Product bundling is a business strategy that packages (either physically or logically), prices and sells groups of two or more distinct products or services as a single economic entity. This practice exploits variations in the reservation prices and the valuations of a bundle vis-à-vis its constituents. Bundling is an effective instrument for price discrimination, and presents opportunities for enhancing revenue without increasing resource availability. However, optimal bundling strategies are generally difficult to derive due to constraints on resource availability, product valuation and pricing relationships, the consumer purchase process, and the rapid growth of the number of possible alternatives. This dissertation investigates two different situationsvertically differentiated versus independently valued productsand develops two different approaches for revenue maximization opportunities using product bundling, when resource availability is limited. For the vertically differentiated market with two products, such as the TV market with prime time and non-prime time advertising, we derive optimal policies that dictate how the seller (that is, the broadcaster) can manage their limited advertising time inventories. We find that, unlike other markets, the revenue maximizing strategy may be to offer only the bundle, only the components, or various combinations of the bundle and the components. The optimality of these strategies critically depends on the availability of the two advertising time resources. We also show how the network should focus its programming quality improvement efforts, and investigate how the value of bundling, defined as the networks and the advertisers benefit from bundling, changes as the resource availabilities change. We then propose and study a bundling model for the duopolistic situation, and extend the results from the monopolistic to the duopolistic case. For the independently valued products, we develop stochastic mathematical programming models for pricing bundles of n components. Specializing this model for two components in a deterministic setting, we derive closed-form optimal product pricing policies when the demand functions are linear. Using the intuition garnered from these analytical results, we then investigate two procedures for solving large-scale problems: a greedy heuristic, and a decomposition method. We show the effectiveness of both methods through computational experiments.

Organizational control, defined as efforts to increase the chances that employees of an organization work toward achieving organizational goals, is believed to have positive effects on performance. However, few studies have tested this assumption. This research draws on theories of control and coordination to investigate the relationship between control and information systems (IS) development performance. It consists of analyses of two research models, one at the individual level of analysis, and the other at the team level of analysis. The individual-level model investigates how control affects individual effort toward task and individual coordination success, and proposes that these relationships are moderated by controlees perceptions of how effectively a controller can monitor their work behaviors and outcomes. The team-level model investigates two mediators through which control may affect IS development performance: team effort toward task, and team coordination success. A field survey was conducted, and completed matched survey responses from 106 managers and team members involved in 36 different IS development projects were used to test the hypotheses. The results suggest that control does have a positive relationship with effort toward task and coordination success. Specifically, clan control was positively associated with coordination success at the individual and team levels, and with team effort toward task. Outcome control was positively associated with individual effort toward task. In addition, the relationship between outcome control and individual effort toward task was moderated by team member perceptions of the difficulty of observing outcomes. At high levels of difficulty of observing outcomes, high levels of outcome control resulted in higher effort than at low levels of difficulty of observing outcomes. Control was also positively related to performance outcomes. Behavior control was associated with reduced overruns of resources such as time, budget, and systems and programming effort. Outcome control was positively associated with product performance, which represents the quality, ease-of-use, and functionality of the system developed or enhanced by the project. Clan control was associated with both improved product performance and reduced resource overruns. No support was found for mediation of the effects of control on performance by effort toward task or coordination success.

Electronic knowledge repositories represent one of the fundamental tools for knowledge management (KM) initiatives. Existing research, however, has largely focused on supply-side driven research questions, such as employee motivation to contribute knowledge to a repository. This research turns attention to the dynamic relationship between the supply-side issue of knowledge contribution and demand-side issue of knowledge usage, as repository systems are successful only to the extent that their content is actively utilized by organizational members to enhance their work performance. There are two primary objectives of this dissertation research. The first is to examine determinants of high quality knowledge contribution, the knowledge refinement process, and effective knowledge use, by drawing on organizational and dyadic factors. The second purpose is to expand the current understanding of knowledge contribution and use beyond conventional constructs that are based on quantity or frequency. New theoretical frameworks are proposed to conceptualize knowledge quality, knowledge refinement, and knowledge use. Towards these goals, informal qualitative interviews and a survey study with a matched-triad design were conducted with users of Eureka, a successful global knowledge repository system of the Xerox company. Results reveal that procedural justice significantly contributed to the quality of refined knowledge and the extent of knowledge use. However, procedural justice had little impact on the quality of knowledge contribution. In addition, expertise gap and communication frequency significantly influenced the quality of refined knowledge, whereas shared understanding made little contribution. These findings are discussed with respect to implications for knowledge management research and managerial practices.

My dissertation examines the impact of in-store slack on shoppers spending. In my first essay, I propose that consumers mental budgets for grocery trips are typically comprised of both an itemized portion and in-store slack. I conceptualize the itemized portion as the amount that the consumer has allocated to spend on items planned to the brand or product level and the in-store slack as the portion of the mental budget that is not assigned to be spent on any particular product but remains available for in-store decisions. Using a secondary data set and a field study, I find incidence of in-store slack. Moreover, I find support for my framework predicting that the relationship between in-store slack and budget deviation (the amount by which actual spending deviates from the mental trip budget) depends on factors related to desire and willpower. Building on my first essay, my second essay examines how the impact of promotions depends on whether the shopper still has in-store slack remaining in her mental budget. Specifically, I evaluate how the effect of promotional savings for both planned and unplanned items on spending varies as a function of whether the item is purchased before or after the shoppers in-store slack is depleted. Additionally, I examine how these relationships vary depending on income. To achieve these goals, I conducted a field study in which respondents used a hand held scanner to record the order of purchases. The results suggest that savings on planned items lead to stockpiling by higher income shoppers when the savings occur before the in-store slack has been depleted, but lead to increased purchase of unplanned items when they occur after in-store slack is depleted. I also show that promotions on unplanned grocery items do generate incremental spending at the basket level which increases with income, but only when the item is purchased after the in-store slack is exceeded. I conclude my dissertation with a discussion of future research opportunities within the field of shopper marketing.

Shareholder litigation is important because it is costly and can influence firms reporting behavior. Prior research finds that attorneys incentives and specific firm characteristics drive shareholder litigation. In this study, I control for these known drivers in order to examine whether an additional behavioral factor, investor retribution, also drives shareholder litigation. Retribution theory suggests that investors will initiate litigation to punish managers for misreporting even when there is no financial incentive to do so. My study uses experimental markets to examine whether retribution plays a role in investors litigation decisions, and if this, in turn, affects managers reporting decisions. Consistent with economic theory, I find that when investors do not have an option to initiate litigation, managers frequently misreport and investors do not find their reports credible. Further, when investors have an option to initiate litigation and a financial incentive to do so (similar to current securities laws), misreporting decreases and the credibility of managers reports increases. However, inconsistent with economic theory but consistent with retribution theory, when investors have an option to initiate litigation but have no financial incentive to do so, misreporting decreases and the credibility of managers reports increases to approximately the same level as when investors have a financial incentive to initiate litigation. These findings have important implications for regulators and managers who need to accurately anticipate investors litigation decisions in order to make optimal policy and reporting decisions.

Although Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) are potential value-creation opportunities, why they tend to occur in waves is a mystery to scholars and managers alike. Most models of M&A waves are unilevel, reductionist, and Gaussian, whereas wave patterns are arguably multi-level, emergent, and non-normally distributed. Using complexity theory, I interpret waves as emergent expressions of a self-organized critical ecology of firms conceptualized as a complex adaptive system. My observation that aggregate U.S. M&A waves from 1895 to 2008 are power-law-distributed lends support. The view that waves are self-organized critical phenomena, similar to earthquakes and avalanches, facilitates integration of prior wave theories. I then employ process-tracing to generate a historical narrative of the Great Merger Wave of 1898-1903, from which I obtain a robust process for waves consistent with a CAS interpretation of these phenomena: (1) a privatizing, market-expanding and financially innovating transportation network generates (2a) laissez-faire regulation, (2b) economic competition, and (2c) financial arbitrage, leading to (3) a burst of consolidation. My process explanation explains the power laws emergence, and may help to understand better the process dynamics of M&A waves.

How does a leading firm sustain its competence-based advantage in a competitive landscape against threats of imitation and substitution? In high-velocity competitive markets, an inherent tension arises when firms wish to prolong the value of their technological competencies, while rivals seek to make those competencies obsolete. These markets are characterized by continuous technological change, fickle customers, and frequent shifts in the competitive landscape. Firms must continually update their innovative competencies that are recurrently targets of imitation and substitution, and managers face challenges in discerning the appropriate competencies their firms should commit to and which they should avoid, resulting in the difficulty of setting straightforward strategic goals for the firm. Looking in the hard disk drive industry from 1987 to 1999, I empirically show that leading firms knowledge disclosure of core technologies has a positive effect on the probability of laggards imitating the leader. Moreover, I show that after leading firms disclose, they introduce next-generation products sooner and prevent laggards from quickly introducing their next-generation products. Thus, I suggest that a leading firms knowledge disclosing activities can shape the competitive landscape by influencing rivals scope of search for innovation opportunities. Namely, leading firms can prolong their established competencies by disclosing knowledge on their innovations by promoting imitation and delaying or preventing substitution.

This dissertation comprises two essays on earnings forecasting accuracy. Chapter 2 focuses on how management forecasting accuracy is affected by managers behavioral biases over time and Chapter 3 addresses how analyst portfolio design choices affect cross-sectional differences in analyst forecasting accuracy. In particular, Chapter 2 examines how CEOs overconfidence and their exhibited self-serving attribution biases affect how they adjust their future earnings forecasts when they receive feedback concerning their prior forecasts. I find that overconfident CEOs respond to feedback by improving their future forecasting accuracy, but they do so more slowly than their less confident peers. I also find that overconfident CEOs learn to improve their future forecasting accuracy only when feedback is less ambiguous in the form of forecasting errors. In contrast, managers who are less confident respond to both less ambiguous forecasting errors and more ambiguous market feedback concerning their prior forecasts. Chapter 3 examines analysts supply chain coverage portfolio design and their forecasting accuracy. I define the relation between a firm and one of the firms major customer firms as a supply chain relation. Further, I define an analyst who issues forecasts for both the firm and one or more of the firms major customers in the same year as a supply chain analyst. I classify all firms followed by the supply chain analyst into one of the three categories in a given year: focal firms, i.e., firms for which the analyst also covers one or more of the firms major customers, major customers of a focal firm for the analyst, and other firms which include all remaining firms in the analysts portfolio. I find that analysts who follow both a focal firm and one or more of the firms major customers issue significantly more accurate earnings forecasts for both the focal firm and the firms major customers than the same analysts issue for other firms in the analyst portfolio. I also find that these analysts are more accurate in their forecasts for the focal firm and the firms major customers than other non-supply chain analysts following the same firm, but not the firms supply chain. I show that the superior forecasting accuracy for supply chain analysts for both the focal firm and the firms major customers is achieved at the cost of reduced forecasting accuracy for other firms in the analyst portfolio. In explaining the relative importance of forecasting accuracy for the firms in the analyst portfolio, I find that focal firms and the firms major customers are more likely to generate more profitable trading commissions and operate in an industry segment that has a greater number of other peer firms than other firms in the same analyst portfolio. This evidence is consistent with earlier studies and suggests when analysts have stronger incentives to generate trading commissions from the stock of a firm, the analysts are more likely to spend effort to acquire more precise information about the firm (Hayes, 1998). When covering the firms supply chains helps analysts produce more precise information about the firm, analyst forecasting accuracy improves accordingly.

My dissertation consists of two essays that focus on the construct of work calling. In Essay 1, I investigate the construct of calling specifically, focusing on the moderating role of context. Researchers have struggled to define the nature of calling and have proposed different conceptualizations of calling, ranging from a religious and transcendental view to a more secular integrative view. In my essay, I review the extant literature by comparing and contrasting different conceptualizations of calling. Empirically, two primary research questions are addressed: (1) How does calling influence the following three categories of outcomes: work attitudes, emotional exhaustion and task performance? (2) How does task and social context moderate the relationship between calling and its outcomes? Data for this study was collected from 268 teachers and aides from 68 child care centers. Results indicate that individuals with stronger calling have positive work attitudes. In addition, results support the moderating role of discrete organizational context features. In Essay 2, I contribute to the extant theory on calling by examining the affective link between calling and two forms of emotional labor, surface acting and deep acting. Specifically, I examine the role of emotional labor in mediating the relationship between calling and its outcomes. Data for this study was collected from 195 teachers and aides from 42 child care centers. Findings indicate that calling is positively related with emotional performance and negatively related with emotional exhaustion. Further, results show that calling is positively associated with emotional labor, and in particular, is positively related to deep acting and negatively related to surface acting. Further, both surface acting and deep acting mediate the relationship between calling and its outcomes.

My dissertation consists of three essays on the dark side of teams. My first essay presents a model of social capitals influence on team member conformity and deviance. First, I propose that social capital within a team facilitates the creation of team mental models. Second, I propose that the saliency of team mental models, due to the strength of an organizations culture, the level of bureaucracy within an organization, and the level of justice from an organization, influences team members to conform to or deviate from team norms and larger normative standards (e.g. organizational norms). Lastly, I propose that conformity (deviance) increases, maintains, or decreases social capital across organizational levels. Using 209 team members representing 51 teams in 13 organizations, my second essay helps explain the positive associations found in prior research between the level of deviance within a group and the level of deviance of individual group members. I find that individual expectations of deviant team member behavior partially mediate this relationship, while shared expectations of deviant team member behavior within a team partially mediate the relationship between the level of deviance within a team and individual expectations of deviant team member behavior. I also find that one dimension of social capital positively moderates the relationship between shared expectations and individual expectations. Using a sample of 1,708 team members in 292 team-based establishments, my third essay examines the relationship between team member stress, and team autonomy in the form of team decision making, team leader appointment, and team responsibility. I also examine the relationship between stress, and intrateam interdependence in the form of team member interdependency and team-based job rotation. I further examine whether the relationships between team design and stress are mediated by team member job demands and job control. I find that an increase in job demands indirectly mediates the positive relationships between team decision making and team responsibility, and stress. I also find that a decrease in job demands indirectly mediates the negative relationship between team-based job rotation and stress.