Efforts to engage customers in cocreating new products have garnered much research attention from studies documenting customer cocreation’s (CC’s) positive impact on firm innovation and performance. Less research, however, has counterbalanced the bright side with the potential dark side of CC, especially as a strategy for multinational corporations (MNCs) operating in foreign markets. This study examines how MNC subsidiaries’ CC affects new product innovativeness and knowledge leakage to competitors. Adopting a broader agency perspective to recognize that subsidiaries often do not perform up to headquarters’ expectations due to both self-serving opportunism and honest incompetence, this study explores how CC effects are contingent on MNCs’ global management mechanisms. Using a dyadic managerial survey of 238 MNC subsidiaries, the authors find that MNCs can control knowledge leakage by implementing proper global integration and local adaptation mechanisms. However, CC may not improve new product innovativeness, except when the subsidiary has low local research-and-development staff influence. This study contributes to the CC literature by showing its benefits, challenges, and boundary conditions as a growing MNC innovation strategy.
June 2020
Journal of International Marketing
Trust is key to relationship marketing. Although trust is bilateral, studies on the dispersion of trust among exchange parties remain limited, leaving the antecedents and outcomes of trust asymmetry largely underexplored. To fill the gaps, this study empirically examines the effects of different types of trust asymmetry on exchange performance and then investigates the institutional origins of trust asymmetry in international interfirm exchanges. Drawing on a survey of 134 international buyer–supplier relationships in China, the study finds that both calculative trust asymmetry and relational trust asymmetry have negative influences on exchange performance. The study also finds that formal institutional distance constrains calculative trust asymmetry and informal institutional distance increases relational trust asymmetry. Moreover, prior interactions and expectations of continuity significantly moderate the effects of formal and informal institutional distance. This study advances trust studies in cross-border settings.
June 2020
Journal of International Marketing
Many people face problems of emotional distress. Early detection of high-risk individuals is the key to prevent suicidal behavior. There is increasing evidence that the Internet and social media provide clues of people’s emotional distress. In particular, some people leave messages showing emotional distress or even suicide notes on the Internet. Identifying emotionally distressed people and examining their posts on the Internet are important steps for health and social work professionals to provide assistance, but the process is very time-consuming and ineffective if conducted manually using standard search engines. Following the design science approach, we present the design of a system called KAREN, which identifies individuals who blog about their emotional distress in the Chinese language, using a combination of machine learning classification and rule-based classification with rules obtained from experts. A controlled experiment and a user study were conducted to evaluate system performance in searching and analyzing blogs written by people who might be emotionally distressed. The results show that the proposed system achieved better classification performance than the benchmark methods and that professionals perceived the system to be more useful and effective for identifying bloggers with emotional distress than benchmark approaches.
June 2020
MIS Quarterly
公司普遍将其服务员工的表现,归因于其尽心努力或天赋才能。然而,我们尚未清楚两者如何影响客户对服务员工的评核和待客成效。此外,过往的研究仅主要分析对自己绩效的归因,对他人绩效归因的影响着墨甚少。借鉴有关热情–胜任力框架和绩效归因的研究,是次的研究指出,当服务员工表现称职归因于努力而非才能时,客户期望更多以共享为导向而非以交换为导向的关系,因为努力(相对于才能)会令客户觉得服务员工更为热情。作者继而提出,客户的协助行为是关系期望的下游结果,而努力(相对于才能)更有可能促使客户的口碑和想法分享行为。研究结果通过将绩效归因确定为关系期望的管理上有意义的前因,丰富了现有文献,并为营销人员如何影响客户对关系的期望和协助行为提供了实用的指引。
May 2020
Journal of Marketing
We investigate the impact of corporate governance on customers' trust using a dynamic model of experience‐goods firm. In the optimal equilibrium, customers' trust in the firm is linked to its behavior in the market for corporate control, so that the controlling shareholder has incentives to ensure high product quality while noncontrolling shareholders' interests are protected. Following a trust‐damaging event, turnover of the controlling share block restores customers' trust and enhances total shareholder value. Our analysis identifies an endogenous cost of corporate control, offers implications for the control premium, and provides a novel rationale for the separation of ownership and control.
May 2020
International Economic Review
How will a chief sustainability officer (CSO) influence corporate social performance? Building upon the upper echelons perspective and the attention‐based view, this study argues that while a CSO helps channel managerial attention to a firm's social domain, managerial attention is more likely to be directed to negative issues than to positive issues. In addition, such relationships are contingent on the focal firm's governance design and its industry culpability. Analysis of a sample of S&P 500 firms for the period of 2005–2014 largely renders support to our predictions.
April 2020
Strategic Management Journal
自2007年首次推出后,绿色债券的市场便于世界各地迅速发展起来。我们这项研究分析了于2007年至2017年期间,来自28个国家的上市公司所发行的绿色债券,是首个关于绿色债券的股票市场反应及实际效果的实验性研究。团队整合了一个全面的国际绿色债券资料库,发现公司发行绿色债券对其股价带来正面影响。可是,我们没有发现显著的绿色债券溢价,这显示公司发行绿色债券期间的正面股价回报并不完全由低融资成本推动。不过,我们发现机构的持股量,尤其是本地机构,将会在发行绿色债券后增加。发行绿色债券也改善股价的流动性。整体而言,我们的研究发现公司发行绿色债券会为股东带来好处。
April 2020
Journal of Corporate Finance
Ownership structure plays a critical role in the incentives and behaviors of business organizations. The literature has focused on the effects of firm ownership dispersion across managers and investors. We extend the literature by examining the roles of ownership structure within a controlling family. Specifically, we focus on the family trust structure, which is a popular vehicle for holding family ownership around the world. The trust structure typically locks controlling ownership within a family for a very long period. Although it ensures family control, the share transfer restriction may induce family shirking problems, make family conflicts difficult to resolve, and distort firm decisions. Based on a sample of publicly traded family firms in Hong Kong, we report that trust-controlled firms that are more susceptible to these problems tend to pay higher dividends, invest less in the long term, and experience worse performance. The costs of using a trust structure are more significant when the family stakes have been locked inside the trust for a longer period and when a larger amount of family ownership is held by the trust.
April 2020
Journal of Corporate Finance
Do cross-country differences in labor regulations shape (1) acquiring firms’ announcement returns and post-acquisition profits, costs, and revenues from cross-border deals, (2) the selection of cross-border targets, or (3) the success rates of cross-border offers? We discover that acquiring firms enjoy smaller abnormal returns and post-deal performance gains with targets in stronger labor protection countries; acquirers are more likely to purchase labor-dependent targets in weak labor regulation countries and more likely to use cross-border acquisitions to enter new markets when targets are in stronger labor regulation countries; and offer success rates fall when targets are in stronger labor regulation countries.
March 2020
Journal of International Business Studies