With the increasing demands for innovation and adaption, organizations need employees not in formal leadership roles to take initiatives and exhibit informal leadership among their peers. Prior research has focused on “who” may behave as informal leaders but largely overlooked “when” individuals practice informal leadership. Very little is known about what ... Read More

Financial analysts are important information intermediaries in capital markets. Traditional research outputs of analysts, such as buy/sell recommendations and EPS forecasts, have been the mainstream focus of market participants. In recent years, analyst forecasts of capital expenditures (capex) have become increasingly prevalent—roughly 70 percent of the US ... Read More

Innovating firms face a choice whether to patent its innovation or keep it as a trade secret. US National Science Foundation’s Business R&D and Innovation Survey in 2013 found that 41% R&D-doing firms find patents important and 67% find trade secrets important. Firms might consider that information disclosed in a patent is only imperfectly protected by the ... Read More

Moment marketing is a rich new area of contextual advertising that entails the ability to synchronize online advertising (e.g., sponsored search) in real time with relevant offline events such as TV ads. Although 81% of surveyed digital marketers have launched moment marketing campaigns mostly using TV advertising as trigger events, very little is known ... Read More

How much should we discount our products or services? Many online sellers offer deep discounts to attract consumers. This is especially the case in online markets where the sellers are often less known to consumers. The question is whether such a promotional tactic helps the sales. It defeats the sellers’ advertising or promotional purposes if the discounts ... Read More

Short sellers have been known to uncover companies that engage in financial. Indeed, several activist short sellers like Muddy Waters Research and Citron Research make a name for themselves by proactively targeting fraudsters, bringing their misconducts to light, and profiting from their price decline. Not surprisingly, managers should consider the cost and ... Read More

In an earnings conference call with investors in 2008, Edward J Shoen, chief executive officer and chairman of U-Haul International, Inc., lamented that the Avis Budget Group, Inc., its main competition in one-way, do-it-yourself moving rental trucks, had failed to match U-Haul’s recent decision to raise prices. Calling the lack of response ‘unfortunate for ... Read More

We develop a flexible content-based search model that links the content preferences of search engine users to query search volume and click-through rates. Content preferences are defined over latent topics that describe the content of search queries and search result descriptions. Moreover, our model allows content preferences to vary systematically based on ... Read More

Our paper studies whether language patterns elicited by a different level of stimulus during earnings conference calls are informative about firms' earnings. Executives endure various levels of pressure when presenting a scripted managerial discussion and spontaneous answering to analysts' scrutinized questions. Such stimulus induces evasive answers ... Read More