PHD Publications

In this dissertation, I examine the influence of aversive states (e.g., unpleasant emotions, undesired outcomes) on consumers' motivations and behaviors. In essay 1, I explore how feelings of physical and moral disgust can be threatening to consumers’ sense of self and motivate them to engage in compensatory consumption. In essay 2, I investigate why and when consumers exhibit negative behavioral intentions against firms that terminate unconditional business-to-consumer gift-giving initiatives. In essay 3, I explore how loneliness affects consumers’ preferences for products and services that do or do not require interpersonal touch and interaction (e.g., getting a massage vs. shopping online). Together, the three essays contribute to the literature on emotion, identity threats, and compensatory consumption, to the literature on sales promotion, and to the literature on loneliness. Moreover, the research findings inform marketing practice in the fields of advertising, sales promotions design, and consumer haptics. Finally, this research provides insights into consumer welfare by bringing attention to the unforeseen consequences of marketers’ actions that seek to benefit the consumers but instead generate compensatory behaviors to cope with their aversiveness.

This thesis is divided into three chapters. The first one deals with Central Clearing Counterparties (CCPs) and their resiliency in crisis times. This is a joint work with François Derrien, Evren Ors and David Thesmar. Focusing on CCPs backed repotrades during the eurozone crisis, we show that the market factored in the default of CCPs. In turn, this affected their capacity to ensure liquidity in the interbank market. Our results have strong consequences for the way CCPs should be regulate.The second chapter aims at quantifying the impact of the rise of the concentration in the banking sector on aggregate credit fluctuations.Building on novel empirical approach, I show that big players’ idiosyncratic shocks have a limited impact on aggregate credit. The explanation lies in the fact that the strength of banking groups idiosyncratic shocks is limited compared to aggregate and subsidiaries level ones.The last chapter, a joint work with Thomas Bourveau and Adrien Matray, focuses on the transmission of corporate risk culture. We show that subsidiaries of the same banking group tend to assess future risks in similar ways. In turn, this gives insights on how banking crisis can spread be fueled by corporate risk culture.

Consumer liminality is a vital concept in marketing research, usually defined as a transitional state of betwixt and between social positions. It enlightens life transitions, extraordinary experiences, and consumption rituals. This dissertation assesses the conceptualization of consumer liminality and advances its theorization in liquid modernity by exploring contemporary consumer lifestyles, which embrace contingency, uncertainty, and ambiguity. The first essay conceptually reexamines the treatment of liminality in consumer research. I identify two distinct forms, transformational liminality and liminoidity, thus challenging the unidimensionality assumption. Countering its celebratory treatment, I highlight the dangers of liminality when it is part of a meaningless transition. This essay contributes to the literature by resolving definitional ambiguities, outlining the concept’s scope, and delineating research directions. The second essay explores the flexible consumer lifestyle, defined as purposefully embracing instability, change, and adaptability in every aspect of life through professional precariousness. With long interviews, projective techniques, and participant observation, I question how the frequent life transitions of the flexible lifestyle, which can be analyzed as an experience of permanent liminality, are handled by consumers. Departing from prior literature, I contribute to consumer research on liminality by illustrating that permanent liminality is unsustainable for individuals, who need a release from the overwhelming pressures of its pursuit. I also identify flexibility capital which enables consumers to be comfortable on the long-term with high degrees of change and uncertainty and thus, to create an escape from the social structure which otherwise compels them to dominated positions. The third essay studies the liminal consumer journeys of consumers who experience repeated cross-cultural transitions. I combine autodriving and long interviews to explore open-ended mobility, a type of international mobility characterized by a high uncertainty regarding the duration of the stay abroad and the next destination. This essay contributes by emphasizing liminal dangers. I identify that liminal consumer journeys put consumers at risk of rootlessness and self-loss and must be compensated by solidifying consumption, which anchors consumers’ identity narratives in crystallized consumption experiences, material objects, and symbolic brands.

This dissertation is composed of three chapters investigating the antecedents andconsequences of corporate disclosure in the domain of empirical-archival financial accounting. Thefirst chapter examines the real effects of firm disclosure and its timing on firm advertisinginvestment. The second chapter presents a joint project with Vedran Capkun and Yun Lou,exploring intra-industry peer disclosure of proprietary information as antecedents of corporatedisclosure decision at product level. The third chapter, joint work with Thomas Bourveau and Vedran Capkun, documents the real consequences of pharmaceutical firms’ clinical trial disclosure in financial markets and on broader society.

The present dissertation examines theentanglement of the social and material in MultinationalEnterprises during the transnational transfer of HumanResource Management Practices, especially PerformanceManagement Practices. Using 4 local Chinese entities of atransnational firm as my case study, I explore how localemployees make Performance Management practices theirown, both internalizing global practices and innovating toadapt to local environments. This research is based on 60interviews, secondary materials and direct observationsover more than 10 years. In the first chapter of thisdissertation, I explore more specifically the adoption ofHuman Resource Management practices at the micro level,and I identify four archetypes of the adoption of HumanResource Management practices: formal, ceremonial,deviant and innovative. In the second chapter, I focus onthe adoption of Performance Management practices inMultinational Enterprises at a meso level. Drawing onsociomaterial theory, I propose a new definition ofhybridization as being a process by which unique practicesemerge in local subsidiaries from the entanglement of thesocial and the material at Headquarters and in localsubsidiaries. This definition allowed me to identify two newhybrid performance management practices in the fourChinese entities of the Multinational Enterprises underinvestigation, which I have called the “harmoniousConfucian” Performance Management practice and the“harmonious instrumental” Performance Managementpractice. In the third chapter, I build on the results of thetwo previous empirical chapters to conceptualize anintegrated multilevel model for the transnational transfer ofHuman Resource Management practices in MultinationalEnterprises by expanding another central concept tosociomaterial theory: the notion of “apparatus”. Thisdissertation aims therefore at contributing both toInternational Human Resources Management literature andto the literature of the sociology of management tools.

This thesis investigates the impact of patent pools for technical standards on the direction of cumulative innovation. It examines eight modern patents pools in the information and communication technology sector and measures the effect of pool formation and pool extension on rates of follow-on innovation in the direction of pool technology.Patent pools are the subject of much theoretical and empirical work. The aim of this thesis is to fill a gap in current literature that focuses on the motivations of firms to join a patent pool.This thesis contributes to the literature by extending analyses to the introduction of patents to patent pools over time. It consists of three empirical studies. Patent pools as institutions possess mechanisms that encourage and discourage innovation. The formation of a patent pool and its extension as a result of the addition of patents to the patent pool after its launch may alter the incentives to innovate of outsider firms. This, in turn, may have important impacts on competition and society. Finally, this thesis also analyzes the evolution of an industry that is particularly linked to technology in patents pools—the film industry.Digitization has transformed movie distribution and technological disruption has altered the supply and demand dimensions of this market. The main findings of these three studies arepresented at the beginning of each chapter.

Decision Theory has been a very dynamic field since von Neumann and Morgenstern 1943. New decision models have opened new ways to think about our actions and every day decisions. Allais’ Paradox in 1953 forced decision theorists to be clearer about the intents their models and several authors claimed that expected utility solely has a normative intent (choices that we should make, potentially better) and not a descriptive one (choices as we make them, potentially flawed). It also allowed defining better methods of validation for a descriptive point of view. Best practices in descriptive decision theory have emerged and we have now clear-cut and vetted methods of justifying the use of a given model of decision theory for a descriptive aim. However for normative decision theory that intents to help us make better choices, we do not have a clear-cut way to determine and "prove" that a given model is the right one. This thesis provides an empirical design that provides such a methodology.

The objective of the present dissertation is to gain a better understanding of how people assess creativity, and of the antecedents and outcomes of this creativity assessment process. In the first essay, I address the question of how people in different cultures assess creativity. In an inductive study of the French and US versions of Top Chef, a professional chefs’ competition, striking cultural differences emerge both in the moves used at each step of the assessment process and in the frequency and valence of the criteria. In the second part of this dissertation, I focus on the cues upon which evaluators rely to assess creativity. In particular, I disentangle the mechanism underlying the relationship between the creator’s status and the evaluation of his or her creativity. I develop the role of a specialist identity and argue for a complementary effect with the creator’s status. I hypothesize and find evidence that the creator’s status is only beneficial for his creativity evaluation when he has a specialist identity. Finally, in the third part of the dissertation, I focus on team creativity and develop a theoretical model where the assessment process provides an explanation as for why teams are not always the breeding ground for creativity. I propose to conceptually distinguish between different team assessment processes and to explore their respective impact on team’s ability to select its most creative idea for further implementation.

This dissertation comprises three essays that pertain to the interrelated constructs of materialism and compensatory consumption. In Essay 1, I review research on the conceptualizations, causes, and consequences of materialism, analyze how adopting different conceptualizations may account for variations in research outcomes, and suggest a broad framework for analyzing materialism research. I also introduce research on compensatory consumption, which refers to the use and possession of material goods to address self-identity threats. In the end, I discuss some ideas for future research, particularly those related to compensatory consumption. In the next two essays, I investigate specific questions on compensatory consumption. In Essay 2, I revisit extant research that shows that compensating with products symbolic of threatened aspects of self-identity (i.e., within-domain compensatory consumption) causes threat-related rumination and depletes self-control resources of individuals. I find that such depletion occurs only when products are explicitly connected to the threatened aspects of self, and not when they are implicitly connected to the threatened aspects. In Essay 3, I examine the efficacy of within-domain compensatory consumption, that is, whether it restores self-identity on aspects damaged by a self-threat. I find that self-identity repair is thwarted when threatened individuals compensate with products having explicit connections to the threatened identity domain, but not when these connections are kept implicit. Explicit, but not implicit, connections remind consumers of the threat, thereby impeding self-repair. I also test a boundary condition to these finding, and show that when the self-threat itself is implicit (e.g., subtle, non-obvious), even products with explicit connections can provide self-repair.

The quality of collaboration within and between firms in a supply chain is one of the main concerns which is studied in supply chain management and economics literature. There are many forces that affect the level of collaboration in different hierarchical settings: collaboration within firms (inteam (group) level) and between firms (in firm level) (Drago and Turnbull, 1988; Siemsen, Balasubramanian, and Roth, 2007). Collaboration and communication within firms and between firms is studied in previous literature from different aspects and through analytical (Gibbons, 2005) and non-analytical methods (Mortensen and Neeley, 2012). This dissertation focuses on collaboration and cooperation between different parties, either within a firm or among different firms in a supply chain, in different contexts.This thesis consists of three chapters. In the first chapter, I discuss incentive design specifically in the context of product development and how different types of collaboration affect optimal team composition in designing a product. In the second chapter, I focus on collaboration among a supplierand different retailers to improve sustainability in a supply chain in terms of improving social welfare by lowering waste in the supply chain. In the last chapter, I consider the collaboration among a supplier and different buyers. The main purpose of this chapter is to study buyers' outsourcingversus in-sourcing decision in a supply chain in the presence of learning-by-doing by players, considering the effect of competition in the market.