Research Colloquia
The Sharing of New Ideas
 The Research Colloquium provides a forum for interaction among faculty, students, and visitors interested in the applications of business and management. The colloquium includes presentations by faculty from UC Irvine and other universities, as well as research institutes.
Colloquia Events are open to the public unless otherwise noted; please see event description for more details.
Past Colloquia
2010-2011 Research Colloquia Events
2009-2010 Research Colloquia Events
(Host: Christine Beckman)
February 23, 2012
Where Do Lawsuits Come From? The Role of Spatial Distribution of Principals and Legal Mediating Agents
SPEAKER: Maxim Sytch
UNIVERSITY: Stephen M. Ross School of Business
TIME: 12:00 – 1:30 pm
WHERE: SB 112
ABSTRACT:
This study investigates the origins of interorganizational litigation. It explores how the spatial distribution of principals (companies) and mediating agents (intellectual property litigation firms) can facilitate and sustain patent infringement lawsuits among companies. Spatial propinquity is hypothesized to determine the nature of interaction and social relationships between the principal’s and the mediating agent’s employees, which can subsequently affect the mediating agent’s involvement in identifying opportunities for the principal to engage in litigation. This study’s context is the patterns of spatial distribution of 405 U.S. biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies (the principals) and the population of 365 intellectual property (IP) litigation firms (the mediating agents) and their 2,255 U.S. regional offices. It relates these patterns to the companies’ involvement in patent infringement disputes from 1999 to 2006. Additionally, this study uses evidence from thirty-six semi-structured interviews with legal practitioners. Results suggest that proximity to IP litigation firms increases the number of lawsuits a company files, even when accounting for the endogeneity in law firms’ location choices. Greater proximity to the IP litigation firm retained for a given lawsuit also lengthens that lawsuit’s duration, although this effect is moderated by the characteristics of the local institutional environment in which the company is located.
(Host: Libby Weber)
February 17, 2012
Technology Shocks in Multi-Sided Markets: The Impact of Craigslist on Local Newspapers
SPEAKER: Feng Zhu, Assistant Professor of Management and Organization
UNIVERSITY: USC Marshall School of Business
TIME: 2:00 – 3:30 pm
WHERE: SB 112
ABSTRACT:
We investigate the impact of Craigslist, a website providing classified-advertising services, on local newspapers’ pricing strategies. We exploit temporal and geographic variation in Craigslist’s entry to show that newspapers with greater reliance on classified-ad revenue experience a larger drop in classified-ad rates after Craigslist’s entry. The impact of Craigslist’s entry propagates to the subscriber and display-ad sides of these newspapers: Relative to other newspapers, they experience an increase in subscription prices, a decrease in circulation shares, and a decrease in display-ad rates. We also show that newspapers respond to Craigslist's entry to the classified-ad side of the market by increasing content differentiation on the subscriber side of the market. This effect is particularly pronounced in markets with readers with different tastes in news types.
(Host: Connie Pechmann)
February 2, 2012
Virality, Word-of-Mouth, and Drivers of Social Transmission
SPEAKER: Jonah Berger, James G. Campbell Assistant Professor of Marketing
UNIVERSITY: The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
TIME: 3:30 – 5:00 pm
WHERE: SB 112
ABSTRACT:
Why are some products talked about more than others? What makes certain online content viral? While people often share opinions and information with others, and such transmission has important consequences for diffusion and sales, much less is known about why people talk about and share certain things rather than others. In this presentation, I will cover some recent projects examining characteristics of products, brands, and information that are linked to transmission. The first uses data on six months of New York Times articles (as well as a number of experiments) to investigate what types of article make the most emailed list. Controlling for where the articles actually appear, we examine how psychological characteristics of content (e.g. how surprising it is or how much emotion it evokes) are linked to virality. The second project uses data on over 300 buzz marketing campaigns (as well as a controlled field experiment) to examine characteristics of products and campaigns that generate more word-of-mouth. In addition to presenting results from each project, comparing the findings from each helps shed light on important differences between online and offline social transmission.
(Host: Libby Weber)
January 20, 2012
Home Court Advantage: Compensating Wage Differentials and Rent Appropriation in the NBA
SPEAKER: Russell Coff, Professor of Management & Human Resources
UNIVERSITY: University of Wisconsin-Madison
TIME: 2:00-3:30 pm
WHERE: SB 112
ABSTRACT:
The compensating differentials literature offers logic that pay is expected to be higher for undesirable jobs. The fact that employees may make tradeoffs between the desirability of a job or work environment and the amount of pay required to hold them in place is of great strategic significance. This willingness to make tradeoffs means that such non-pecuniary benefits may allow other stakeholders, such as shareholders, to capture more rents. But do employees routinely give up financial compensation when they receive non-pecuniary gains? While the compensating wage differentials literature offers some evidence that it occurs (consider the classic example of pay rates for sanitation workers), it has not been examined in the context of competitive advantage where many professionals may especially enjoy their work. To what extent are employees willing to take pay cuts based on the presence of non-pecuniary factors?
We examine this in the context of the National Basketball Association. Using team-level data from every regular season game spanning 2000-2009, combined with measures of firm performance, including wins, playoff performance, and attendance, we estimate a variety of specifications where firm performance relative to rivals is a function of the exchange value of team members’ skill portfolio and several proxies for individual mobility constraints. Counter to the compensating wage differentials literature, results indicate that players often do not take pay reductions when there are important non-pecuniary gains. In this way, the financial compensation understates the rent that such individuals actually appropriate. Analysis confirms that players recognize this value since a substantial premium is required to lure them away from their hometown teams – they need to be compensated for the utility lost by moving away. Accordingly, the theory of competitive advantage needs to be augmented to account for these, often hidden, sources of value creation that influence the total amount of rent generated as well as how it is allocated to the various stakeholders.
(Host: Zheng Sun)
November 15, 2011
Portfolio Choice with Illiquid Assets
SPEAKER: Professor Mark Westerfield, Assistant Professor of Finance and Business Economics
UNIVERSITY: University of Southern California
TIME: 10:30 am – 12:00 pm
WHERE: SB 122
ABSTRACT:
We investigate how the inability to continuously trade an asset affects portfolio choice. We extend the standard Merton model to include an illiquid asset that can only be traded at infrequent, stochastic intervals. Because consumption is financed through liquid wealth only, the presence of illiquidity leads to increased and state-dependent risk aversion. Illiquidity leads to under-investment in both the liquid and illiquid risky asset, relative to the standard Merton (1969) case. We demonstrate that the effect of illiquidity can be quantitatively large, because in contrast to transaction costs models, the shadow cost of illiquidity is unbounded. The presence of liquidity risk distorts the allocation of the liquid and illiquid assets even when liquid and illiquid asset returns are uncorrelated and the investor has log utility.
(Host: Zheng Sun)
October 28, 2011
A Glass Half Full: Contrarian Trading in the Flash Crash
SPEAKER: Jialin Liu, Assistant Professor of Finance
UNIVERSITY: Columbia University Graduate School of Business
TIME: 2:00 – 3:30 pm
WHERE: SB 112
ABSTRACT:
Stocks with better past returns crash more than other stocks on May 6, 2010. I find evidence that this is related to such stocks being unattractive to contrarian buyers. This suggests the importance of contrarian investors in stabilizing price fluctuations. However, the glass is half full---that the contrarian investors shun certain types of stocks limits the extent of price stability that relies heavily on this and other similar types of trading strategies. Stocks with better past returns exhibit more negative co-skewness, which holds in almost every month since the 1960s and for past return horizons ranging from one month to three years. This has interesting implications for risk premia associated with short-term reversal, medium-term momentum, and long-run reversal portfolios.
(Host: John Turner)
October 26, 2011
Multi-period Assortment Planning for Short-Lived Products
SPEAKER: Felipe Caro, Assistant Professor
UNIVERSITY: UCLA Anderson School of Management
TIME: 3:30 – 5:00 pm
WHERE: SB 223
ABSTRACT:
The assortment planning literature has centered on single-period problems that fit well products like groceries but are less useful when variety over time is a key sales driver. In this talk we incorporate a time dimension to assortment planning and we present two models that deal with new product introduction.
The first model deals with the assortment packing problem (APP) in which a planner must decide, in advance, the release date of each product in a given collection over a selling season. A fundamental aspect of the problem is that each product is short-lived in the sense that, once introduced, its attractiveness lasts only a few periods and vanishes over time. The planner's objective is to determine when to introduce each product to maximize the total profit over the selling season.
In the second model we take a portfolio approach to study dynamic assortment strategies for a retailer with limited shelf space. The retailer can choose among basic and fashion items with low and high risk (and return) respectively. An important feature is the vogue that the retailer tries to follow, which we explicitly model as a stochastic process.
The objective is to maximize the long-term value of the retail business by dynamically adjusting the menu of products on display.
The APP model is joint work with Victor Martínez-de-Albéniz (IESE) and Paat Rusmevichientong (USC) while the portfolio model is joint work with René Caldentey (NYU).
(Host: Zheng Sun)
October 24, 2011
Can Noise Create the Size and Value Effects?
SPEAKERS: Jun Liu, Assistant Professor with Tenure and Jason Hsu, Chief Investment Officer
UNIVERSITIES: UCSD Rady School of Management and UCLA
TIME: 10:30 am – 12:00 pm
WHERE: SB 116
ABSTRACT:
Small-capitalization and value stocks are likely to predominantly have negative noise, while large-capitalization and growth stocks are likely to have positive noise, if prices contain random noise. Negative price noise implies that small-capitalization and value stocks are more likely undervalued and thus have higher expected return than justified by risk, while the large-capitalization and growth stocks are more likely overvalued. We formally verify and explore this intuition by using a standard noise-in-price model.
We compute in closed form and match quantitatively the level of and the cross-sectional variations in the expected stock return documented in Fama and French (1992). Our model is parsimonious with essentially only one adjustable parameter, the volatility of the price noise. Our study suggests that a modest amount of noise in prices can create size and value effects.
Blume and Stambaugh (1983) assume small-cap stocks have higher noise volatility and show that they have higher expected return because of Jensen's inequality. This channel is shut o® in our paper because we assume all stocks have the identical return distribution thus the same noise volatility. Small-cap stocks in our paper are defined to be ones with low market capitalization and they generate higher expected returns because of the negative realization of random price noise.
(Host: Libby Weber)
October 21, 2011
The Influence of Intellectual Property Protection on the Geography of Trade in Knowledge-Intensive Goods
SPEAKER: Anita McGahan, Professor and Rotman Chair in Management
UNIVERSITY: Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, Canada
TIME: 1:00 – 2:30 pm
WHERE: SB 112
ABSTRACT:
This paper examines the impact of legal institutions for patent enforcement on the diffusion of knowledge-based products. The context is the implementation of the TRIPS (trade-related intellectual property) agreement of the World Trade Organization (WTO), which required member countries to adopt and enforce laws to protect intellectual property (IP). One stated goal of TRIPS was to promote “the transfer and dissemination of technology,” particularly from high-income to poorer countries. Using the United Nations Comtrade data, we analyze trade flows from 1995 to 2009 for 158 WTO countries to investigate how the diffusion of knowledge-based products changed with TRIPS implementation. In particular, we examine changes in trade across different sectors that vary in the importance of knowledge and IP as well as across countries of different income levels. We find that, relative to sectors that rely less on IP, exports of biopharmaceuticals and information and communications technology (ICT) products increased following the implementation of TRIPS. This result holds across all country income levels. In addition, we find an increase in ICT imports in developing countries. However, contrary to the TRIPS goal of transferring knowledge from rich to poor, the increase in importation of knowledge-based goods – particularly of biopharmaceuticals – was lower in poorer countries than in high-income countries. Furthermore, post-TRIPS biopharmaceutical imports into developing countries increased less than ICT imports. Overall, the results demonstrate that exports of IP-intensive products responded vigorously to the implementation of legal protections on trade, but that imports from high-income countries into developing countries – and consequently the dissemination of knowledge into poorer settings – was sensitive to other factors that affected receptiveness to these goods. These findings suggest that the patent system alone may not be sufficient for promoting knowledge diffusion from high-income to developing countries. Keywords: TRIPS; International trade; Intellectual Property Rights; Biopharmaceuticals; ICT; Industry Clusters.
* Thanks to Michael E. Porter for providing us with access to the International Cluster Competitiveness Project (ICCP) data on cluster definitions. Imtan Hamden-Livramento, Walter Park and Juan Ginarte generously shared their data on country-level patent protection. We are grateful for comments and suggestions to Anne Boring, Iain Cockburn, Phillip McCalman, Matthew Slaughter, participants in the NBER Biopharmaceuticals Location Conference, and seminar participants at the Fox School of Business and Universidad Carlos III. Copyright © 2008, 2011, Mercedes Delgado, Margaret Kyle and Anita McGahan. All rights reserved.
(Host: Jone Pearce)
October 20, 2011
Callings and Meaning at Work: From Cages to Cubicles
SPEAKER: Stuart Bunderson
UNIVERSITY: Washington University, St. Louis
TIME: 12:00 – 1:30 pm
WHERE: SB 117
ABSTRACT:
In an earlier study of work meaning in the zookeeping profession (Bunderson & Thompson, 2009, ASQ), we identified and elaborated a "neoclassical" view of work as a calling -- a view that mirrors classical conceptualizations of calling in its emphasis on occupational place, destiny, and duty. We found that a neoclassical calling is both binding and ennobling, that it fosters identification and meaning as well as duty and sacrifice. In this presentation, I will briefly summarize our earlier work and will then discuss our recent theoretical and empirical efforts to examine the relevance of a neoclassical calling for a more mainstream profession -- the profession of management.
(Host: John Turner)
October 17, 2011
Siting Decision Failures - How Can You Avoid Them?
SPEAKER: Richard Szanto
UNIVERSITY: Corvinus University of Budapest (Hungary)
TIME: 12:00 – 1:00 pm
WHERE: SB 223
ABSTRACT:
From the late 1970s a growing attention has been paid to siting (location) decision problems both by researchers and practitioners. Myriads of unwanted (many times noxious) facilities were rejected by local communities and other stakeholders in the past decades, and public opposition campaigns were often successful.
This phenomenon is often characterized by the expression of NIMBY (Not in my backyard) or LULU (locally unwanted land use). People opposing the unwanted facilities often consider them extremely risky; however the “objective level” of risk of these facilities (such as power plants or waste incinerators) is usually under the official limit values. “Traditional” multi-criteria decision making models often fail to provide the optimal location in these cases, since the human factors are often neglected during the decision making process.
In the framework of the qualitative research design a comparative case study was elaborated with three individual cases in the Hungarian cement industry. All the companies involved had serious difficulties in dealing with a siting conflict, and these cases lasted for years. The cement industry divides people regarding its environmental performance, and firms are constantly under attack by NGOs, and local inhabitants. Their environmental problems are well-known to the public and to themselves as well, hence they are flagships of corporate environmental programs – both in Hungary and abroad.
By coding my research interviews I revealed several key categories of siting conflicts. These are diverse risk perceptions, the role of risk communication, compensation, distrust among the actors and public participation.
(Host: Zheng Sun)
October 11, 2011
Winners in the Spotlight: Media Coverage of Fund Holdings as a Driver of Flows
SPEAKER: David Solomon, Assistant Professor of Finance and Business Economics
UNIVERSITY: University of Southern California
TIME: 8:30 – 10:00 am
WHERE: SB 112
ABSTRACT:
We show that media coverage of mutual fund holdings affects how investors allocate money to funds. Controlling for fund performance, fund holdings with high past returns attract extra flows only for stocks recently featured in the media. In contrast, holdings that were not covered in major newspapers do not affect flows. We present evidence that media coverage tends to amplify investors’ chasing of past returns rather than facilitate the processing of useful information in fund portfolios. Fund managers exploit this behavior by purchasing media-covered past winners at reporting dates, a strategy most prevalent among poorly performing funds. Our evidence suggests that media coverage can exacerbate investor biases and that it is the primary mechanism that makes window-dressing effective.
Don Beall Center for Innovation & Entrepreneurship
(Host: Christine Beckman)
October 6, 2011
No Exit: Failure to Exit Under Uncertainty
SPEAKER: Anne Marie Knott, Professor of Strategy
UNIVERSITY: Olin School of Business, Washington University
TIME: 1:30 – 3:00 pm
WHERE: SB 117
RSVP: Maria E. Gonzalez-Tan (Email: mgonzal9@uci.edu)
ABSTRACT:
N/A
Don Beall Center for Innovation & Entrepreneurship
(Host: Christine Beckman)
September 27, 2011
Creating and Maintaining Institutions Through the Production and Perpetuation of Ignorance
SPEAKER: Kenji Klein, Doctoral Student in Organization & Management
UNIVERSITY: The Paul Merage School of Business, UC Irvine
TIME: 12:00 – 1:30 pm
WHERE: SB 116
LUNCH RSVP: Maria E. Gonzalez-Tan (Email: mgonzal9@uci.edu)
ABSTRACT:
Institutional scholars have long argued that the inability of actors to conceptualize alternatives to dominant institutional arrangements plays a key role in the maintenance of those arrangements, yet little is known about how actors come to be unable to conceptualize alternatives to such arrangements. This paper addresses that gap through historical analysis of the origins and perpetuation of marijuana prohibition. This analysis reveals the way in which institutionalization depends upon the ongoing disruption and suppression of knowledge, communities, and material artifacts that undermine the taken-for-granted status of dominant institutions. It also suggests conditions under which the taken-for-granted status of dominant institutions becomes vulnerable to erosion. Implications for research on institutional work and power in institutional processes are discussed. A case is made for the relevance of the study of ignorance and forgetting in organizational processes to supplement the extensive literature on knowledge and learning.
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