PHD Publications

This dissertation comprising three essays explores the value creation mechanisms associated with the work structures, team composition, and community ideologies of open source software projects. The first essay examines the unique nature of open source work which is dominated by the sequential layering of individual tasks. This essay theorizes the motivational mechanisms associated with the work structures of open source projects and examines their influence on project success. While the first essay establishes the importance of task-work organization in open source projects, the second essay expands the inquiry into the role of team composition in the project’s success. Building on the theories of coordination and network governance, this essay studies the influence of source code access restrictions imposed on team members in mitigating coordination challenges. The third essay pursues an overarching view of the open source community by examining the ideological foundations of the community and studies its influence on project success. The essay scrutinizes two ideological shifts seen in the open source community that have altered the beliefs of ‘openness’ and ‘prevention of commercial appropriation’, on which the open source phenomenon was founded.

In this dissertation, I examine the influence of consumer identity (e.g., materialism, self-construal) on marketing strategies of firms. The first essay explores how materialistic consumers can be nudged to behave prosocially by leveraging their status-seeking motivations in the context of luxury consumption. Firms are under increasing pressure to engage in cause-related marketing (CRM) campaigns that link the brand to a charitable cause. However, such campaigns may pose problems for luxury brands because the target market—materialistic consumers—are more extrinsically motivated, less generous, and less concerned with prosocial causes, than non-materialistic consumers. The first essay proposes that certain types of CRM campaigns will be more successful than others by leveraging the motivations of materialistic consumers for buying luxury products. I show that materialists’ willingness to engage in CRM depends on the type of campaign: product-linked (brand linked to a cause through limited-edition products) or donation-linked (direct donations to a charitable cause). Materialists are more willing to engage in product-linked than donation-linked campaigns, whereas non-materialists show the opposite pattern, and these effects are driven by the status-signaling qualities that luxury products convey for materialists: the effects are eliminated for value brands and when materialists’ need for status is momentarily satiated. The second essay investigates how and why individualistic consumers (vs. collectivistic consumers), prefer digitally mediated social interaction such as posting on social network platforms (e.g., Facebook), playing social network games (e.g., FarmVille), or watching live streaming video platforms (e.g., Twitch). Social interaction is a fundamental social behavior based on evolutionary underpinnings that fulfills one’s need to belong. However, desire for social interaction can differ based on individual characteristics. Individualists, who see themselves as independent, autonomous, and distinct from the group, are known to perceive higher costs for social interaction necessary for maintaining their relationships than are collectivists. In Essay 2, I show that individualistic consumers have a greater preference for digitally mediated social interaction than collectivistic consumers, but that this effect is moderated by social interaction costs. I further show that perceived face-to-face social interaction costs explain the underlying process of this effect. The two essays contribute to the literature on self-identity. Essay 1 and 3 focus on materialism and Essay 2 focuses on self-construal. The research findings inform marketing practice in the fields of luxury goods, social media, and gaming industries. This dissertation provides insights into how firms in these industries should consider consumers’ self-identity in adopting new marketing strategies.

The three chapters of this thesis study households’ financial decisions over the lifecycle.The first chapter focuses on the decision to become an entrepreneur, the second on the choice to invest in stock market and the third on the value of pension entitlements.In the first chapter, I use French administrative data on job-creating entrepreneurs to estimate a life-cycle model in which risk-averse individuals can start businesses and return to paid employment. I find that unobserved benefits represent 6,100 euros per year, summing up to 67,000 over the average entrepreneurial spell. The option to return to paid employment is worth 82,000 euros to new entrepreneurs.In the second chapter, I estimate a life-cycle model of portfolio choices that incorporates the relationship between stock market returns and the skewness of idiosyncratic income shocks.The cyclicality of skewness can explain low stock market participation among young households with modest financial wealth and why the equity share of participants slightly increases until retirement. In the third chapter, I calibrate a life-cycle model in which the stock and labor markets are cointegrated and Social Security benefits are wage-indexed. I find that the certainty equivalent of Social Security for working households is 46% lower than the sum of future cash flows discounted at the risk-free rate and negative for young households. At the national scale, the risk-adjusted value of Social Security entitlements is 19.6 trillion dollars, which is 37% lower than the unadjusted value of 31 trillion dollars.

This thesis is in the interface of sustainable operations management, technology management, and finance. Specifically, in my thesis I strive to examine firm's incentives to adopt `technology improvement' (TI) measures that lead to the more efficient use of inputs in operations and thereby affect the cost structure, risk exposure, and environmental performance of firms. Thus, I seek to identify the factors that affect---and the mechanisms by which they do so---a firm's decision to invest in TI: forces within a supply chain, price uncertainty in the markets for inputs, cash constraints, financial hedging mechanisms, industry competition, and the firm's competitive pricing strategy. By collaborating with professors in the fields of operations research, economics, and finance, I have embraced a multidisciplinary approach to studying the adoption of efficient and sustainable technologies. In particular, in my first chapter, ``Technology Improvement Contracting in Supply Chains under Asymmetric Bargaining Power'' I examine how asymmetric bargaining power---between buyers and suppliers---affects the optimal level of investment in technology improvement. In my second chapter, ``Input-price Risk Management: TechnologyImprovement and Financial Hedging'', I explore the mechanism driving a firm's interest in TI under increased uncertainty about input prices. Finally, in the third chapter, ``The Value of Financial Risk Management in Dynamic Capacity Investment and Technology Improvement'', I study the role of budget constraint and financial hedging on the choice of technology.