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(2020)ThesisThis thesis consists of three chapters. It studies, as a broad theme, the effectiveness of several institutional changes on individual decision-making based on experimental evidence. Chapter 1 is self-contained, with results purely based on a laboratory experiment. Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 are based on one field experiment in education. Chapter 2 describes the experimental settings and presents the overall results of the experiment, whereas Chapter 3 extends the analysis and focuses on treatment effects on women and men respectively. Chapter 1 shows how reward or punishment opportunities change contributions in a public goods game with 'privileged' members, where 'privilege' indicates that one's per-unit contribution to the public good produces a higher monetary return than is the case for others in the group. The main finding is that reward opportunities strongly increase group contributions in such groups while punishment opportunities do not. Reward also mitigates contribution decay over successive periods and improves social welfare. Chapter 2 mainly studies how rank incentives (i.e., relative performance information) in a milestone-based online assignment system affect students' academic performance. I find that rank incentives increase the likelihood of a student putting more effort in the online assignment. Rank incentives also have positive effects on low-performing students' exam marks while they have negative effects on high-performing students' exam marks. The positive effects seem driven by increased self-perceived stress, increased effort, and decreased procrastination. The negative effects seem driven by increased self-perceived happiness and re-allocation of effort. Chapter 3 studies how rank incentives and milestone information (i.e., information with reference to achievement milestones corresponding to different amounts of points earned) affect men's and women's academic performance differently. Women with access to the rank incentives experience a 0.19 SDs mark decrease in the first midterm, compared to women without this access. In the absence of relative performance information, men with access to the milestone information experience a 0.26 SDs mark increase in the final exam, compared to men without the access. The negative effects on women seem driven by their increased stress level, whereas men's improved exam performance seem driven by increased effort.
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(2020)ThesisThis thesis is composed of three stand-alone research studies relating to the recent unconventional monetary policy adopted by the Bank of Japan (BOJ). The first study investigates the impact of the BOJ’s policy on stock prices and corporate activities. The empirical results show that the policy has generated heterogenous effects on stock prices. Firms with disproportionately higher BOJ investment experience significantly positive stock returns both in the short term and the long term. Corresponding to the positive price impact, the cost of equity capital reduces and firm value increases. However, further tests fail to find evidence of any real impact. Firms that benefit from a reduction in cost of equity capital do not increase external financing, corporate investment and employment. The concentrated capital structure in Japan and the biased investment scheme adopted may explain this weak policy impact. The second study examines whether and how excess reduction in free float affects stock liquidity. Using the BOJ’s equity purchase program as a natural experiment to tackle endogeneity problems, the results show that firms that experience a larger reduction in free float exhibit a reduction in stock liquidity. The negative effect of free float reduction on stock liquidity survives a battery of robustness tests. Further analyses of the underlying channels show that the number of common shareholders and institutional shareholders in a firm significantly decrease. These findings are consistent with a lack of free floating shares introducing frictions in the process of liquidity provision. The third study examines whether an increase in exchange traded funds (ETF) ownership via indexed investment impedes or improves price efficiency. Utilizing Japan’s ETF purchase program as the identification strategy, empirical tests show that prices of stocks that experience an increase in ETF ownership become less efficient in that they deviate more from a random walk and exhibit longer delays in responding to market information. An increase in ETF ownership is also associated with an increase in post-earnings announcement drift, a decline in analyst coverage, and a reduction in the coefficient of current returns to future earnings. These results together suggest that an excessive increase in ETF ownership curbs information arbitrage activities and results in less informative security prices.
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(2020)ThesisThis thesis consists of three stand-alone research projects on corporate ownership structure across countries, insider trading, and passive institutional investors. The first study examines the effect of social trust on corporate ownership structure. Using a large sample of public firms across 42 countries, I find that a culture of trust in a country leads to a more dispersed corporate ownership structure. I also investigate how trust affects the evolution of ownership structure following firms’ IPO and the channels through which trust leads to dispersed ownership. I show that corporate ownership is more likely to become widely held and diffuses at a faster speed in countries with a higher level of social trust. Trust also encourages the selling of block ownership by large shareholders and the use of equity financing by firms. The second study investigates whether fast economic integration but slow legal integration leads to more aggressive insider trading by foreigners in possession of material non-public information about domestic firms. Using a large sample of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) around the world, I find systematically a higher likelihood of insider trading in target firm securities before the announcements of cross-border deals compared to domestic deals. The difference is mainly driven by cross-border deals where the acquirer is from a country with high corruption and low social norms, and where the target is in a country with stricter enforcement of insider trading laws. The third study examines the role of family interest in explaining and influencing individual funds’ voting behaviour. Specifically, I focus on the voting patterns of index funds in the event of corporate M&As. I find that the interest of fund families in the target is significantly positively associated with the likelihood of an affiliated index fund voting for a deal in the bidder merger approval meeting. However, an index fund’s own interest in the target does not explain its voting pattern. A higher level of aggregate bidder ownership held by fund families that have greater active interest in the target is also associated with worse deal performance. Taken together, the evidence suggests that cooperation between active and index funds within fund families potentially weakens the resistance of bidder shareholders to bad mergers.
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(2021)ThesisHousing wealth is typically the largest component of retirees’ portfolios. Although economic theory predicts that retirees would benefit from using housing wealth as a source of retirement funding, the take-up of enabling products and approaches is low. This thesis addresses three key areas in the utilization of housing wealth in retirement: (i) identification of the preferred home equity release approach for different types of households; (ii) exploration of means to address behavioral impediments to the utilization of housing wealth through equity release products; (iii) investigation of potential demand for long-term care insurance (LTCI) financed through home equity release. Chapter 3 investigates the preferred home equity release approach for retirement, given available options (i.e., downsizing, reverse mortgages, the government-offered Pension Loans Scheme, and home reversion–type schemes) and reflects the current tax, superannuation, and age pension rules in Australia. We use state-of-the-art economic and actuarial modeling to identify the preferred approach for the use of housing wealth by Australian retirees with different marital status, wealth portfolios, and preferences. Chapter 4 uses an online experimental survey administered to a representative sample of Australian (pre-)retiree homeowners to explore whether information framing to address mental accounting and narrow choice bracketing can enhance the demand for reverse mortgages. The information framing to address mental accounting significantly increases the stated demand for reverse mortgages. Chapter 5 presents the results of an online experimental survey administered to a representative sample of Chinese (pre-)retiree homeowners to investigate the demand for LTCI financed through home equity release. We find that access to home equity release products significantly increases the stated demand for LTCI and that the preferred approach is to use a reverse mortgage. Overall, the findings in this thesis confirm that retirees would benefit from using housing wealth to finance retirement. The results also identify approaches to reduce the gap between theoretical and actual demand for home equity release products. The findings provide evidence that government and private providers can use to address barriers to increasing interest in and take-up of home equity release products and to develop new products to enhance the utilization of housing wealth in retirement.
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(2021)ThesisReward-based crowdfunding is rapidly shaping up to be a revolutionary avenue for companies, especially start-ups, to broadcast their businesses and solicit capital through digital platforms. The platformized micro-investment mechanism in crowdfunding creates an unprecedented digital market that ensures a more fluid and granular distribution of financial resources. The Information Systems (IS) community has endeavored to shed light on this growing market by studying the decisive factors that motivate funders’ contributions and lead to crowdfunding success. Yet, despite its risky nature, no study thus far systematically investigates how risk perceptions emerge and impact funders’ investment behavior in reward-based crowdfunding and what companies can do to address funders’ risk concerns. To bridge these gaps, this thesis synthesizes contemporary knowledge on the contextual characteristics of crowdfunding and risks around diverse transactional environments to arrive at a typology of the risks encountered by funders when participating in reward-based crowdfunding. Drawing on the indispensable link between trust and risk, a holistic research model is constructed to: (1) postulate the impact of funders’ risk perceptions on their willingness to invest using a reward-based crowdfunding platform, (2) discern how different types of crowdfunding risks can be mitigated by enhancing the assessability of fundraiser’s trustworthiness, and (3) explore the optimum trust-building mechanisms that can facilitate funders’ assessments of fundraiser’s trustworthiness. Three experimental studies are conducted to validate the advanced research model empirically. The findings from the three studies yield theoretical insights on crowdfunding risks and mechanisms to diminish funders’ risk perceptions via trust-building. The results also yield actionable design principles that platform providers can adopt to help funders assess risk and improve their financing experience in this emerging market.
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(2021)ThesisEmerging technologies are radically changing the future of work. From artificial intelligence for customer support to robotics for performing surgery, the change is unprecedented in the history of most organisations. This thesis aims to understand and contribute rich, empirically informed insights into the phenomenon of the future of work in the context of emerging technologies from an organisational history perspective. The thesis comprises three related but standalone studies that discuss organisational trajectories and the implications of emerging technologies in three distinct organisational contexts. To explore this emerging and intrinsic phenomenon in organisations, this work adopts the historical narrativist approach and the qualitative case study method. The first study explores the interplay between tradition and technology at a pre-digital organisation when new technologies are introduced. The second study delves into the strategies and practices of realising historically embodied process knowledge when adopting a robotic process automation technology at a digitally reformed organisation. The third study traces the evolution of a strategic path towards technology and data driven innovation, from the foundation to the implementation of artificial intelligence technologies, at a born-digital organisation. Each of the three studies provides a distinct but complementary understanding on the role of organisational history by contributing to the theories of imprinting, organisational memory and path dependence. Collectively, the thesis studies contribute to our understanding of “how history matters” in the future of work. The thesis discussion contributes to the literature by integrating the implications of surface- and deep-level effects of emerging technologies for the future of work and how they are shaped by the distant, intermediate and immediate histories of organisations.
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(2021)ThesisDecades of research on organizational change and its leadership has explored the influence of leaders on change outcomes. Yet, despite this accumulated effort, the likelihood of success remains stubbornly low. This dissertation explores: how do leaders improve the likelihood of change success? Prior scholarship has examined this question from two perspectives. Change practice discussion describes change processes, the activities that enable change, with allied suggestions for leader engagement – how to lead change processes. Change leadership discussion studies leader attributes, aiming to identify and generalize those allied with success and, in doing so, provide guidance for leadership development. Addressing the leader-success challenge, scholars have identified two problems: (1) these two discussions lack integration – while it is difficult to talk about change leadership without inherently referring to a change process, the former discussion overlooks the available choices between change processes, and (2) the study of attributes has yielded desired leader behaviors, yet evidence shows that these behaviors do not always manifest in practice. Addressing the first challenge, I commence with a process study of 79 cases of change. This research finds that a dynamic choice between two perspectives of change processes – illustrated as diagnostic and dialogic – significantly improves the likelihood of change success. It also extends an understanding of a leadership practice that facilitates this choice. Integrating these findings, I develop a model that explains how choice connects change leadership to change process knowledge, at the same time as providing a roadmap for leaders to navigate between diagnostic and dialogic processes in practice. Addressing the second challenge, psychologists explain a key limitation of behavioral study is that a large component of people’s behavior is a product of situational cues. To explain this phenomenon, these scholars have explored mindsets, describing how behavioral dispositions result from mental frameworks that stand ‘ready to fire’ based on situational cues. My second study establishes psychology-derived mindsets as relevant for leadership engagement of change processes. It does so by developing a typology of mindset constructs, then conducting an integrative review of mindset knowledge between change leadership and psychology settings. This study matches the fixed and growth mindsets with leadership engagement of diagnostic and dialogic change processes. My third study empirically examines how the fixed and growth mindsets manifest within leaders when change is targeted. It finds that leaders with a growth mindset are likely to choose to oscillate between change processes and achieve change success. Further, I identify that diagnostic change processes can provide situational cues that foster a fixed mindset within leaders, with detrimental effects on outcomes. Integrating these findings from all three studies, this dissertation puts forward a new means for leadership development – mindset activation theory – explaining a means for leaders to take control of their situation-mindset interaction and guide their behaviors in practice. It demonstrates how leaders can increase awareness of and operationalize the situational cues that guide their mindset, facilitating choices between change processes that improve their likelihood of change success.
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(2021)ThesisConsumers encounter thousands of scarcity messages daily, yet the effects of scarcity tactics are unclear. This thesis aims to uncover the effects of different types of scarcity tactics from both firm and customer perspectives. Included herein are fifteen studies that employed mixed research designs (i.e., experimental designs, cross-sectional surveys) with a variety of product categories (i.e., clothing, shoes, electronics, food, sustainable products, etc.). Three essays are produced to articulate this work; Essay One focuses on product scarcity and investigates when and why a corporate decision to create an intentional scarcity of products would improve or impair the brands. Essay Two examines how two types of messaging, scarcity based, and social proof based, can drive or diminish consumers’ information sharing in promotional contexts. Essay Three identifies how a personal scarcity concept - feelings of relative deprivation - undermines consumers’ adoption of sustainable products. Collectively, this thesis contributes advances to multiple streams of research including scarcity, branding, information sharing behaviour, and sustainable purchases. It also offers practical guidance for marketers, retailers, and policy makers.
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(2021)ThesisThe enduring prevalence of dark personalities in the workplace has warranted recent research on narcissists, psychopaths, and Machiavellians and their adverse effects on the workplace. However, little effort has been made to investigate the individuals who favor dark personalities, enabling them to flourish within organizations. To better understand “when” and “how” exactly dark personalities are favored, Study 1 used an experimental design to investigate different strategies by which leaders favor narcissists, psychopaths, and Machiavellians. An actor role-played these three dark personality types within teams. Narcissists and psychopaths were favored by leaders through resource allocation, both covertly (i.e., when the decision is confidential) and overtly (i.e., when the decision is not confidential). In contrast, Machiavellians were only favored through overt resource allocation. This study also showed that narcissists were favored through interpersonal influence and promotion recommendations, while psychopaths were favored through task influence. The first study provided insight into the different ways by which leaders favor the three dark personalities and found narcissists, as compared to psychopaths and Machiavellians, to be favored through multiple mediums. Building on the premise that narcissists successfully obtain additional resources and attain favored status through interpersonal influence and promotion recommendations, further research was needed to investigate the motivational factors associated with favoring narcissists. In Study 2 and Study 3, we used a 2x2 experimental design to test a three-way interaction to determine the motivational factors that drive leaders to favor narcissists. Study 2 employed a design in which leaders watched videos of teams containing a narcissist. Study 3 employed a design in which an actor role-played the narcissist within a team. Both experiments supported the hypothesis that high dominant leaders will favor low status, narcissists through resource allocation. Thus, high dominance motivated leaders have a heightened awareness of potential threats to power and strategically choose to favor less threatening narcissists even though such narcissists negatively affect team coordination and performance. Additionally, Studies 2 and 3 supported the hypothesis that low dominant leaders favor high status narcissists through resource allocation. Leaders low in dominance motivation have a greater concern for the overall team well-being and performance while also being less assertive. Therefore, low dominant leaders are more susceptible to a narcissist’s demands and will favor the high status ‘bad apple’ to maintain high team performance. Our studies further expand the research on narcissists in the workplace and provide key insights into the leaders who favor narcissism in a manner that promulgates the prevalence of narcissists throughout organizations.
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(2021)ThesisConnections between business and political entities (“political connections”) have received unprecedented research attention in the last decades. Studies investigate the relationships between political connections and firms’ behavior, strategy, as well as various performance outcomes. Meanwhile, scholars have adopted diverse perspectives to explain the role of political connections in these relationships. Nevertheless, reviews designed to synthesize political connections studies has not kept pace with the explosive growth of this scholarship. In addition, there are still research gaps to be addressed within the scholarship. In particular, as political connections can generate both positive and negative impact on the firm, further research is needed to explain the reason behind and reconcile existing mixed findings. Furthermore, prior studies have predominantly focused on understanding the impact of political connections while leaving the antecedents of such connections underexplored. This thesis takes up these challenges by synthesizing prior political connections studies and addressing the research gaps above. This thesis consists of three studies. First, it combines bibliographic techniques and qualitative review techniques to conduct a comprehensive review of the political connections studies published during the last three decades (in Chapter 2). Next, based on the findings of Chapter 2 and guidance for future research provided therein, it includes two empirical studies to investigate how connections may paradoxically influence firms’ resource acquisition and utilization for innovation performance (in Chapter 3) and to examine how the emphasis the firm places on financial vs. nonfinancial goals acts as an antecedent of formation of different types of political connections (in Chapter 4). In sum, this thesis offers a more complete and fine-grained understanding of political connections and provides research guidance for future development of the scholarship of political connections.