Agents who perform interrelated tasks or work in similar local conditions often observe each other's actions and local signals. However, such information is often costly for the principal to obtain. Analytical models show that in such a situation, a peer reporting system with a verification mechanism (using one agents information to verify the others) and a reward for truthful whistle blowing can induce agents to report honestly and thereby help the principal achieve the first-best outcome. However, behavioral research suggests that the agents perception regarding the fairness of the principal as well as cheap talk among agents may affect both how honestly agents report and how willing they are to blow the whistle on their peers. The results of the experiment show that under a peer reporting system, the agents' perception regarding the fairness of the principal positively affects the agents reporting honesty and negatively affects the agents rate of collusion. Communication between agents decreases their honesty and their whistle blowing when the principal is perceived as unfair, but not when the principal is perceived as fair.

Incentives of executives and board of directors play an important role in corporate decisions. Principal agent theory suggests a tradeoff between risk and incentives in optimal compensation contracts for managers. The first essay of this dissertation explores the relationship between the distribution of incentive compensation among top executives and firm risk. This essay develops and tests a two-agent model of optimal incentive compensation for corporate executives. The model investigates the effects of firm risk and cooperation among executives in the design of incentive contracts and offers two contrasting propositions: 1. When importance of cooperation is invariant to risk, the ratio of incentive compensation of the CEO to that of other top executive(s) increases with risk. 2. In contrast, when importance of co-operation increases with risk, the ratio of incentive compensation first increases and then decreases with risk. Using EXECUCOMP data from 1992 to 2002 I test these propositions and find evidence supporting the second proposition, but none for the first. The second essay examines the relation between board independence of target firms and the returns to targets and acquirers around takeover announcements. Using a sample of 232 large relative size takeovers, I reexamine whether target board independence is related to target or acquirer returns and their share in the total wealth change around announcements. Unlike Cotter et al. (1997), I do not find independent target boards to be associated with higher target premiums or lower acquirer returns. Similar to Wulf (2004), I find that target returns are lower when target CEOs obtain CEO positions in the merged firm. However, target board independence does not mitigate the lower premium targets receive when their CEOs are CEOs of the merged firm. I conclude that the takeover market is competitive such that target board independence is unrelated to gain sharing between targets and acquirers in larger relative size takeovers.

Participation of users in the information systems development (ISD) process has been widely advocated by both academicians and practitioners. Most researchers utilize user participation as a behavioral construct when studying various ISD outcomes. However, both the ISD literature and the Participative Decision-Making (PDM) literature imply the insufficiency of the behavioral approach to participation, especially when studying productivity-related ISD outcomes. This research adopts an efficacy approach to participation, and proposes knowledge participation as a new construct to assess the effectiveness of participative activities performed by users in an ISD process. The construct of knowledge participation is studied to ascertain whether it has more predicative power than user participation when predicting productivity-related ISD outcomes. In addition, team cognition, specified here by its two elements shared awareness of expertise location and shared task understanding, are proposed as a mediating mechanism that transforms the effect of knowledge participation on ISD productivity outcomes such as team performance and system quality. Some ISD environmental factors, such as business context complexity, system complexity, management support, and project size are studied as control variables. An experimental study and a field study are designed to test the proposed research model.

My dissertation consists of three essays that examine the effects of processes that take place in the pre-decision stage of decision-making on subsequent self-regulation. In my first essay I examine a new construct dealing with individuals' tendency to elaborate on potential future outcomes and develop a scale to measure it. Elaboration on potential outcomes captures the degree to which individuals generate positive and negative consequences of their behaviors, as well as the degree to which they evaluate the likelihood and importance of these consequences. I first develop the Elaboration on Potential Outcomes (EPO) scale and establish its factor structure, reliability and validity. I then investigate its relationships with conceptually related yet distinct consumer traits. Third, I examine its association with various consumer behaviors such as exercise of self-control, procrastination behaviors, compulsive buying, credit card debt, retirement investing, healthy lifestyle, and obesity. Finally, I show that peoples' tendency to think about potential outcomes predicts the type of information processing they engage in when making an important consumer decision, as well as the choices they make. In my second essay I examine consumers' tendency to elaborate in potential outcomes in the context of investment behavior. In three studies I show that investors with a stronger chronic tendency to engage in pre-decision outcome elaboration are less likely to be affected by different types of descriptive variance effects, which emerge when individuals make different decisions as a function of how information is presented to them. Furthermore, I find that encouraging pre-decision elaboration on the pros and cons of investing helps investors who tend not to engage in such elaboration to become less influenced by peripheral cues such as information framing and presentation mode. Finally, in my third essay I examine a different pre-decision process goal activation at different levels of abstraction. The main question I look at is whether activating high- vs. low-level goals by asking consumers to consider why they should achieve a goal rather than how they can achieve it might differentially affect their pursuit of this goal. In two studies I examine the interactive effects of decisional status (pre- or post-decisional) and goal hierarchy (high- vs. low-level goal activation) on several self-regulatory domains: goal commitment, anticipated effortful goal pursuit, and choice.

This study offers a new approach to understanding the diffusion of a new technology; specifically on the process of information sharing and its influence on a market based standards contest. Since diffusion relies upon adopting firms to gather information and learn about a new technology prior to adoption, communication of a technologys attributes and benefits is essential to the overall process of diffusion. The flow of information from sponsors to adopters is an influential action that serves to impact both the speed and degree of adoption of a new technology and can influence the outcome of market based standards contest. I explore these issues through a case analysis of the wireless phone industry and the 2G standards contest in the United States by studying the information sharing actions and events of two technology sponsors; Ericsson and Qualcomm. I develop a model of information sharing that identifies how aspects of timing, message, media, and target of influence combine to form two primary types of information sharing; cascade and broadcast. This model draws on concepts from the relevant body of literature on standards contests, social networks and communication theories.

This dissertation investigates the financial impact of a large sample of outsourcing contracts signed by corporations listed on the US markets from 1990 through 2003. We construct a data set that identifies the outsourcing client and vendor firms and use this data set to examine (a) the announcement effects of outsourcing contracts on firm value, (b) the impact of outsourcing contracts on long-run stock and accounting performance and (c) the impact of outsourcing contracts on the relation between client and vendor firms.

There are many reasons why managers are interested in maintaining control over their firm. Some potential reasons include compensation, autonomy, power, perquisites, and the ability to determine the terms under which the firm is acquired. This study examines one event that provides an opportunity for managers to take actions designed to maintain control of firm, the initial public offering (IPO). A simple rationing approach provides the mechanism which impacts managements ability to maintain control. The hypothesis underlying this study is that managers strategically underprice the IPO to influence outside blockholdings. By preventing large outside blocks from forming as part of the IPO, management reduces the incentive for outsiders to monitor their actions, resulting in greater autonomy. Chapter One documents that IPO underpricing is significantly related to country-level governance characteristics. Examining a sample of 4.698 IPOs across 24 countries for the 2000-2004 time period, the results suggest that IPO underpricing is higher in countries which offer greater protection to investors. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that IPO underpricing is an instrument used by managers to maintain control of the firm when country-level governance mechanisms favor investors rights Chapter Two finds that IPO underpricing exhibits a significant, positive relation with activity in the market for corporate control. Examining a sample of over 2,300 initial public offerings in the United States over the 1990-1998 time period, the results suggest that underpricing is greater when the market for corporate control is active. Additional results indicate that the corporate control climate prevailing at the time of the offering is related to the likelihood that a firm survives in subsequent years, that underpricing is associated with the post-offering ownership structure, and that the size of the external blockholdings formed concurrent with the offering are positively related to the probability a firm is taken over in the years following the event. Together, the findings presented in this study are consistent with the hypothesis that underpricing is an instrument used to protect managers when other governance mechanisms, including investors rights and the market for corporate control, threaten their control over the firm.

Interruptions are important phenomena in organizations, and researchers debate their effects on performance. This paper reviews the literature and argues that the degree of fit between task demands and an actors capacity determines whether the effects of interruptions on performance are positive or negative. The fit model hypothesizes that for actors working with a capacity deficit (i.e., their capacity scarcely meet the task demands), interruptions have detrimental effects on performance. Moreover, the greater the actors capacity, the less negative their reactions to interruptions will be. Time diaries, surveys, and archival studies were conducted among 92 public school principals in an urban school district in the eastern United States. The results support the hypothesis on the main effects of interruptions and partially support the proposed moderating effects of individual effort. The contributions of this research and its implications for future work are discussed.

This dissertation explores job crafting, or the processes through which individuals conceptualize and carry out tasks, enact relationships with others to get work done, and ascribe meaning and significance to their jobs. Previous literature in this area has remained relatively silent about the work context factors shaping job crafting. Thus, the research conducted in this dissertation addresses three primary questions: (1) What does it mean to craft a job?; (2) What are the effects of the structural and relational context of work on job crafting?; and (3) What are the outcomes of job crafting? A model of individual job crafting and its antecedents and consequences is proposed, to describe how the structural and relational contexts of work shape opportunities and motivations to engage in job crafting. The research model explores the influence of discretion in work, task complexity, and task interdependence with others, as well as the influence of workgroup psychological safety and occupational community of practice, on how individuals craft their jobs. Further, outcomes of job crafting for individuals as well as the collective (workgroup and organization) are also explored. Job crafting is examined empirically in two settings that facilitate observation of job crafting because they offer individuals high opportunities to craft work (Eisenhardt, 1989), and provide different lenses that complement each other in enriching our understanding of job crafting. Study one (manufacturing work) preliminarily explores job crafting in autonomous teams in a manufacturing organization - the Volvo Uddevalla car factory in Sweden, where considerable room is deliberately left for individual input. Study two (service work) affords a richer context to explore the content of job crafting and in particular, the organizational and collective influences on job crafting. This study surveyed special education professionals an occupation where there is no right way to do the work in a sample of 200 schools from a large urban public school district in the U.S. Based on extensive qualitative work, a rich measure of job crafting was developed. The findings suggest that work discretion, task complexity, and interdependence with others enable job crafting behaviors. The positive effect of work discretion on task crafting is stronger for individuals with broader skills than for those with narrower skills. With regard to collective influences, team psychological safety inhibits individuals job crafting. Further, the positive effects of the occupational community of practice on job crafting are stronger in organizational settings emphasizing collaborative work than in those emphasizing isolated work. With regard to outcomes, individual job crafting enhances employees job satisfaction and commitment levels, while increasing individual performance and reducing absenteeism levels. In addition, the effects of individual job crafting extend beyond the individual and positively impact team outcomes. Finally, implications of findings for researchers and practitioners are also discussed.

Why does a firm respond to a competitor's action as it does? Prior to this grounded theory study, there was no transparency, the black box of competitive response remained dark. Using a series of three embedded case studies and examining eighteen competitive responses, this study has illuminated the processes connecting the inputs and outputs related by previous content based research in competitive response. One pattern that quickly emerged was multiple responses to competitive actions/trends. Understanding why firms pursue multiple responses and what does and does not constrain their choices became the focus of this research. To widen the beam of light, this study takes a broader view of competitive response recognizing that, from an Austrian viewpoint, all responses - imitation, modified imitation or novel - can erode the advantage created by the initiating firm. To control for rival hypotheses, the participating firms were all in the same service industry characterized by high visibility that maximizes awareness and minimizes response uncertainty. Emerging from this study are five response processes, all with the potential to produce multiple responses. These processes are differentiated by their triggers, which include perceived survival threats, performance below expectations, trends with and without revenue opportunities and trends with an impact to firm identity. This study also revealed the response pressure mechanism in which a delay in the firm's main response and a looming penalty for not responding within a response window were found to generate interim responses. Implications from this study include: an initial understanding that how a firm responds depends on the triggers; a firm may respond more than once to a competitor action; responses come in all shapes, sizes and frequencies; the number of responses is dependent on the response pressure mechanism; and how a firm responds is molded by its perceptions, its current and aspired identities, and the customer appeal of the initial action. Though this study must be replicated in additional contexts to ensure generalizeability, a final contribution of this research is to demonstrate the complementary value of process and content research to allow the full picture of competitive response to take shape.