Wharton School Research Articles

Citation Analysis of Marketing Research: Key Contributions and Future Directions

Citation analysis measures the relative importance or impact of an author, article, or publication by counting the number of times other works have cited it. This research conducted a thorough examination within the marketing academic field, exploring the most cited articles and authors, the most published authors, publishing countries, universities, and the years with maximum contributions. The methodology involved selecting the top ten marketing journals based on the Scimago Journal and Country Rank (as of April 29, 2024). Data were collected from the Scopus database, encompassing 12,445 journal articles and 782,442 cited references. The results revealed Barry J. Babin as the most prolific author with 447 articles. The most cited article was "Uniting the Tribes: Using Text for Marketing Insight" with 772 citations. The United States led with 67,302 publications and 2,500,668 citations, while the University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School, had the highest number of publications at 235 articles. As of December 2019, Philip Kotler was identified as the most cited author in marketing, with 75,355 citations for his paper "Marketing Management: A South Asian Perspective" since 2009. This analysis provides valuable insights into the recent trends and future directions in the marketing field, highlighting significant contributions and influential works. However, the study's scope was limited to the top ten marketing journals from the SciMago list. Future research should consider a broader range of journals to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the marketing discipline.

THE ROLE OF SUCCESSFUL PUBLIC RELATIONS IN CRISIS SITUATIONS

This article analyzes the theoretical foundations of the emerging concepts of anti-crisis PR, in particular, the tasks and functions of crisis management services are considered. A comparative analysis was made using the example of large global companies. The integration of new communication PR technologies during a turning point has been studied. The role of the media in maintaining a positive image of organizations is specifically noted. A definition is given to the concept of “crisis” and crisis communications. In addition, theories of crisis communications (reputation restoration, situational crisis) are considered. Using the example of foreign and national companies, anti-crisis measures are analyzed. McDonald’s Sets Out to Conquer the World by Changing its Image. 2003. A business journal from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Knowledge at Wharton. Electronic resource: https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/mcdonalds-sets-out-to-conquer-the-world-by-changing-its-image/ Date of the application: 21.06.2024. Muratova, N. 2022. Mass Media in State Strategic Programs of Information Society Development in Different Countries. International Journal of Social Science Research and Review. 5:4. 56-61. Post on Facebook, 2018. Electronic resource: https://www.facebook.com/oqtepalavash.official/photos/a.1419760331386261/2725700707458877/?type=3&theater / Date of the application: 19/06/2024. Меньшиков, А. 2013. Паблик рилейшнз в кризисных ситуациях. Комсомольск-на-Амуре. ФГБОУ ВПО «КнАГТУ. 75

In search of breadth and depth: the origin story of a multidisciplinary faculty of management

Purpose This paper aims to use the origin story of Dalhousie’s Faculty of Management as a foil for unpacking the tensions between deep disciplinary specialization and liberal education in business schools in Canada and the USA. Ultimately, the paper reveals that those tensions are not irreconcilable, and that through the fortunes of historical contingencies and deliberate decision-taking, a faculty can embrace the benefits of both breadth and depth. Design/methodology/approach The paper proposes a critical organizational history of management education through a case study. By drawing on secondary literature and archival sources, the authors focus on moments in business education, such as the founding of the Wharton School of Business, the release of the Carnegie and Ford Reports and the trend towards increased specialization to situate a case study of Dalhousie University’s Faculty of Management. Findings The authors find that the evolution of business education in North America from its broad, liberal origins towards narrow, specialization has come at a cost to some of the benefits of business and management education. An alternative approach, one reflected in the design of Dalhousie’s Faculty of Management, its programme offerings and its interconnection with other disciplines, enables the advantages of deep disciplinarity to co-exist (and cross-inform) with the advantages of liberal approach to knowledges. Originality/value The Dalhousie model offers business schools an example of a faculty that balances the rich insights of liberal interdisciplinarity with the need for sophisticated approaches to more granular, often disciplinary, topics. In addition, the paper offers the story of a multidisciplinary management faculty, some explanation for how that faculty was maintained despite pressures towards specialization; and in doing so, contributes to the limited historical research of management education, particularly in Canada, post-2000.

Are Political and Charitable Giving Substitutes? Evidence from the United States

Using microdata from the American Red Cross (ARC) and the Federal Election Commission (FEC) in two natural experiments, we provide evidence that political giving and charitable giving are substitutes. In the first natural experiment, we estimate the effects of a positive shock to charitable donations to the ARC: foreign natural disaster events. We find that although charitable donations to ARC increase by 34.9% in the six weeks following a disaster, political donations decline by 18.8% in the same period. Put differently, each 1% increase in the charitable giving to ARC is accompanied by a 0.53% drop in political donations. At the average county-week–level donations, the implied effect of a $1 increase in charitable giving is a $0.42 decline in political donations. In the second natural experiment, we estimate the effects of a positive shock to political giving: advertisements for political campaigns. Exploiting geographic discontinuities in advertising markets, we find that political advertisements increase political giving, whereas they decrease charitable donations to ARC. Our estimates imply that each 1% increase in the political giving is accompanied by a 0.59% drop in charitable donations to ARC. At the average county-week–level donations, the implied effect of a $1 increase in political giving is a $0.33 decline in charitable donations. The crowding-out elasticities suggest that political giving and charitable giving are relatively close substitutes. We provide a number of robustness checks, and we discuss potential causal mechanisms. This paper was accepted by Eric Anderson, marketing. Funding: P. Yildirim thanks the Dean’s Research Fund and the Mack Institute at the Wharton School as well as the Wharton Behavioral Laboratory for their financial support. M. Petrova thanks financial support from the Severo Ochoa Programme for Centres of Excellence in R&D (Barcelona School of Economics CEX2019-000915-S), funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2021.00845 .

WHY MANAGEMENT HAS GOTTEN WORSE AND THE LEADERSHIP ISSUES BEHIND THAT

AbstractThe author, Professor of Management at The Wharton School and Director of Wharton’s Center for Human Resources, discusses the background of what in his view is the worsening of management of employees in today’s organizations. He cites considerable research and historical background to this effect, while also relating the leadership issues that have led to this situation. For instance: “Remarkably, 29% of those who are promoted now leave within a month because promotions often come with no pay increase and with more work and responsibility. A third of US managers now report that they received no management training of any kind either before becoming a manager or after.” He also cites the power and “influence of the investor world, which relies on financial accounting to judge company performance, and the fact that financial accounting simply cannot address human capital.” In looking for ways to improve these systemic issues, he believes that “the way forward starts with Boards of Directors who have the long‐run success of their companies in mind and who guide the top executives. It is important that they help executives avoid blind spots about people issues that are common in a ‘finance‐first’ approach to management.”

Co-Opetition and the Firm’s Information Environment

Some firms in the technology sector choose to cooperate with competitors (“co-opetition”) in standard setting organizations (SSOs). These SSOs create technology standards that facilitate rapid market penetration of new technologies such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and 4G. Active participation in the standard setting process requires the exchange of proprietary information with competitors. Although the goal of such information sharing is to further a technology or a product market, firms potentially receive an additional benefit from access to competitor and industry information. We examine whether contributing to SSO committees enhances a firm’s information set and allows managers to better predict future sales. We find that the centrality of a firm’s location within the network of SSO collaborators is positively related to the accuracy of the firm’s sales forecasts. This relation is stronger when firms exchange more information with direct competitors and with larger firms, when forecasting is more difficult ex ante, and when firms forecast over longer horizons. Our findings show that collaborating with competitors in the product market provides an important additional benefit of improving the manager’s information set. This paper was accepted by David Simchi-Levi, accounting. Funding: This work was supported by the Wharton School, Institut Européen d’Administration des Affaires, the Institut Européen d’Administration des Affaires-Wharton Alliance, and the Mack Institute for Innovation Management. Supplemental Material: The data and online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2021.03152 .

Comparative Analysis on Benefits of Elective System at Universities Based on Triangle-dynamic-matching System

Nowadays, the development of education can improve the level of human capital and significantly promote economic development. As part of the education system, more and more students care about the college admissions, but few of them pay attention to the benefits of a good elective system, which also might influence their whole university life. Taking Chinese elective system as an example, the paper proposes a new elective system at universities with a specific formula: Triangle - dynamic - matching system, which combines the advantages the Auction mechanism, the Wharton Business School Mechanism and the Deferred acceptance algorithm with the true preferences of students, teachers and the schools recommendation dynamically. Through the Systematic Literature Review and Analytical Method, the paper aims to analyse the benefits of a good elective system, its utility, the algorithm and problem in the elective system. This is a new system promising Pareto-efficiency and strategy proof, which might helps to save the school's human, material and financial resources, and greatly enhances the efficiency of students' course selection.

Too Much Information: When Does Additional Testing Benefit Schools?

U.S. K–12 school districts that traditionally utilized ongoing “formative” assessments of student progress increasingly rely on additional “interim” assessments to predict student performance on standardized tests. Moreover, some districts are experimenting with merit-based teacher bonuses tied to standardized test scores. We examine the relationship between interim assessments and teacher bonuses using a two-period principal–agent model. The school district (principal), operating under a limited budget, decides whether to implement interim assessments and how much merit pay to offer, and teachers (agents) choose how much effort to exert in each period. We use two-state (proficient versus not proficient) Markovian dynamics to describe the evolution of student test readiness, in which the transition probability in a given period depends on both teachers’ effort decisions and the starting state. Our results indicate that, despite the popularity of interim assessments, their usefulness is far from guaranteed. In particular, the accuracy promised by these assessments is a double-edged sword: positive midyear results can make it easier to incentivize second period teacher effort, but negative results can have a demotivating effect. Moreover, even when an interim assessment does result in a higher probability of the school ending the year in the proficient state, the resulting higher expected costs of merit-based bonuses for the district may exceed the available budget. Thus, even a free interim assessment might be too expensive for the school district. This paper was accepted by Charles Corbett, operations management. Funding: This research was supported by the Risk Management Center Russell Ackoff Doctoral Student Fellowship and the Fishman-Davidson Center for Service and Operations Management, both at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2020.01547 .

Auditor Tenure and Misreporting: Evidence from a Dynamic Oligopoly Game

We estimate an infinite-horizon dynamic oligopoly model of audit firm tenure and misstatements and evaluate a policy counterfactual involving mandatory audit firm rotation. Longer tenure lowers the cost of producing audits, increasing audit quality and reducing audit fees. Thus clients are less likely to misstate and more likely to keep the incumbent audit firm as tenure increases. By reducing the value of retaining audit firms, mandatory rotation leads to large increases in auditor switches, even before the term limit, implying increases in the switching costs borne by clients. Misstatement rates increase because audit firms endogenously lower audit quality and newly hired audit firms have lower quality. Overall, the model suggests caution when evaluating the costs and benefits of government oversight over the audit profession. This paper was accepted by Suraj Srinivasan, accounting. Funding: The authors thank the financial support from the Olin Busiiness School and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4944 .

When Should the Off-Grid Sun Shine at Night? Optimum Renewable Generation and Energy Storage Investments

Globally, 1.5 billion people live off the grid, with their only access to electricity often limited to operationally expensive fossil fuel generators. Solar power has risen as a sustainable and less costly option, but its generation is variable during the day and nonexistent at night. Thanks to recent technological advances, which have made large-scale electricity storage economically viable, a combination of solar generation and storage holds the promise of cheaper, greener, and more reliable off-grid power in the future. Still, it is not yet well understood how to jointly determine optimal capacity levels for renewable generation and storage. Our work aims to shed light on this question by developing a model of strategic capacity investment in both renewable generation and storage to match demand with supply in off-grid use cases while relying on fossil fuel as backup. Despite the complexity of the underlying model, we are able to extract two general results. First, we find that solar capacity and storage capacity are strategic complements, except in cases with very high investment in generation capacity, when they surprisingly turn into strategic substitutes with implications for long-term investment decisions. Second, we develop a simple heuristic to determine which storage technology, within a given portfolio, can turn a profit in the broadest set of market conditions and thus, is likely to be adopted first. We find that currently, low-efficiency, cheap technologies, such as thermal, can more easily turn a profit in off-grid applications than high-efficiency, expensive ones, such as lithium-ion batteries. We then develop two newsvendor-like approximations of the general model that are analytically tractable, yield precise values for the optimal investment decisions and profit in some cases, and provide bounds to the optimal investment decisions and profits in all other cases. To conclude, we calibrate our models to measure the accuracy of our solutions utilizing real-life data from three geographically-diverse islands, and then, we use our approximations to provide high-level insights on the role that large-scale storage will play in the years ahead as technology improves, carbon taxes are levied, and solar becomes cheaper. This paper was accepted by Beril Toktay, Special Section of Management Science on Business and Climate Change. Funding: This work was supported by the Mack Institute for Innovation Management at the Wharton School as well as the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. Supplemental Material: The data files and online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2021.04129 .

Decentralized Platforms: Governance, Tokenomics, and ICO Design

Traditional two-sided platforms (e.g., Amazon, Uber) rely primarily on commission contracts to generate revenues and fuel growth, whereas their decentralized counterparts (e.g., Uniswap, Filecoin) often forego these in favor of token retention. What economics underpin this choice? We show that with properly designed initial coin offerings (ICOs), both mechanisms can independently alleviate market failures at the initial fundraising stage and incentivize long-term platform building. However, they achieve this in different ways. Although commission contracts often lead to higher profits for founders, token retention leads to higher service levels, benefiting the users and service providers. In essence, token retention surrenders a fraction of earnings to better align with the tenets of decentralized governance. Combining both mechanisms can add value, but only in relatively limited cases. These findings offer guidance and a possible rationale for why platforms may want to favor one mechanism over the other or use both.This paper was accepted by Will Cong, Special Section of Management Science: Blockchains and Crypto Economics.Funding: This work is funded by the Mack Institute at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2021.02076 .

Book Review- Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know

Adam Grant is a renowned psychologist, best-selling author, and top-rated professor at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. His books, including “Give and Take”, “Originals”, “Option B”, “Power Moves” and “Think Again” have sold millions of copies, been translated into 45 languages, and earned him the #1 spot on the New York Times bestseller list. As one of TED’s most popular speakers, with over 30 million views, Grant’s insights on work and leadership resonate with audiences worldwide. He is recognized as one of the world’s 10 most influential management thinkers and has received prestigious awards for his scientific achievements. Adam Grant continues to inspire individuals and organizations to challenge norms and drive positive change.

Searching for the Best Yardstick: Cost of Quality Improvements in the U.S. Hospital Industry

The Hospital Value-Based Purchasing (VBP) Program is Medicare’s implementation of yardstick incentives applied to hospitals in the United States. Under the VBP Program, 2% of all Medicare payments to hospitals, estimated to be U.S. $1.9 billion in fiscal year 2021, are withheld and redistributed based on their relative performance in the quality of delivered care. We develop a dynamic mean-field equilibrium model in which hospitals are engaged in repeated competition under yardstick incentives. Using structural estimation methods, we recover key parameters that govern hospitals’ decisions to invest in quality improvement, including the financial and nonfinancial costs and uncertain outcomes of investment. By dynamically solving for hospitals’ individually optimal investment policies, we estimate the trajectory of quality improvements for each hospital, including its investment decisions and quality levels throughout the implementation of the VBP Program. Our counterfactual analyses explore the benefits, on the one hand, of modifying the overall size of the yardstick incentives and on the other hand, of implementing a more focused program tailored to hospital type. We find that increasing the size of the incentives from 2% to 4% would have resulted in an additional quality investment of U.S. $1.2 billion from 2011 to 2018, leading to a 3.3% reduction in the average rate of central line-associated bloodstream infections (CLABSIs). Applying yardstick incentives to the tailored hospital peer groups, even without changing the size of the incentives, can lead to an average reduction of 1.4% in the rate of CLABSI among groups of hospitals associated with the highest costs of quality investment. This paper was accepted by Stefan Scholtes, healthcare management. Funding: K. Moon acknowledges support from the Wharton School [Claude Marion Endowed Faculty Scholar Award]. Supplemental Material: The data files and online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4875 .

Design of Off-Grid Lighting Business Models to Serve the Poor: Field Experiments and Structural Analysis

A significant proportion of the world’s population has no access to grid-based electricity and so relies on off-grid lighting solutions. Rechargeable lamp technology is gaining popularity as an alternative off-grid lighting model in developing countries. In this paper, we explore consumer behavior and the operational inefficiencies that result under this model. Specifically, we are interested in (i) measuring the impact of inconvenience (of traveling to recharge the lamp) along with the impact of liquidity constraints (because of poverty) on lamp usage and (ii) evaluating the efficacy of strategies that address these factors. We build a structural model of consumers’ recharge decisions that incorporates several operational features of the low-income regions. We conducted large-scale field experiments in Rwanda in partnership with a local rechargeable lamp operator and use the resultant data to estimate and test our model. We find that the complete removal of inconvenience and liquidity constraints from the current business model results in 73% and 126% increases in both recharges and revenue, thereby suggesting that these constraints are major sources of inefficiency. By implementing simple operations-based strategies—such as starting more recharge centers, visiting consumers periodically to collect their lamps for recharge, and allowing consumers to partially recharge their lamps and pay flexibly for the recharge—more than half the benefit of completely eliminating the inefficiencies can be attained. By contrast, the price- and capacity-based strategies that vary the economic variables (i.e., the amount paid per recharge and the amount of light obtained in return) but not the operational model perform far worse than the aforementioned strategies. Overall, our analysis emphasizes the importance of managing operations effectively even in markets with cash-constrained consumers, in which firms may have a natural tendency to focus more on reducing prices. This paper was accepted by Vishal Gaur, operations management. Funding: This work was supported by the International Growth Centre; Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania; and Institut Européen d’Administration des Affaires; The Environment and Energy Partnership; Grand Challenges Canada (Stars in Global Health); INSEAD’s Emerging Markets Institute; INSEAD’s Randomized Controlled Trials Laboratory; the INSEAD–Wharton Alliance, and International Growth Centre. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4844 .

The Contingent Relationship Between Purpose and Profits

When do for-profit corporations pursue both purpose and profits and when do they prioritize one over the other? This study explores this question, measuring the strength of purpose based on the perceptions of nearly 1 million employees across 635 U.S. public companies within 14 industry categories. Two main findings emerge. First, the relationship between purpose and profits varies widely across companies and industries. Second, companies with higher levels of innovation intensity, intangible capital, or long-term investors tend to pursue both purpose and profits, whereas companies with lower levels of these factors tend to prioritize one over the other. This evidence suggests that purpose and profits are compatible in settings that rely on innovation and long temporal horizons for value creation and opposed in settings that do not.History: This paper has been accepted for the Strategy Science Special Issue on Corporate Purpose.Funding: C. Gartenberg acknowledges financial support from the Govil Family and the Wharton School.

Howard Kunreuther: An appreciation

Risk AnalysisVolume 43, Issue 5 p. 884-885 EDITORIAL Howard Kunreuther: An appreciation Mark V. Pauly, Corresponding Author Mark V. Pauly [email protected] The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA Correspondence Mark V. Pauly, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA. Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author Mark V. Pauly, Corresponding Author Mark V. Pauly [email protected] The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA Correspondence Mark V. Pauly, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA. Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author First published: 06 April 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/risa.14131Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL No abstract is available for this article. Volume43, Issue5May 2023Pages 884-885 RelatedInformation

Dewey, Implementation, and Creating a Democratic Civic University

Dewey, Implementation, and Creating a Democratic Civic University

The Value of Social Media Data in Fashion Forecasting

Problem definition: How to use social media to predict style color and jeans fit sales for a retailer. Academic/practical relevance: Neither retail practice nor the academic literature provides a method for using social media to predict style color and jeans fit sales for a retailer. We present and validate a systematic approach for doing that. Methodology: Demand forecasting in the fashion industry is challenging due to short product lifetimes, long manufacturing lead times, and constant innovation of fashion products. We investigate the value of social media information for color trends and jeans fit forecasting. We partner with three multinational retailers, two apparel and one footwear, and combine their proprietary data sets with web-crawled publicly available data on Twitter and the Google Search Volume Index. We implement a variety of machine learning models to develop forecasts that can be used in setting the initial shipment quantity for an item, arguably the most important decision for fashion retailers. Results: Our findings show that fine-grained social media information has significant predictive power in forecasting color and fit demands months in advance of the sales season, and therefore greatly helps in making the initial shipment quantity decision. The predictive power of including social media features, measured by the improvement of the out-of-sample mean absolute deviation over current practice ranges from 24% to 57%. Managerial implications: To our knowledge, this study is the first to explore and demonstrate the value of social media information in fashion demand forecasting in a way that is practical and operable for fashion retailers. With consistent results across all three retailers, we demonstrate the robustness of our findings over market and geographic heterogeneity, and different forecast horizons. Moreover, we discuss potential mechanisms that might be driving this significant predictive power. Our results suggest that changes in fashion demand are driven more by “bottom-up” changes in consumer preferences than by “top-down” influence from the fashion industry. Funding: This work was supported by Wharton School Fishman-Davidson Center for Service and Operations Management, the Wharton School Baker Retailing Center, and the Wharton School Risk Management Center Russell Ackoff Doctoral Student Fellowship. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/msom.2023.1193 .

Introduction to the Virtual Special Issue: Strategy Science’s Contributions to Doctoral Reading Lists

Introduction to the Virtual Special Issue: <i>Strategy Science</i>’s Contributions to Doctoral Reading Lists

Response to: Comment on The AI and I: A Collaboration on Competence.

We thank the authors for their thoughtful comments on the present and future use of artificial intelligence in surgery.1 As they creatively demonstrated in their letter written by Open AI GPT-3 chatbot (ChatGPT), some AI technology performance has become very difficult to distinguish from human performance. It has even been reported that ChatGPT could likely pass the United States Medical Licensing Exam and the Bar Exam.2 The rapid rise of ChatGPT use has led to debates and uncertainty in numerous fields. For example, some educators are concerned that it will facilitate cheating. Others have embraced it. In an interview with National Public Radio, Dr. Ethan Mollick, Associate Professor of Management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, stated that he not only allowed, but even required his students to use ChatGPT to facilitate ideas for class projects. He noted that use of AI is analogous to using a calculator to do math.3 “I think everybody is cheating…So what I’m asking students to do is just be honest with me.” Although the direct applications of ChatGPT to surgical care may be limited in the sense that it cannot perform operations, the impact that ChatGPT and similar technology will have on academic publishing is unknown. Will journals and publishers prohibit ChatGPT from being used? Will they use technology, some of which has already been developed, to identify and “root out” ChatGPT text?4 Conversely, will they take Dr. Mollick’s approach and welcome ChatGPT use and require disclosure? Cheating and plagiarism have always been challenges in academia and publishing. ChatGPT raises new questions about the process and traditional approach to applied intellect. With new technology that can generate high level, authentic appearing writing, publishers and journal editors will need to develop new strategies and standards for what is considered original or novel content. Of note, ChatGPT was not used to write this.