Business Commons^™

The Old Boys Club In New Zealand Listed Companies, Chen Chen, David K. Ding, William R. Wilson

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The board of directors plays an important role in implementing corporate governance in the firm, as directors have a fiduciary duty to the firm’s shareholders. The effectiveness of directors is a key determinant of corporate value and they need to bring a range of skills and experience to the boardroom. This skill and experience cannot be developed solely within the firm, and most boards incorporate non-executive directors who are or have been directors of other firms. Current research on the benefits of interlocking directorships is mixed between the claim that they bring outside feedback to the table and open decision …

Online Review Solicitations Reduce Extremity Bias In Online Review Distributions And Increase Their Representativeness, Hülya Karaman

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Representative online customer reviews are critical to the effective functioning of the Internet economy. In this study, I investigate the representativeness of online review distributions to examine how extremity bias and conformity impact it, and explore whether online review solicitations alter representativeness. Past research on extreme distribution of online ratings commonly relied solely on observed public online ratings. One strength of the current paper is that I observe the private satisfaction ratings of customers regardless of whether they choose to write an online review or not. I show that both extremity bias and conformity exist in unsolicited online word-of-mouth (WOM) …

The Role Of Law In Chinese Value Chains, Henry Gao, Gregory Shaffer

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Since starting its economic reform four decades ago, China has been highly successful in integrating its economy into regional and global value chains (GVCs). This started with simple assembly and processing, then expanded to low-end labor-intensive manufacturing, and gradually moved up to technology-intensive and capital-intensive industries. This article analyzes the development of Chinese law, legal institutions, and international and transnational legal initiatives to support the development of GVCs, which we divide into five phases. The article does not idealize law in terms of ‘commitment’ or ‘rule of law,’ but rather, in the legal realist tradition, views law as an important, …

Repatriation Taxes, Internal Agency Conflicts, And Subsidiary-Level Investment Efficiency, Harald J. Amberger, Kevin S. Markle, Daniel M. P. Samuel

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Using a global sample of multinational corporations (MNCs) and their foreign subsidiaries, we find that repatriation taxes impair subsidiary-level investment efficiency. Consistent with internal agency conflicts between the central management of the MNC and the manager of the foreign subsidiary being the driver, we show that this effect is concentrated in subsidiaries with high information asymmetry and in subsidiaries that are weakly monitored. Quasi-natural experiments in the U.K. and Japan establish a causal relationship for our findings and suggest that a repeal of repatriation taxes increases subsidiary-level investment efficiency while reducing the level of investment. Our paper provides timely empirical …

The Impacts Of Ethical Philosophy On The Corporate Hypocrisy Perception And Communication Intentions Toward Csr, Kyujin Shim, Jeong-Nam Kim

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This study investigates how perceptions of corporate hypocrisy from the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities connect the public’s ethical philosophy to subsequent positive/negative opinion-sharing intention. With special attention to deontology and consequentialism in normative ethics of philosophy, the current study empirically tests a theoretical model of perceived corporate hypocrisy with two causal antecedents (i.e., individual moral philosophy of deontology and consequentialism), and the mediating role of corporate hypocrisy between such antecedents and the publics’ subsequent communication intention (i.e., positive and negative opinion-sharing intentions) toward a firm. Results indicate significant mediation effects of corporate hypocrisy between personal ethical orientations and the …

Are Disagreements Agreeable? Evidence From Information Aggregation, Dashan Huang, Jiangyuan Li, Liyao Wang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Disagreement measures are known to predict cross-sectional stock returns but fail to predict market returns. This paper proposes a partial least squares disagreement index by aggregating information across individual disagreement measures and shows that this index significantly predicts market returns both in- and out-of-sample. Consistent with the theory in Atmaz and Basak (2018), the disagreement index asymmetrically predicts market returns with greater power in high-sentiment periods, is positively associated with investor expectations of market returns, predicts market returns through a cash flow channel, and can explain the positive volume-volatility relationship.

Just Because You're Powerless Doesn't Mean They Aren't Out To Get You: Low Power, Paranoia, And Aggression, Michael Schaerer, Trevor Foulk, Christilene Du Plessis, Min Hsuan Tu, Satish Krishnan

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Due to its pervasive negative consequences, failing to understand the origins of paranoia can be costly for organizations. Prior research suggests that powerful employees are particularly likely to experience paranoia as others want to exploit the resources they control, implying that employees low in power should feel less paranoid. In contrast, we build on Conservation of Resources Theory and sociocultural perspectives of power to argue that the inherent vulnerability associated with being low power also evokes paranoia as a protection mechanism. Because paranoia causes employees to form malevolent attributions towards others, we predict that paranoia, in turn, leads to aggressive …

A Unified Market Model For Swaptions And Constant Maturity Swaps, Chyng Wen Tee, Jeroen Kerkhof

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Internal-rate-of-return (IRR) settled swaptions are the main interest rate volatility instruments in the European interest rate markets. Industry practice is to use an approximation formula to price IRR swaptions based on Black model, which is not arbitrage-free. We formulate a unified market model to incorporate both swaptions and constant maturity swaps (CMS) pricing under a single, self-consistent framework. We demonstrate that the model is able to calibrate to market quotes well, and is also able to efficiently price both IRR-settled and swap-settled swaptions, along with CMS products. We use the model to illustrate the difference in implied volatilities for IRR-settled …

The Salience Of Choice Fuels Independence: Implications For Self-Perception, Cognition, And Behavior, Kevin Nanakdewa, Shilpa Madan, Krishna Savani, Hazel Rose Markus

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

More than ever before, people across the world are exposed to ideas of choice and have opportunities to make choices. What are the consequences of this rapidly expanding exposure to the ideas and practice of choice? The current research investigated an unexamined and potentially powerful consequence of this salience of choice: an awareness and experience of independence. Four studies (n = 1,288) across three cultural contexts known to differ in both the salience of choice and the cultural emphasis on independence (the United States, Singapore, and India) provided converging evidence of a link between the salience of choice and independence. …

Experience Base, Strategy-By-Doing And New Product Performance, Liang Chen, Mengmeng Wang, Lin Cui, Sali Li

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Research Summary Strategy research views firms' diverse experience base as critical to new product success. It also champions strategy-by-doing in entrepreneurial settings. This study juxtaposes and bridges these two perspectives to better understand product development. We propose that while a firm's product portfolio diversity contributes to new product success only to a certain degree, design iteration-a postlaunch strategy-by-doing approach-is positively associated with new product performance. Our core contribution points to a complementary relationship: strategy-by-doing helps mitigate the capacity constraints problem that prevents firms from successfully adapting product development capabilities to a dynamic market. Our analysis of a sample of 2,182 …

Information Avoidance And Medical Screening: A Field Experiment In China, Yufeng Li, Juanjuan Meng, Changcheng Song, Kai Zheng

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Will individuals, especially high-risk individuals, avoid a disease test because of information avoidance? We conduct a field experiment to investigate this issue. We vary the price of a diabetes test (price experiment) and offer both a diabetes test and a cancer test (disease experiment) after eliciting participants’ subjective beliefs about their disease risk. We find evidence that, first, some people avoid the test even when there is neither a monetary nor a transaction cost, and second, both low- and high-risk individuals select out of the test as the price increases. We explain our findings using three classes of models of …

The Impact Of Concession Patterns On Negotiations: When And Why Decreasing Concessions Lead To A Distributive Disadvantage, Kian Siong Tey, Michael Schaerer, Nikhil Madan, Roderick I. Swaab

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We propose that making a series of decreasing concessions (e.g., $1,500–1,210–1,180–1,170) signals that negotiators are reaching their limit and that this results in a negotiation disadvantage for offer recipients. Although we find that most negotiators do not use this strategy naturally, seven studies (N = 2,311) demonstrate that decreasing concessions causes recipients to make less ambitious counteroffers (Studies 1–5) and reach worse deals (Study 2) in distributive negotiations. We find that this disadvantage occurs because decreasing concessions shape recipients’ expectations of the subsequent offers that will be made, which results in inflated perceptions of the counterparts’ reservation price relative …

Competition And Cheating: Investigating The Role Of Moral Awareness, Moral Identity, And Moral Elevation, Abhijeet K. Vadera, Chandra Shekhar Pathki

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Competition can lead individuals to cheat; yet our knowledge of why competition affects cheating and how to mitigate these effects is limited. To address this limitation, we first contrast two theories: arousal theories of competition (via desire to win) and social cognitive theory (via impaired moral awareness). Our results were consistent with social cognitive theory in that competition impairs moral awareness and that this impairment explains why people cheat. We therefore build on social cognitive theory and show that two factors, moral identity and moral elevation, which are likely to make morality salient, moderated the effects of competition on cheating …

Limousine Service Management: Capacity Planning With Predictive Analytics And Optimization, Peng Liu, Ying Chen, Chung-Piaw Teo

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The limousine service in luxury hotels is an integral component of the whole customer journey in the hospitality industry. One of the largest hotels in Singapore manages a fleet of both in-house and outsourced vehicles around the clock, serving 9,000 trips per month on average. The need for vehicles may scale up rapidly, especially during special events and festive periods in the country. The excess demand is met by having additional outsourced vehicles on standby, incurring millions of dollars of additional expenses per year for the hotel. Determining the required number of limousines by hour of the day is a …

Hedonic Price Of Housing Space, Sumit Agarwal, Yanying Chen, Li Jing, Yi Jin Tan

Research Collection School Of Economics

This article estimates hedonic prices for different levels of housing space, by exploiting a unique space‐adding project in Singapore that added a uniform amount of space to each existing housing unit regardless of the original size. This space adding program was carried out if sufficient residents vote in favor of space adding. Using a difference‐in‐differences (DiD) strategy after restricting our sample to narrow margins around the voting cutoff, we find that the additional space increased the resale price of a housing unit by 7% on average, and the extent of price appreciation varied significantly across the original size of the …

The Evolving Chinese Luxury Consumer, Rane Xue, Xiaolei Gu

Perspectives@SMU

Chinese who travel frequently or have lived abroad will shape the perception and understanding of luxury consumption going forward

Gucci: Steering Into The Post-Covid Era, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Marco Bizzarri and Alessandro Michele proved there is life after Tom Ford. COVID-19 could yet make Gucci’s revival a short-lived one

Is Commercial Real Estate Overpriced?, Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh

Perspectives@SMU

Valuations are sky-high but realised cashflow growth is sluggish. Much of the dichotomy could be attributed to the increased diversity of the commercial real estate ecosystem

Us Lawmakers Are Taking A Massive Swipe At Big Tech. If It Lands, The Impact Will Be Felt Globally, Katharine Kemp

Perspectives@SMU

Five antitrust laws proposed in the US aim to aggressively rein in the market power of “big tech” companies and change the way they do business, writes UNSW Sydney's Katharine Kemp

How To Spot And Avoid Greenwashing In Supply Chains, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Research draws attention to practice of firms greenwashing their CSR by disclosing supply chain relationships with “green” but concealing “brown” suppliers

Why Do Robots Have Smiley Faces?, Mark Findlay

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The author discussed why engineers and designers provide machines with the semblance of friendliness, and why it takes more than that for humans to trust AI. The ground-breaking AI in community research and policy initiative by CAIDG, supported by the National Research Foundation Singapore under its Emerging Areas Research Projects Funding Initiative, seeks to understand how and why trust can be established when humans and machines come together.

Generalist Versus Specialist Ceos And Acquisitions: Two-Sided Matching And The Impact Of Ceo Characteristics On Firm Outcomes, Guoli Chen, Sterling Huang, Philipp Meyer-Doyle

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Research Summary: To address endogeneity concerns stemming from firm-CEO matching, we deploy a two-sided matching model that identifies the complementarities arising from the CEO-firm match and subsequently account for these complementarities in empirical tests. Applying this approach, we examine how the nature of CEOs' human capital affects the acquisition behavior and performance of firms. We find that generalist CEOs (CEOs with a broader set of knowledge and skills) are more likely to engage in unrelated acquisitions than specialist CEOs (CEOs with a narrower but deeper set of knowledge and skills). We also find that the fit between the nature of …

Using Excel To Teach Simulation For Management Accounting, Clarence Goh, Poh Sun Seow, Gary Pan

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

In this article, we introduce an Excel exercise on simulation that can be implemented in a management accounting class. Specifically, we introduce a three phase implementation process where instructors (i) give the class an introduction to simulation, (ii) introduce students to a four-step process used in conducting analysis using simulation in Excel, and (iii) introduce a simulation problem focused on a specific area of management accounting (revenue projection) and guide students in completing the simulation analysis in Excel. By highlighting how simulation models can be built using Excel and used to solve a management accounting problem, our article identifies an …

Labor Market Mobility And Expectation Management: Evidence From Enforceability Of Noncompete Provisions, Michael Tang, Rencheng Wang, Yi Zhou

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

This study examines how managers' use of expectation management is affected by their labor market mobility, which we measure by the enforceability of noncompete provisions in their employment contracts. Exploiting quasinatural experiments, our difference-in-differences analyses provide new causal insights to the growing literature on how managers' career concerns affect their disclosure choices. Consistent with a less mobile labor market imposing more pressure on managers to achieve earnings expectations, we predict and find that managers in US states that tightened enforcement of noncompete provisions are more likely to manage analyst expectations downward. We also find that downward expectation management is used …

The Pricing Of Initial Public Offering And Market Efficiency, Chiyachantana N. Chiraphol

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This study investigates long-run performance of Thai initial public offerings (IPOs). To examine the longrun performance of Thai IPOs, we compute buy-and-hold abnormal returns and cumulative abnormal returns for two years after the IPOs. We find strong evidence of long run underpricing in Thai market. Specifically, the average buy-and-hold abnormal returns and cumulative abnormal returns are 64.5% and 18.4% respectively. However, our multi-variate analysis does not indicate a strong relation between long-run underperformance and firm-specific factors, such as firm size, firm age, investment banker reputation and firm profitability.

What Drives Sales Of E-Commerce Live Streaming? Evidence From Taobao, Danyang Song, Xi Chen, Zhiling Guo, Xin Gao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Despite the rapid development of live streaming, empirical research on the driving factors of e-commerce live streaming sales, still lags. We empirically address this question by utilizing a large and unique data set from a leading e-commerce platform in the world. Our results show that product characteristics, streamer characteristics and consumer engagement are important factors that drive e-commerce live streaming sales. Interestingly, we find that newer products from small brands with lower prices benefit more from the live streaming sales. Experienced streamers who are tied to a single seller and who have more followers perform better. In addition, real-time comments …

Triads Of Interorganisational Conflict: Investigating Asymmetries, Disputes, And Tensions, Li Hao Edson Kieu

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Interorganisational relations are critical resources that are enablers for organisations to achieve competitive advantage. Collaborative ties provide organisations access to new markets, distribution channels, information, and present opportunities to develop or enhance capabilities and competencies. However, interorganisational ties are dynamic and susceptible to relational tensions among collaborative, coordinative, and competitive elements. As such, primarily focusing on collaborative elements between organisations presents an incomplete representation. Social relations involve elements of collaboration and conflict that are not antithetical but dialectical determinants of one another. Despite these conjectures of dialectical tensions, the nature of interorganisational conflict remains elusive. Hence, this dissertation is devoted …

On Financial Quotient: Theory And Empirical Analysis, Gang Sun

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Financial Quotient (FQ) has become a common topic of concern in the global academic, business and social communities, but at this stage, academic research on FQ and its education are still immature, theoretical depth and empirical support basis are shortage, and influence factors of FQ and the degree of influence of each factor have not been systematically studied. Therefore, there is a large gap between research and practice.

The purpose of this Paper is to construct a set of scientific and reasonable FQ index for individuals, to find factors that can influence or predict personal financial quotient (PFQ), and to …

Do Animated Line Graphs Increase Risk Inferences?, Junghan Kim, Arun Lakshmanan

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This article shows that animated display of time-varying data (e.g., stock or commodity prices) enhances risk judgments. We outline a process whereby animated display enhances the visual salience of transitions in a trajectory (i.e., successive changes in data values), which leads to transitions being utilized more to form cognitive inferences about risk. In turn, this leads to inflated risk judgments. The studies reported in this article provide converging evidence via eye tracking (Study 1), serial mediation analyses (Studies 2 and 3), and experimental manipulations of transition salience (graph type; Study 3) and utilization of transitions (global trend; Study 4 and …

The Gender Effects Of Covid-19 On Equity Analysts, Frank Weikai Li, Baolian Wang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We use the COVID-19 pandemic as a natural experiment to study the effects of childcare and household duties on sell-side analysts. The richness of this setting allows us to compare female and male analysts while requiring them to perform the same tasks. We find that female analysts' forecast accuracy declined more than male analysts, especially when schools were closed and among analysts who were more likely to have young children, inexperienced, were likely busier before the pandemic, and lived in southern states. Female analysts also reduced the timeliness of their forecasts and resorted to more heuristic forecasts. The stock market …