Driving a More Prosperous Future
User Innovation and Product Stickiness: Evidence from Video Games
Journal of Economics & Management Strategy
Prior research on user innovation fails to explain its low adoption rate and neglects its impact on increased product stickiness. To bridge these gaps, we conducted an empirical investigation into user innovations within the video game sector. Our study reveals that embracing user innovation leads to an upsurge in the number of active players for a game. Furthermore, the marginal effect of user innovations varies depending on their recency and quality, with low-quality user innovations leading to user attrition. The effect is also contingent on the stage in the product life cycle in which user innovation is adopted.
Yunfei Wang, UMD and Peng Huang, UMD
AdGazer: Improving Contextual Advertising with Theory-Informed Machine Learning
Journal of Marketing
Contextual advertising involves matching features of ads to features of the media context where they appear. We propose AdGazer, a new machine learning procedure to support contextual advertising. It comprises a theoretical framework organizing high and low-level features of ads and contexts, feature engineering models grounded in this framework, an XGBoost model predicting ad and brand attention, and an algorithm optimally assigning ads to contexts. AdGazer includes a Multimodal Large Language Model to extract high-level topics predicting the ad-context match. Our research uses a unique eye-tracking database containing 3531 digital display ads and their contexts, and aggregate ad and brand gaze times. We compare AdGazer’s predictive performance to two feature learning models, VGG16 and ResNet50. AdGazer predicts highly accurately with hold-out correlations of 0.83 for ad gaze and 0.80 for brand gaze, outperforming both feature learning models and generalizing better to out-of-distribution ads. Context features jointly contributed at least 33% to predicted ad gaze and about 20% to predicted brand gaze, good news for managers practicing or considering contextual advertising. We demonstrate that the theory-informed AdGazer effectively matches ads to advertising vehicles and their contexts, optimizing ad gaze more than current practice and alternatives like text-based and native contextual advertising.
Michel Wede (UMD Smith) Jianping Ye (UMD PhD student); and Rik Pieters (Tilburg University, the Netherlands)
Building credible commitments via board ties: Evidence from the supply chain
November 2025
Using a novel dataset that provides a comprehensive coverage of U.S. firms' industrial supply chain relationships, we find that firms with innovation specific to a buyer are more likely to share a common director with that buyer. This association is stronger when the buyer has a larger number of alternative suppliers. We further find that when a supplier–buyer pair shares a common director, the supplier's R&D investment is more sensitive to the investment opportunities of its buyer. Moreover, such pairs tend to have longer supply chain relationships. Taken together, our findings demonstrate that board ties serve as a credible commitment mechanism to support exchange along the supply chain and safeguard suppliers' buyer-specific investments.
Rebecca Hann, University of Maryland-College Park; Musa Subasi, University of Maryland-College Park; Yue Zheng, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology