Management Science, Accepted

Independent directors are expected to monitor management, but what motivates them to do so? This study uses evidence from China’s financial market, where regulators sometimes penalise directors for negligence, to examine how the perceived risk of penalties shapes directors’ behaviour.

Key findings:

• Penalties observed within a director’s network increase monitoring: Directors become more willing to vote against management after seeing another director in their board network penalised for negligence.

• This effect persists and is shaped by similarity: This heightened vigilance is long lasting and stronger when the observing and penalised directors share the same professional background or gender.

• Directors at higher risk firms are also more vigilant: Management is also likely to face more scrutiny when the observing director works at a firm that is itself more likely to be penalised.

These findings provide direct evidence that the possibility of regulatory penalties is an important motivator for independent directors to carry out their monitoring duties.

Operations Research, Advanced online publication

Supply chains must cope not only with unpredictable customer demand but also with sudden disruptions in supply. One proven strategy is process flexibility—setting up production so that capacity can be shifted to make different products when needed.

This study examines a long chain design, where production resources are arranged so that each one can produce a limited set of products, but the overall system forms a connected network.

The study demonstrates how well a long chain performs compared with fully flexible systems when random disruptions occur.

Key findings:

• Long chains absorb disruptions effectively: Even with limited flexibility, long chains capture a large share of the benefits of full flexibility, especially when capacity is set to match expected demand.

• Capacity decisions matter: Expanding capacity to cover disruption risks reduces the relative advantage of long chains, but they still outperform dedicated systems.

• Long chains stay reliable under both normal and disrupted conditions: Using a new evaluation method, our study shows that long chains can meet service targets with capacity levels similar to fully flexible systems when disruptions are absent, and maintain significant resilience when disruptions occur.

Our findings highlight that long chain designs offer a practical balance: they are simpler than fully flexible systems yet still resilient against uncertainty. In practical terms, this means companies need to plan their production capacity with potential disruptions in mind. Long chains offer a strong, reliable way to manage this risk.

Journal of Management Information Systems, 2025, 42(3), 951–982

Healthcare systems face a persistent challenge: patients prefer well-known healthcare providers. This preference creates a bottleneck where top-tier providers are overworked while less prominent hospitals and junior physicians often remain underutilised.

This study investigates whether digital technology, particularly online prescripting service, can address this imbalance in online healthcare platforms.

Key findings:

• Digital tools level the playing field: When online healthcare platforms offer online prescripting service, patients are significantly more willing to consult junior physicians and less prominent hospitals.

• Routine needs result in lower rank services: This shift in behaviour occurs primarily with low-uncertainty demand, i.e. consultations that focus less on diagnosis.

• Digital interactions build real-world trust: Digital interactions build trust between patients and physicians, potentially making patients more comfortable consulting lower-rank physicians for medical diagnosis.

Our study presents a compelling digital solution to the pressing issue of patient demand imbalance. It illustrates how a routine, non-diagnostic task can direct demand to less prominent hospitals and junior physicians and enable specialist resources are more reserved for complex cases. This approach ultimately leads to a more efficient and equitable distribution of care.

Journal of Accounting Research, Forthcoming

Using data from over 4,000 Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests across 600 U.S. counties from 2014 to 2021, we examine how BLM activism shapes corporate diversity at different organizational levels. We develop an approach integrating OpenAI's GPT-4 with Chain-of-Thought prompting to classify race and ethnicity. In our validation tests, this method achieves higher accuracy than several tested open-source algorithms. Our main findings are as follows. First, although firms headquartered in protest-affected counties add more Black directors, particularly in larger protests, this gain appears to largely offset the representation of other non-Black minority directors. Second, these board-level shifts do not consistently extend to executives or the general workforce. In contrast, a gap may emerge between a firm's workforce composition and local labor-market demographics, particularly in the representation of Black employees. This pattern is consistent with diversity tokenism, which suggests firms may prioritize high-visibility board appointments and potentially downplay broader, transformative change. Our findings indicate that although board-level diversity gains are highly visible and attract notable public attention, they may not be accompanied by an organization's transformative commitment to company-wide diversity.

Management Science, 2025, 71(8), 6961-6978

We demonstrate that a broad set of asset pricing factors/anomalies are significantly exposed to “noise trader risk,” and the noise trader risk is priced in factor premia. We first confirm that mutual funds’ flow-induced trading of factors are uninformed, as they generate a large price impact on factor returns, followed by a complete reversal. We then show that asset pricing factors are subject to flow-driven noise trader risk in that expected variation (covariation) of flow-induced noise trading strongly forecasts variance (covariance) of factor returns. Importantly, factor premia are higher when flow-driven noise trader risk is expected to be more salient.

Journal of Consumer Research, Advanced online publication

With the rise of environmental concerns in recent decades, many companies have joined the initiative to advertise and promote sustainable consumption. The current research examines how providing sustainability cues to consumers might have unintended consequences of which practitioners and policymakers may not be fully aware. One pilot study and 10 main studies, including two real-choice studies, show that a sustainability cue may delay consumption. That is, in an intertemporal choice, a sustainability cue can increase preference for a larger-later option over a smaller-sooner option. This effect occurs because a sustainability cue shifts a consumer’s temporal focus toward the future, leading to a shorter perceived wait time for the larger-later option. The findings further show that the delay does not emerge among those with strong green consumption values and can be circumvented if firms communicate the immediate need or instant payoff of sustainable actions. By investigating how sustainability cues shift consumer preferences between two options separated in time, the current research contributes to the literature on both sustainable consumption and intertemporal choice. The findings offer practitioners and policymakers guidelines to nudge consumers’ sustainable consumption more effectively.

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2025, 128(6), 1292–1314

When interacting with others in unfamiliar sociocultural settings, people need to learn the norms guiding appropriate behavior. The present research investigates an individual difference that helps this kind of learning: stress reactivity. Interactions in an unfamiliar sociocultural setting are stressful, particularly when the actor fails to follow its rules. Although stress is typically considered a liability, more stress-reactive individuals may be more motivated to improve and, thus, quicker to learn these rules. Consistent with this idea, a pilot study found that people genetically inclined to stress reactivity, as computed by a genetic profile score across 59 single-nucleotide polymorphisms on 10 different genes, learned unfamiliar sociocultural norms from experiential feedback at a faster rate (i.e., exhibited a greater increase in accuracy across trials). Study 1 found that participants with higher acute cortisol reactivity in response to a physical stressor were faster at learning unfamiliar sociocultural norms. Study 2 conceptually replicated these results using a self-report measure of dispositional stress reactivity. Study 3 found that self-reported dispositional stress reactivity similarly predicted the rate of learning in a sociocultural task and a nonsocial task. Study 4 provided evidence for the underlying mechanism—participants higher on dispositional stress reactivity experienced more stress early in the sociocultural norm learning task, which predicted faster learning overall and lower stress later on in the task. These findings indicate that more stress-reactive individuals get more stressed out from the negative feedback that they receive in social interactions in unfamiliar settings, which motivates them to learn the relevant norms.

Journal of Applied Psychology, Advance online publication

Scholars increasingly recognize the existence of voice habit, wherein employees speak up automatically without considering relevant situational factors, being able to control their impulse to voice, and exerting effort in deciding whether to voice. However, a lack of theory testing and an absence of a psychometrically valid measure have called into question its theoretical usefulness as well as its construct validity. Moreover, contrary to Lam et al.’s (2018) theorizing on the interpersonal costs and intrapersonal benefits of voice habit, research on the reticence bias suggests the opposite: Habitual voicers may gain interpersonal benefits by experiencing higher supervisor liking, but they may also suffer intrapersonal costs by experiencing voice regret. Integrating these divergent insights with theorizing on voice habit, we predict that voice habit may elicit supervisor liking when supervisors perceive habitual voicers as having higher prosocial motives or behavioral integrity, even though habitual voicers may experience regret in work units with a weaker voice climate. Results from a multiwave, multisource field study with 435 employees and 135 supervisors using a 12-item validated scale of voice habit support our hypotheses. Our work provides a direct test and extension of the recently proposed theorizing on voice habit and introduces a psychometrically valid measure for future research use. Our findings also empirically support the dual nature of voice habit, highlighting both its potential functional interpersonal outcomes in relation to supervisors and its potential dysfunctional intrapersonal outcomes for habitual voicers.

Journal of Consumer Research, Accepted

This research examines the effectiveness of two common types of restricted price promotions: threshold promotions (conditional on spending more than a threshold amount; e.g., “Get $5 off on orders of $10 or more”) and capped promotions (limited to a maximum dollar value; e.g., “Get 50% off, up to $5 per order”). Results from seven pre-registered studies, including one field study, show that threshold promotions lead to higher purchase intentions and conversion rates (but potentially lower purchase amounts) than comparable capped promotions—even though capped promotions are equivalent in maximal economic savings for the consumer—when the trigger value (the spending amount at which the promotion activates or caps) is low. This effect occurs because consumers have higher expected promotion levels for capped promotions and lower expected spending levels for threshold promotions, leading them to perceive the threshold promotion as a fairer deal. However, this effect reverses when the trigger value is high, where consumers perceive capped promotions as a fairer deal and prefer them to threshold promotions. The implications of our results for the optimal management of price promotion architectures were discussed.