Existing research suggests that experts often protect their professional autonomy by rejecting lay clients’ feedback or passing it to intermediaries (e.g., managers and agents). However, the rise of review platforms and disintermediated marketplaces has empowered clients to publicly share challenging feedback, and experts’ defensive tactics may further erode ... Read More

Research Summary: The impact of political connections on firm innovation remains unclear. Utilizing the unexpected removal of high-ranking officials during China's anti-corruption campaigns between 1999 and 2015 as an exogenous shock, we analyze this relationship to provide greater clarity. Employing a difference-in-differences approach, we find that firms ... Read More

Research summary: Building on the search-based view of innovation, we develop a framework regarding how Google guides innovative search behavior. We exploit an exogenous shock, China's unexpected blockade of Google in 2014, and adopt a difference-in-differences approach with a matched sample of patents from China and nearby regions to test our predictions ... Read More

Crowdsourcing contests allow firms to seek ideas from external solvers to address their problems. This research examines solvers’ use of developmental feedback from different sources and of different constructiveness when generating ideas in contests. I theorize a source effect in solvers’ feedback use where they use seeker feedback more than peer feedback ... Read More

We study pivots as signaling devices in a dynamic experimentation model. An entrepreneur receives funding from an investor and has private information about a project, which requires costly experimentation to succeed. The entrepreneur has a real option to pivot, i.e., to abandon the project and to start a new one. Investors learn about the project from the ... Read More