to the digitization of existing services that FIs provide to individual customers and examines whether elevating digitization capability would improve performance. We first define a new construct to capture the ability of FIs to actively utilize emerging digital technologies to digitize service offerings. We then propose a new theoretical model in which the drivers and outcomes of building digitization capability are linked together. To empirically test the model, we collect both primary data from a well-designed, web-based survey and secondary data from FI annual reports. We first show that elevating digitization capability is indeed beneficial for FIs to gain better performance. We also show that focusing on digital-savvy customers and aligning the front-office back-office process are two important drivers for FIs in the development of their digitization capability, and these efforts also indirectly help improve performance.
Open Access
Influencing a Field: The Role of Influencers in the Cosmetics Industry
(2022-12-14) Taltekin Guzel, Gulay; Fischer, Eileen Mary
The study explores the influx of influencers in the markets and how they change the practices of consumers by employing practice theoretics as enabling lens. It focuses on cosmetics industry by employing a multi-method qualitative approach including archival research, observational netnography and interview with consumers as well as professionals in the industry including influencers; brand owners and managers; marketing, talent and influencer agency professionals; makeup artists and lastly; a cosmetics magazine editor. Our preliminary findings consist of two level of change introduced by the influx of influencers to the market. The first one is practice entity changes including complexification of practice entities and valorization of new goals/meanings. Entity level changes are available to grasp or ignore by consumers and they are observed at the market level. On the other hand, consumer performance changes are the responses of consumers to practice entity changes. They are diversification, perfecting and rejecting strategies to plug and unplug changes into cosmetics practices. Therefore, the research aims to explain now only the institutional change brought by the influx of the influencers in the markets but also how consumption practices are shaped by consumers by responding to those changes in their daily routines. The study offers theoretical and practical implications as well as future research directions.
Open Access
When Your Outrage Is Not Mine: Consumer Responses to Expressions of Online Outrage towards Brands
(2022-12-14) Kermani, Mohammad Saeid; Darke, Peter R.
In the digital age, it is common for consumers to encounter expressions of moral condemnation towards brands and their marketing activities. These expressions of moral disapproval tend to have emotional overtones of outrage. Public expressions of outrage can serve to alert bystanders towards the presence of a norm violations and encourage others to also condemn the triggering event. Thus, outrage can serve as a tool for social influence. However, moral values can be held with deep conviction and consumers oftentimes encounter outrage that conflicts with personal values. In the present work, I explore situational factors in which outrage towards a brand can fail to influence observing-consumers to appraise the target brand negatively. Across eight studies (N = 2277), we address two questions: 1) How do consumers respond to outrage expressed towards a brand’s social value marketing campaign? 2) Is outrage effective in persuading observing-consumers to respond negatively towards potentially offensive advertisements? In examining the first research question, participants were presented social marketing campaigns with accompanying expressions of disapproval towards these campaigns that varied in terms of outrage. Across five studies, our findings suggest that outrage towards social value marketing campaigns can increase brand support among consumers who share the brand’s values. We find that this is because outrage (versus disapproval alone) is more threatening to those values. In examining the second research question, participants were presented potentially offensive advertisements with accompanying expressions of disapproval towards these advertisements that varied in terms of outrage. Across three studies, we provide evidence that the propensity of outrage in persuading observing-consumers to respond negatively towards potentially offensive advertisements is contingent on the severity of the ad’s norm violation. Furthermore, we demonstrate that expressions of disapproval without outrage can be more effective in persuading observers to evaluate brand’s negatively when the ad’s norm violation is perceived to be mild (versus more severe). This is because outrage in these instances can be perceived to be inappropriate reactions. Taken together, these findings suggest that outrage towards brands does not necessarily lead to negative brand consequences.
Open Access
Three Essays in Empirical Asset Pricing
(2022-12-14) Zhou, Xinyao; Kamstra, Mark J.
This dissertation consists of three essays in empirical asset pricing concerning how investor attention and social interactions impact information diffusion in financial markets. In the first essay, I investigate how different investor attention facilitates information diffusion through the customer-supplier network. I find that retail attention improves information incorporation into asset prices and plays a stabilizing role in financial markets. In contrast, institutional attention exhibits a diminished role if I control for retail attention. In addition, I show that the attention of a potential group of informed retail investors, local retail investors, plays a price-stabilizing role beyond that of uninformed (non-local) retail investors. My results provide a refinement on the view of the role played by retail investors. While the literature argues that retail investors destabilize prices, my findings suggest that at least a group of informed retail investors can stabilize financial markets. In the second essay, I examine how social connectedness affects fund manager stock holdings during the COVID19 pandemic. I exploit the recent outbreak of COVID-19 as an exogenous shock to people's beliefs on the future economic condition to examine how fund managers from different regions make different decisions on stock holdings. By applying a unique dataset from Facebook that measures social interaction among different regions, I am able to identify managers from COVID-19 hotspot counties and those highly socially connected to the hotspot counties. I am also able to identify fund managers that are skilled using standard methodologies exploiting fund alpha and other performance metrics. The results show that managers located in or socially connected to hotspot counties sold more stock holdings during the outbreak of COVID-19 in the first quarter of 2020. However, such reductions appear panic-driven given subsequent behavior and outcomes and in particular given the contrasting behavior and outcomes for skilled versus unskilled fund managers. The evidence suggests that social interaction can intensify salience bias even for institutional investors if they are unskilled, but skilled managers appear relatively impervious to the deleterious effect of social networking. Finally, in the third essay, I explore the role of institutional and retail attention in the context of the media news releases and find nuanced evidence of the costs and benefits to market price adjustments flowing from investor attention to news. I show that retail attention does indeed destabilize financial markets by inducing price overreactions to positive news, but only if it is from uninformed retail investors. I find that when retail attention destabilizes the market, it is when retail investors appear to struggle digesting complex business information and then only if the news is of a positive sentiment; negative sentiment news and retail investor attention are not associated with market instability, possibly a result of the well-known reluctance of retail investors to short sell. I also find that institutional attention plays a stabilizing role in any context I explore, complex or simple news, positive or negative news sentiment, with or without retail investor attention.
Open Access
Three Essays on the Influence of Climate Change on Corporate Behaviors
(2022-12-14) Zhang, Lei; Kanagaretnam, Kiridaran
This dissertation follows the “three papers” dissertation model. It consists of three independent papers but with a related theme focusing on the capital market effects of climate change. The macroeconomic effects of climate change have been well documented in the literature, however, less is known about how climate change influences economic activities at the micro level. The dissertation fills this gap in and contributes to the literature by exploring the influence of climate disasters on firms’ information environment, and the influence of climate change social norms on firms’ cash holding behaviors and conditional conservatism.
Open Access
Hospital Survivability and Government Policies: The 2010 Affordable Care Act
(2022-08-08) Onder, Ortac; Rungtusanatham, M. Johnny; Kristal, M. Murat
This dissertation investigates the impact of the U.S. Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010 on hospital survivability. To this end, I study two policy changes in the ACA. The first is the Hospital Readmission Reduction Program (HRRP), which ties the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) payments to hospital readmission rates. A hospital’s readmission rate thus becomes an important financial and healthcare delivery indicator. Hence, in the first project of this dissertation, I test the financial viability of hospitals based on readmission rates. Then, using Simar and Wilson’s two-stage data envelopment analysis (DEA), I test the impact of two dimensions of quality—experiential quality and clinical quality—on hospitals’ financial viability. Results indicate that hospitals that offer higher quality care are more efficient at achieving financial viability. Additionally, the results demonstrate that excelling in both dimensions has had additional benefits for hospitals. The second policy change explored is the ACA’s Medicaid coverage expansion. I examine its impact on hospital closures. This policy expands Medicaid coverage to all adults with incomes lower than 138% of the U.S. federal poverty level. However, based on constitutional arguments against the ACA, the U.S. Supreme Court in 2012 ruled that states could opt out of the mandate. The heterogeneous adoption by states enables researchers to conduct a natural experiment by providing a control group. Therefore, I adopt a difference-in-differences analysis framework with fixed effects using a Poisson regression to test whether the ACA-mandated Medicaid coverage expansion impacted hospital closures. Results show that the mandate reduced the number of hospital closures in states that complied with the mandate by 54% as compared to states that did not. Then, I explore hospital-level operational drivers that contributed to the hospital closure crisis. Results demonstrate that the mandate increased patient revenue and perceived quality of care, while no evidence showed that the mandate affected the number of patient discharges, number of employees, and hospital operating expenses. Furthermore, my results suggest that Medicaid expansion increased hospital revenue not by increasing the number of patients, but rather by decreasing hospitals’ amount of uncompensated care.
Open Access
Translating Lightning in A Bottle: Idealists, Pragmatists, and the Reorientation of Translators at the Intersection of Blockchain and Climate
(2022-03-03) Phung, Kam Jyhming; Valente, Mike S.
The travel of ideas is a ubiquitous part of social and organizational life. People and organizations are constantly exposed to ideas and often incorporate them into their lives in some way, including adopting them to create new ventures or solutions to grand societal challenges. Grounded in the translation perspective (i.e., Scandinavian institutionalism), this dissertation explores the notion of within organization translator heterogeneity and the microfoundations of the incipient process of new venture ideation predicated on the translation of an idea to a new setting or what I call "ideational translation." To explore such underpinnings of the emergence of a new organizational entity and the travel of ideas, I draw on insights from a 24-month ethnography of life behind the creation of Blockset, one of the world's first blockchain-based carbon offset platforms. Through a detailed ethnographic account, I tell the story of the set of blockchain experts and climate experts contributing to Blockset's formative creation and explore their diverse lived experiences as translators facilitating the travel of the idea of a blockchain platform to the field of climate. Notably, in doing so, I pay attention to the tensions that ensued, how people navigated them, and to what avail. Yet, what lies at the heart of this dissertation is my finding that a key microfoundational aspect of ideational translation is within organization translator heterogeneity delineated by "translation orientations" – a term I use to capture a person's general beliefs with regards to the appropriate way to implement an idea. Overall, based on my findings, I present an orientation-based model of ideational translation that is centered around a translation orientation spectrum anchored on idealism and pragmatism – which stress translators' preferences for conforming to the norms of an idea's origin and destination, respectively – and specifies why translators embrace specific orientations, their impacts on the dynamics and outcomes of translation, and reorientation pathways that translators can follow.
Open Access
Voluntary Disclosure and Corporate Innovation: Evidence from Management Earnings Forecasts
(2021-11-15) San, Ziyao; Kanagaretnam, Kiridaran
This research consists of two parts. In the first part, I examine whether a firm whose chief executive officer (CEO) is more future-oriented (as measured by commitment to voluntary disclosure practices, i.e., issuing more frequent and more disaggregated earnings forecasts) is likely to be more successful in corporate innovation investment. Using a global sample of 26,364 firms from 27 countries and a single-country sample of 8,980 firms (domiciled in the US), I find that firms with more future-oriented CEO are granted more patents and receive more citations per patent. The results of additional cross-sectional analyses indicate that the relationship between commitments to voluntary disclosure and corporate innovation varies with various CEO-, firm-, and country-level factors. In the second part of this research, I investigate the role of CEOs personality traits in corporate innovation and in the association between commitment to voluntary disclosure and corporate innovation. I find that firms with more extraverted CEOs tend to be more successful in their innovation investment in the future and that the signaling role of commitment to voluntary disclosure in corporate innovation success is more pronounced in firms with more extraverted CEOs. My findings also indicate that voluntary disclosure by more extraverted CEOs attracts more investor attention. Collectively, the results of this research support the conjecture that future-oriented CEOs are likely to commit to voluntary disclosure practices to signal their ability to manage uncertainties associated with innovation investment and thereby achieve innovation success. Additionally, such signaling tends to be driven by more extraverted CEOs. This research should be important for the investors and other stakeholders, as it shows how the likelihood of firms future innovation success can be inferred from CEOs observable earnings forecasting behavior. The findings may also be of interest to firms, as they highlight the importance of considering candidates level of extraversion when hiring a CEO. Finally, the findings of this research should be helpful to policymakers who develop initiatives to enhance firms voluntary financial disclosure, because this research highlights how the effectiveness of management earnings forecasts in signaling corporate innovation success varies with country-level institutional characteristics.
Open Access
Analysts' Risk Discussions and the Use of Valuation Models: A Content Analysis of Sell-Side Equity Analyst Reports
(2021-11-15) Yu, Changqiu; Kanagaretnam, Kiridaran
This dissertation consists of three research studies on sell-side equity analysts based on textual analysis of analyst reports from Investext. In the first study, I examine whether analysts' geographic location is associated with their discussions about risk. Using textual analysis of analysts' reports to extract their risk discussions for firms globally, I find that foreign analysts present more risk discussions than local analysts. Foreign analysts' more extensive risk discussions are associated with their unfamiliarity with the underlying firms. Analysts' risk discussions are incrementally informative to investors. The informativeness of risk discussions is similar for foreign analysts and local analysts. The second study examines whether comparability of the underlying firms to their peers affects the informativeness of discounted cash flow (DCF) models and price-to-earnings (PE) models used by analysts. I hypothesize that analysts are more likely to be subject to anchoring and adjustment bias when using PE models compared with using DCF models. The bias is more severe when the underlying firms are not comparable to other firms. Consistent with this argument, I find that market reactions to analysts' investment opinions based on DCF models are stronger than their opinions based on PE models. Furthermore, the incremental effect of DCF models on market reactions to analyst investment opinions is mainly restricted to firms with less comparability. In the third study, I use textual analysis to detect analysts' use of valuation models for a large sample of analyst reports on firms around the world. I classify these models into accrual models and cash flow models. Given the fact that accrual models are the default models used in analyst reports, I examine whether the firm country's institutional factors are associated with analysts' choice of cash flow models. I find that analysts are more likely to use cash flow models to value firms in countries with stronger investor protection, better information environment, and greater economic freedom. The market reactions to target price changes based on cash flow models are stronger, particularly in countries with a stronger institutional environment. The findings suggest that countries with sound institutions facilitate analysts' use of cash flow models.
Open Access
Essays on Platform Sponsor Scope: Implications for Ecosystem Emergence and Growth
(2021-11-15) Murthy, Ramya Krishna; Madhok, Anoop
Platform sponsors and complementors co-create value in platform ecosystems. This dissertation sheds light on a critical aspect platform sponsor scope of such value co-creation. Platform sponsor scope constitutes the sponsors choice of activities to perform internally, their decision rights on the complements, and their orchestration in the ecosystem. Platform sponsor scope signals value co-creation opportunities to complementors and shapes the latitude of the platform sponsor in governing the ecosystem. The dissertation comprises of three essays (chapters 2, 3, and 4) that together demonstrate (i) the platform sponsors agency in choosing their scope vis--vis complementors, (ii) the interplay of platform sponsor scope with elements of problem, platform ecosystem design, and dynamics, and (iii) the implications of scope choices on ecosystem emergence and growth at different stages of the lifecycle. The first essay (chapter 2) demonstrates that the platform sponsor can facilitate ecosystem emergence by aligning their scope choice with the problem they are seeking to solve. Using a dataset of crowdfunding campaigns and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), I find distinct configurations of problem and scope for different types of ecosystems. The second essay (chapter 3) examines the interplay between the ecosystem structure and governance as exemplified in the platform sponsor scope choices. The study uses a configurational approach and inductively identifies configurations of scope and ecosystem structure across different ecosystems and at the incipient and mature stages of the lifecycle. The third essay (chapter 4) examines the role of platform sponsor scope in ecosystem dynamics of indirect network effects and ecosystem growth. Using a formal model, I find that the ecosystem growth trajectory differs based on the symmetricity of indirect network effects. However, the growth can be augmented by aligning the scope choice with the type of benefits the actors accrue within the ecosystem. I examine the micro-level dynamics using Wikipedia editing activity data and find that scope changes influence complementors participation decisions. Collectively, these essays contribute to the literature on platform ecosystems and firm scope, bringing fresh insights into how platform sponsor scope choices shape value co-creation in platform ecosystems.
Open Access
Accounting and Performance Metrics in the Baseball Industry
(2021-11-15) Nappert, Pier-Luc; Neu, Dean
This doctoral thesis explores the roles of accounting and performance metrics in the baseball industry, a sport characterized by significant income inequalities amongst players. I entered the field with a broad research question, trying to understand how accounting mechanisms and technologies influence the decision-making processes of Major League Baseball organizations related to the evaluation, acquisition and monitoring of high-profile employees, namely baseball players. This work begins with Chapter II, which examines how new technologies, such as data analytics and camera-based tracking systems, have changed performance measurement and management control systems in the industry. It illustrates that these technological devices have impacted the temporality of performance metrics and have transitioned the industry toward a "society of control" (Deleuze, 1992). In Chapter III, I explore how baseball operations specialists translate player evaluations into player valuations, notably with financialized valuation methods. However, the chapter also illustrates that the valuations of players' contracts are debated by clubs' accounting executives, who claim that such valuations are not consistent with the "reality" of accounting. By exploring the interplay between valuation and accounting, this chapter illustrates how "hyperreality" (Baudrillard, 1994) is a core feature of sports accounting, which is strategically displayed by clubs' owners in their communications with key stakeholders. Finally, in Chapter IV, I explore the technologies and rationalities underlying human capital contracts, new financial products available to underpaid minor league players, and how these contracts change participants' subjectivity. I demonstrate that human capital contracts enable participants to foresee a brighter future and that they act as a coping device by providing an escapist form of imagination. Taken together, the three chapters show how baseball players are transformed into human "assets," in part by being financialized by their employer but also by contributing to their own financialization.
Open Access
Regional Influences on Responsible Behaviours of Business Organizations
(2021-11-15) Choi, Jaehyun; Valente, Mike S.
My dissertation explores how regional societies influence the responsible behaviors of business organizations. It is comprised of three essays that come together in the shared theme of investigating the role of regional social connectedness – the structural dimension of regional social capital – in facilitating responsible behaviors. The first essay challenges simplistic views of regional political conservatism and demonstrates that regional political conservatism can have contradictory aspects as regards social responsibility, which are elicited by two different types of regional social connectedness (interfirm and cooperative). The second essay examines how regional social connectedness compensates for the decline of local newspapers. It finds that while local newspaper scarcity has led to an increase in corporate wrongdoing, regional social connectedness mitigated that effect. The third essay applies social capital theory to a disaster context by observing the impact of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis on unemployment rates. It finds that the spread of COVID-19 cases results in a higher unemployment rate as local organizations rely more on layoffs. However, this relationship is affected by two different types of regional social connectedness (cooperative and instrumental) in contradictory ways. In addition to each essay's individual contributions to a distinctive set of literature, three essays all together offer two key insights into the research that integrates social capital theory and organization studies: first, that regional social connectedness has complementary relationships with other regional determinants for responsible behaviors; and second, that different types of regional social connectedness coexist in regional society and generate heterogeneous effects on responsible behaviors.
Open Access
Essays in Asset Management and Corporate Credit Markets
(2021-07-06) Densmore, Michael; Shum Nolan, Pauline M. P.
In the first chapter of this dissertation I investigate the extent to which firm cash holdings are affected by credit default swap (CDS) coverage of their product market peers. Using a sample of firms incorporated in the US, and defining peer groups using the text-based industry classification of Hoberg and Phillips (2016), I find that firm cash-to-asset ratios and relative-to-peer cash ratios are positively related to peer CDS coverage. The marginal effects are meaningful at approximately 2 and 9 percent of the sample medians respectively. Decomposing peer firm CDS coverage by relative financial constraints suggests that the effects are due to predatory motives. In chapter two, I examine whether obtaining a foreign presence through sub-advisors affects fund performance and management behaviours of international equity mutual funds sold in the US. I find no evidence that international sub-advisors exploit information in a way that improves fund performance. Moreover, funds that hire outsourced international sub-advisors are found to underperform on a risk-adjusted basis by up to 126 basis points (bps) annually. The underperformance of outsourced international sub-advisors is concentrated in their local holdings and can be partly explained by lower activeness and greater risk shifting. These effects are alleviated in funds with multiple sub-advisors as they are more likely to be terminated following poor performance. In the final chapter, I investigate the extent to which competition from low-cost index funds affects fees, performance, and survival rates of actively managed funds. I measure the intensity of competition using the market value of holdings overlap between the portfolios of index entrants and active incumbents. Disentangling the competitive effects of traditional index funds (market index) from smart-beta index funds (factor index), I find that future changes in actively managed net fees are negatively related to factor index fund entry but unrelated to market index fund entry. Additionally, I find that both factor and market index entry are negatively related to active incumbent survival rates and that this effect is most pronounced for relatively expensive active incumbents. Lastly, I find evidence that factor index entry has had an attenuating effect on active incumbent future performance.
Open Access
A Post-ANT Study of the Translation of a Performance Management System
(2021-07-06) Deng, Claire; Neu, Dean
This dissertation consists of three individual research papers that push the boundaries on the ontology, epistemology, and methodology of the actor-network-theory (ANT) pertaining to its mobilization in sociological and organizational accounting research. All three papers anchor on an ethnographic field study wherein a team of two consultants developed a new performance management system (PMS) in a subsidiary of a state-owned enterprise (SOE) in China. Chapter 1 introduces the overarching theses in this dissertation, which are characterized by the ontological boundaries of ANT that the three papers push and the new dimensions of accounting research it opens by pushing such boundaries. Paper 1 (Chapter 2) explores the ways in which accounting enacts multiple reality in the organization by mobilizing the notion of multiple reality contributed by Actor-Network Theorists Annemarie Mol (1999, 2002) and others (Dugdale, 1999; Law, 2002; Law & Singleton, 2005), and seek to extend our understanding of the roles of accounting by explicating how accounting practices enact, circulate, sustain, and erode multiple reality; how the multiple reality coexisted, relied on, opposed to, and were outside and inside one another; as well as how accounting translation is executed when the reality is multiple. Paper 2 (Chapter 3) probes the theoretical and methodological dilemma posed by ANTs flat ontology: how to approach institutionalized contexts with the vocabulary of ANT. Through examining the roles that SOE context plays in the translation processes of accounting technology, I identify context roles in the actor-network as black boxes, discursive resources, devices of interessement, and performative actants. Drawing on the Bakhtinian notions of genre and intertextuality, the third paper (Chapter 4) examines the role that linguistic gaps can play during the introduction and formation of management accounting practices. These linguistic gaps involve the cross-language gap between different languages, the generic gap between speech genres suitable for particular purposes or communicative situations, and the performative gap between text and verbal performance. These gaps, on the one hand, contribute to the incompleteness of performance measures by enabling interpretive and performative spaces; and on the other hand, can be mustered as a rhetorical strategy by actors to persuade and recruit others during the formation of accounting objects. Chapter 5 concludes the dissertation by bringing a critical spirit into ANT-inspired accounting research.
Open Access
Three Essays in Corporate Finance
(2021-07-06) Duan, Rui; Ng, Lilian K.
My dissertation explores the economic relationships among firms within customer-supplier networks and examines their roles in corporate environmental policies, competitive behaviors, and information dissemination. One chapter focuses on the information flow along a supply chain and studies institutional investors' abilities to process the information in advance of other market participants. Another chapter uses the link among suppliers to distinguish existing competition from the potential competition and investigates their distinct impacts on disclosure behavior. In the final chapter, I examine the role of competition in environmental regulations compliance.
Open Access
Negotiating in Professional Relationships: The Impact of High-Quality Relationships on Negotiation Behaviours and Outcomes
(2021-03-08) Astray, Tatiana V.; Tasa, Kevin
This dissertation draws on the concept of High-Quality Relationships (Dutton & Heaphy, 2003) to explore how professional relationships impact negotiations. Most negotiation research on relationships has focused on relationship type (e.g., strangers versus friends) without considering the quality of the relationship. Only two studies have examined relationship quality and its effects on negotiations (Bagarozzi, 1982; Greenhalgh & Chapman, 1998). I aim to explore how relationship quality impacts negotiation behaviours and outcomes. I propose and test a theoretical model in which (1) the effects of High-Quality Relationships on Integrative Bargaining Behaviours are mediated by Psychological Safety and Integrity Trust, and (2) the effects of High-Quality Relationships on negotiation outcomes (economic and subjective value outcomes) are mediated by Psychological Safety, Integrity Trust, and Integrative Bargaining Behaviours. In Study 1, professionals recalled a work situation where they needed to reach an agreement with a colleague. In Study 2, graduate-level students were assigned to High and Low-Quality Relationship dyads based on their existing class relationships. One week later, dyads engaged in a face-to-face negotiation simulation. Results from both studies showed that High-Quality Relationships has implications for negotiation bargaining behaviours and subjective value outcomes. Study 2 found no association between High-Quality Relationships and economic outcomes. This dissertation sheds light on the High-Quality Relationship construct by (1) highlighting its relevance to the negotiations that occur within on-going professional relationships, and (2) identifying two novel mediators, Integrative Bargaining Behaviours and Integrity Trust, and a novel serial mediating path through Psychological Safety and Integrity Trust. The research also contributes to the literature on negotiations and professional relationships by (1) showing that relationship quality has a direct effect on negotiation bargaining behaviours, (2) identifying the direct and indirect effects of High-Quality Relationships on subjective value outcomes, and finally, (3) identifying relationship quality as a novel relational antecedent of subjective value outcomes. The broader theoretical and managerial implications for a relational-based understanding of negotiations and positive workplace relationships are discussed.
Open Access
Models for Capacity Allocation in Anticipation of Time-Varying Demand
(2020-11-13) Furman, Evghenii S.; Diamant, Adam
In this dissertation, we propose and investigate several stationary capacity allocation methods that anticipate time-varying demand. We apply these techniques to three practical settings in customer acquisition and retention, cloud computing, and healthcare. In the first part of this dissertation, we model the trade-off between customer acquisition and retention as a multi-class queueing network with returning customers, time-dependent arrivals, and abandonment. Based on its fluid approximation, we propose an approach to determine optimal stationary staffing levels by partitioning the time-limiting solution of the dynamical system. We test our method by applying it to two real-world applications, i.e., advertising campaigns and a clinical setting, and demonstrate its superiority when comparing to other state-of-the-art approaches. In the second part, we analyze a cloud computing system where a provider wants to determine the optimal number of servers and retrial interval for incoming jobs when all servers are busy. Servers in this setting represent components of a computer network and customers are jobs attempting to access the cloud computing infrastructure. By modeling the system as a fluid queue and using a calculus-of-variations approach, we derive the optimal amount of service capacity and retrial interval in anticipation of time-varying dynamics. We conduct a case study using data collected from a real cloud service provider and show that significant savings can be realized. Finally, we estimate the demand for personal protective equipment (PPE) in the general internal medicine (GIM) department of a hospital during the COVID-19 pandemic. We derive closed-form estimates of demand for multiple types of PPE using a queueing framework with generally distributed service times that models medical interactions with heterogeneous patients whose hospital admissions are time-varying. We parametrize our predictive model using a data set containing patients' clinical and operational records over a period of 9 years. We find that gloves and surgical masks represent approximately 90\% of predicted PPE usage. We also find that while demand for gloves is driven entirely by patient-practitioner interactions, 86\% of the predicted demand for surgical masks can be attributed to the requirement that medical practitioners will need to wear them when not interacting with patients.