emlyon business school

While research has analyzed how the structure of incentive pay relates to the dispersion of the performance measure distribution, as measured by its variance or volatility, we examine how it relates to the asymmetry of the distribution, as measured by its skewness. In contrast to the variance, skewness affects the relative informativeness of high and low performance about the agent's effort, which determines the relative efficiency of providing rewards and punishments for incentive purposes. Therefore, skewness is an important determinant of compensation convexity, which is determined by the relative holdings of stock and options. Consistent with our analytical and numerical results, we find that the skewness of expected earnings is negatively associated with the convexity of CEO compensation. Our results are economically significant, robust to alternative specifications, and do not appear to be driven by reverse causality. In addition, we find that earnings skewness is negatively associated with total CEO compensation and that this association is driven by lower options‐based compensation. These findings are consistent with CEOs preferring positively skewed performance metrics. Overall, we provide theoretical, numerical, and empirical evidence suggesting that skewness is a more important determinant of the convexity and structure of CEO compensation than volatility.

We introduce umigon-lexicon, a novel resource comprising English lexicons and associated conditions designed specifically to evaluate the sentiment conveyed by an author's subjective perspective. We conduct a comprehensive comparison with existing lexicons and evaluate umigon-lexicon's efficacy in sentiment analysis and factuality classification tasks. This evaluation is performed across eight datasets and against six models. The results demonstrate umigon-lexicon's competitive performance, underscoring the enduring value of lexicon-based solutions in sentiment analysis and factuality categorization. Furthermore, umigon-lexicon stands out for its intrinsic interpretability and the ability to make its operations fully transparent to end users, offering significant advantages over existing models.

Multi-tote storage and retrieval (MTSR) autonomous mobile robots can carry multiple product totes, store and retrieve them from different shelf rack tiers, and transport them to a workstation where the products are picked to fulfill customer orders. In each robot trip, totes retrieved during the previous trip must be stored. This leads to a mixed storage and retrieval route. We analyze this mixed storage and retrieval route problem and derive the optimal travel route for a multiblock warehouse by a layered graph algorithm, based on storage first-retrieval second and mixed storage and retrieval policies. We also propose an effective heuristic routing policy, the closest retrieval (CR) sequence policy, based on a local shortest path. Numerical results show that the CR policy leads to shorter travel times than the well-known S-shape policy, whereas the gap with the optimal mixed storage and retrieval policy in practical scenarios is small. Based on the CR policy, we model the stochastic behavior of the system using a semiopen queuing network (SOQN). This model can accurately estimate average tote throughput time and system throughput capacity as a function of the number of robots in the system. We use the SOQN and corresponding closed queuing network models to optimize the total annual cost as a function of the warehouse shape, the number of robots, and tote buffer positions on the robots for a given average tote throughput time and throughput capacity. Compared with robots that retrieve a single tote per trip, an MTSR system with at least five buffer positions can achieve lower operational costs while meeting given average tote throughput time and tote throughput capacity constraints. Funding: This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant 72372088] and the Shenzhen Science and Technology Program [Grant GJHZ20220913143003006]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/trsc.2023.0397 .

This commentary offers a timely exploration of participatory food provisioning via emerging food technologies. Through an in-depth analysis of case studies of these technologies, we elucidate the changing nature of prosumption in orchestrating food market provisioning. Our investigation highlights a shift toward a non-anthropocentric vision of market provisioning, where value creation transcends human-centered paradigms to include alliances between humans, technology, and nature. By articulating the nuanced dynamics and outcomes of these alliances in the food market, we propose a reimagined perspective on value creation, urging macromarketing scholars to consider the broader implications of technology-driven, participatory food systems. Ultimately, we emphasize the necessity of integrating human and non-human stakeholders in the discourse on value creation, and challenge conventional notions of control, democratization, and sociality within prevailing food-provisioning systems.

This article investigates ethnographically how early-stage impact investors evaluate the credibility of the impact promises made by social entrepreneurs. Uncovering how investors carry out this task beyond observable characteristics and self-reported prosocial intentions, I propose that their evaluation of impact promises centers on four interrelated aspects of the entrepreneurs’ behavior: impact metrics, impact track record, impact management, and impact prospects. I articulate these aspects into a framework explaining how credible beliefs about entrepreneurs’ impact promises emerge among investors and embolden their investment decisions.

To realise their potential to lead in sustainability development, cities require both symbolic resources such as social capital and legitimacy and material resources such as financial and technical support. Recent research in urban studies has shown that cities overcome institutional barriers to urban sustainability by drawing on support from their wider environment. However, we argue that resource needs vary depending on whether cities spotlight or sideline sustainability. Drawing on in-depth interviews with sustainability managers in cities with variable seriousness about sustainability, and representatives of city networks and support organisations, we show that cities express different symbolic and material resource needs as well as means to acquire them. When cities express pragmatic needs, they seek to demonstrate political feasibility and look to peer cities for legitimation; when cities express progressive needs, they aim to push the boundaries of technical possibility and broadcast their achievements to the world. Since cities require dissimilar external support, skewed attention towards ‘leading’ cities in extant research limits our understanding of how cities can overcome institutional barriers to climate action, especially when these barriers are high. Our findings offer contributions to the literature on city strategies for climate change on the institutional drivers of urban sustainability.

The ideal worker is represented as constantly available for work. However, an increasing number and variety of workers experience conflict between work and family demands. Research has identified numerous practices to manage this conflict with positive implications for non-work relationships, but the implications of these practices for work relationships remain unclear. How do efforts to manage role conflict affect workplace relationships? To examine this question, we draw on ethnographic data from 72 STEM workers across three organizations. We find that workers who experienced role conflict interpreted interactions in the workplace—often unpredictable in timing, frequency, and length—as a threat to fulfilling both their work and family roles on a daily basis. Thus, they controlled work interactions to make time for both work and non-work roles. However, interactional control limited their sense of workplace belonging and opportunities for resource exchange. In contrast, workers who did not experience daily role conflict encouraged interactions, allowing these encounters to expand across time. As a result, their work extended into evenings and weekends, and they experienced a sense of belonging and more regular resource exchange. We identify how interactional control practices manage role conflict but limit the development of workplace relationships. We also expand the repertoire of how devotion to work can be performed, identifying the occupied worker who expresses devotion through focused and efficient work and interactions rather than availability for work and interactions.

This study reviews the literature on entrepreneurship from several angles, including the entrepreneur's point of view, finding opportunities, creating a business plan, securing finance, and entrepreneurship's effect on economic well-being. The authors stress the importance of entrepreneurs in developing novel products and services, expanding economies, and developing new methods of doing things. Employment, economic growth, and tax revenues are all highlighted as key benefits of entrepreneurship. In addition, the article delves into what factors, such as taxes, the price of real estate, the nature of government oversight, the need for funding, and the difficulty of enforcing contracts, make up an entrepreneurial ecosystem. It indicates that a good regulatory environment and tax cuts encourage entrepreneurship. Furthermore, the report offers predictions for the future of entrepreneurship, including an increase in low-tech, socially-minded businesses that concentrate on solving local problems. It suggests further studies be conducted on the relationships between various forms of entrepreneurship and their respective development prospects. The report also emphasizes the need of future research using a wide range of dependent welfare factors, as well as foreign comparative studies on entrepreneurship utilizing various common metrics. It also stresses the need for more study into the link between entrepreneurship and social and environmental progress in underdeveloped nations. In its last section, the research stresses the significance of learning about the factors that influence entrepreneurs and how those factors affect incentive and support programs for entrepreneurs.

This paper examines the profit testing of life insurance companies that issue participating policies, type B and type A universal life policies, and variable annuities with guaranteed minimum maturity and death benefits, when investment returns are stochastic and modeled by normal or variance gamma distributions. We rely on the stochastic profit testing techniques introduced in Dickson et al. (Actuarial mathematics for life contingent risks, 2nd edn, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2013) to examine the influence of the models’ parameters and of the models themselves on the profit testing indicators. We show that the variance gamma model results in more conservative predictions than the normal model for most cases.

Managing acquired subsidiaries can be daunting. Parent and affiliate executives strive to co-create value, but fixed mindsets around subsidiary autonomy can result in diverging interests and outcomes. Through a longitudinal study of Audi’s post-acquisition integration of supercar manufacturer Lamborghini, this article provides guidance on how to manage the level of acquired subsidiary autonomy as a strategic dial that can be dynamically adjusted over time for mutual benefit. This dynamic approach to autonomy rests on three specific managerial levers—appraisal respect, organizational identity, and resource orchestration. These can enable the renewal of competitive capabilities and sustain post-acquisition success.

Recognizing that management scholarship does not adequately address the preservation of natural resources, an ecological resource orchestration model is introduced in this article. To this end, we build on the case of Poiscaille, a French online platform that offers a distribution model for ultrafresh fish and seafood with a goal of preserving the ocean for future generations. Using the extended case method, this study advances the resource orchestration model through an empirical case. The Poiscaille case provides rich insights into the resource orchestration model by showing how it fosters the sustainable management of natural resources. Thus, this article contributes to natural resource management research and to the resource-based view literature.

This research investigates how entrepreneurs in an early-stage market economy decide their level of compliance with formal rules and finds the manner in which they interact with government officials to operate on a continuum of formality. Focusing on the nonmarket strategy approaches entrepreneurs employ to establish relationships with government officials, we build a model that shows how entrepreneurs adopt strategies aligned with their firm’s level of formality, spanning low to high formality practices. We draw on qualitative interview data from entrepreneurs who exhibit varying levels of compliance with state-provided rules and guidelines. We inductively theorize that deciding the firms’ level of formality involves strategic interaction approaches with government officials responsible for rule enforcement. Our findings highlight that the interaction strategies entrepreneurs use hinge on the political capital they possess, eliciting the desired response from government officials, and dissuading the officials from enforcing formal rules or imposing sanctions for informality. We offer theoretical and policy implications for future work on the nuances of firm formality and the interaction between entrepreneurs and government officials.

This research focuses on the development of an artificial multiple intelligence system (AMIS) for solving multi-visit scheduling and routing of multi-heterogeneous resources. The proposed method has been developed as a decision-making tool for solving mechanical sugarcane harvest operations which have been replacing the manual harvesting system with the sugarcane field burning. The mechanical sugarcane harvesting system is a fresh one with a high potential reduction of CO2 emission. Two resources which are fuel service staff teams and technician teams were considered to support the mechanical harvester operations in order to improve the harvesters’ productivity and stability of its sugarcane supply by minimizing the downtime or waiting time of harvesters. Based on this approach, not only the sugar production is efficient, but also the harvesting which is the inbound activity is fuel-efficient. This problem was formulated as the allocation and scheduling of multi-Heterogeneous Resources with consideration of transportation for both resources and service operations. Sugarcane harvesters which get services from the workforce are geographically scattered in each time period. There are various technicians and fuel service staff with different skills giving services to the harvesters. The workforce allocation (WFAllcn) and the sequences and routing (WFSeqRoute) sub-problems were modeled as the integrating problem with the objective function to maximize the sugarcane harvested by all harvesters. To solve the problem, the Artificial Multiple Intelligence System (AMIS), which was developed with new intelligence box selection rules, is firstly developed. Using this approach, allocation and scheduling, and routing of technicians and fuel service staff in sugarcane mechanical harvest operations is very efficient.

The belief in meritocracy – that advancement is based solely on individual capabilities and hard work – remains ingrained in organizations despite evidence it is a flawed concept that perpetuates gender and other social inequalities. Critical streams of research have highlighted the ideological character of meritocracy discourse, its entrenched nature and acceptance as ‘common-sense’. Less is known about how this ‘meritocracy myth’ is maintained, that is, how this hegemonic discourse retains its potency in day-to-day talk in organizations. We argue that leaders, given their active discursive roles and opportunities to establish and control discourses, play an important but underexamined role in the reproduction and legitimization of this seemingly progressive yet ultimately destructive discourse. We conduct a critical discourse analysis (CDA) drawing on qualitative interviews with leaders in higher education institutions (HEIs) in the UK focusing on their talk about women’s recruitment and progression in academic roles. We identify three discursive interventions through which leaders routinely maintain and reinforce and on occasion challenge the existing system of meritocracy: invisibilizing gender inequality through gender-neutrality; denying constraints through individualization; and problematising meritocracy to uphold or challenge the status quo. We argue that by uncovering the means through which meritocracy discourse retains its resilience, our paper offers the opportunity to scrutinize and challenge these discursive underpinnings that uphold the ‘meritocracy myth’. We suggest it is possible to re-imagine what might be considered ‘merit worthy’ in universities recognising and centring structural gender and other social inequalities to create more equal institutions.

With the growth of mobile e-business, it has become common for customers to experience an explosion of instant desire to consume in a short period of time. Companies are harnessing this momentum, hoping to better capture, retain and convert these consumer desires into actual sales orders. Consequently, companies also need to use pre-sales call centers to provide the satisfied service and motivate more customers to repurchase, thereby increasing the revenue. The function of the call centers is updated from providing post-sales service to providing pre-sales consultation. In this regard, this paper examines the impact of delayed announcements consisting of queue information on customer repurchase behavior in pre-sales call centers. We classify the queuing information into no-information, part-information and full-information according to the level of information by constructing a simulation model. In the simulation experiments, some application scenarios are set up to describe the load of the call center. In all the given scenarios, we find out the full-information, which provides the delay time, is always the best. Moreover, the different methods for estimating the delay time to provide the full-information, namely LES, EA, EA2 and WA–LES, are compared. We find optimal announcements for the application scenarios set out in the time-varying scenario as well. Consequently, considering there exists certain cost for the company to make WA–LES announcements, while some call centers can only provide part-information instead, this paper investigates the impact of estimate bias on customer repurchase behavior and company revenue. Subsequently, the company revenue is further investigated in two extended experiments, where repurchase influence power and repurchase number are limited. The analysis ideas and simulation logic of this paper have good reference significance for e-commerce pre-sales call centers, and the suggestions for setting information levels in practice while considering customer repurchase behavior are also clearly given in the conclusion of the paper.

Why do first movers into a new industry sometimes gain an advantage simply because of the fact that they are perceived by audiences to be more authentic than second movers, whereas in other contexts such second movers are perceived as no less authentic than first movers? We theorize that this difference hinges on the amount of costly, risky “legitimation work” that entrants are perceived to have conducted in their efforts to establish that the new organizational form is reliable and acceptable. Whereas a first mover must expend great effort to reassure skeptical audiences that the new form coheres with their norms and that it can meet and even exceed their standards, later arrivals are often able to appropriate such legitimacy once it has been established. But such appropriation by the second mover makes its (often implicit) claim of original insight or vision seem less authentic than that of the first mover. In three complementary online experiments on audience reactions to online healthcare startups, we find support for our prediction that followers suffer from a lower consumer preference because they are perceived to have done less work in establishing the new form’s legitimacy. Our results show that when follower firms show evidence of participation in legitimation work, it may overturn the default interpretation and reduce the authenticity discount. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2022.17215 .