Forging the Future of Work
Unintended Consequences of Closing Pay Gaps Across Multiple Groups: A Formal Modeling and Simulation Analysis of Allocation Methods
Organization Science, October 2025
In recent years, many firms have prioritized both pay equity (i.e., closing pay gaps associated with target groups such as women and racial minorities) and equitable representation (i.e., ensuring these target groups are fairly represented across a firm’s hierarchy). We use formal modeling and simulations to show how efforts to close pay gaps across multiple groups can undermine equitable representation. Specifically, our analysis suggests that pressure for pay equity creates a cost-based financial incentive to enact a subtle form of tokenism: A firm may minimize the cost of closing pay gaps if it maintains a workforce with a small number of minority women whom it pays well in order to compensate for underpaying larger numbers of majority women and minority men who resemble each other in terms of job attributes and personal qualifications. A firm can avoid these outcomes if it focuses on ensuring that employees from target groups are equitably rewarded for job attributes and personal qualifications rather than minimizing cost. But an equitable-rewards approach can be substantially more expensive than a cost-minimization approach, especially if pay gaps are larger in high-wage jobs or if there are many target groups. We conclude by offering testable empirical predictions and recommending a practical solution, namely to include terms for intersectional categories (e.g., minority women) in the regressions used to estimate pay gaps.
David Anderson (Villanova University); Margret Bjarnadottir (University of Maryland);
David Ross (University of Florida)
Can Employees' Past Helping Behavior Be Used to Improve Shift Scheduling? Evidence from ICU Nurses
Management Science, November 2025
Employees routinely make valuable contributions at work that are not part of their formal job description, such as helping a struggling coworker. These contributions, termed organizational citizenship behavior, are studied from many angles in the organizational behavior literature. However, the degree to which the past helping behavior of employees scheduled to a shift impacts that shift’s operational outcomes remains an underexplored question. We define two measures of past helping behavior for members of a shift -- the total past helping of each employee and the past helping between each pair of employees -- and hypothesize that they are associated with shift performance. We empirically confirm our hypotheses with detailed scheduling and patient outcome data from six intensive care units (ICUs) at a large academic medical center, using the hospital’s electronic medical records to identify cases of one nurse helping another. Our empirical results indicate that both measures of past helping are predictive of patient length of stay (LOS), more so than the broadly studied notion of team familiarity. Counterfactual analysis shows that relatively small changes in shift composition can yield significant reduction in total LOS, indicating the managerial significance of the results. Overall, our study suggests the potential value of shift scheduling using data on past helping behaviors, and this may have promise far beyond the selected application to ICU nursing.
Zhaohui (Zoey) Jiang (CMU), John Silberholz (UMD), Yixin (Iris) Wang (UIUC), Deena Kelly Costa (Yale), Michael Sjoding (University of Michigan)
Cost-Saving Synergy: Energy Stacking in Battery Energy Storage Systems
Management Science
Despite the great potential benefits of battery energy storage systems (BESSs) to electrical grids, most standalone uses of BESS are not economical due to batteries’ high upfront costs and limited lifespans. Energy stacking, a strategy of providing two or more services with a single BESS, has been of great interest to improve profitability. However, some key questions, for example, the underlying mechanism by which stacking works or why and how much it may improve profitability, remain unanswered in the literature. Using two popular battery services, we analytically show that there often exists cost-saving synergy -- the cost of performing both services at the same time (simultaneous stacking) is smaller than the sum of individual costs if we had performed each service alone -- which allows for bigger profits. Furthermore, we perform comparative statics on the optimal mix of the services to systemically characterize grid/market conditions that maximize/minimize this synergy. We also derive a theoretical upper bound on simultaneous stacking’s benefits, showing that it can approximately double the profit of the best standalone service. Several generalizations of the base model not only show that the main lessons continue to hold but also that stacking’s benefits may become even stronger.
Joonho Bae (Indiana University), Roman Kapuscinski (University of Michigan), John Silberholz (UMD)
Celebrity messages reduce online hate and limit its spread
Online hate spreads rapidly, yet little is known about whether preventive and scalable strategies can curb it. We conducted the largest randomized controlled trial of hate speech prevention to date: a 20-week messaging campaign on X in Nigeria targeting ethnic hate. 73,136 users who had previously engaged with hate speech were randomly assigned to receive prosocial video messages from Nigerian celebrities. The campaign reduced hate content by 2.5% to 5.5% during treatment, with about 75% of the reduction persisting over the following four months. Reaching a larger share of a user's audience reduced amplification of that user's hate posts among both treated and untreated users, cutting hate reposts by over 50% for the most exposed accounts. Scalable messaging can limit online hate without removing content.
Eaman Jahani, Assistant Professor, UMD
Blas Kolic, Post-doc, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
Manuel Tonneau, PhD Student, Oxford University
Hause Lin, Post-doc, MIT
Daniel Barkoczi, University of Southern Denmark
Edwin Ikhuoria, Middlesex University
Victor Orozco, World Bank
Samuel Fraiberger, World Bank and NYU
The GenAI Future of Consumer Research
Journal of Consumer Research
We develop a novel generative AI (GenAI) trajectory, “democratization-average trap-model collapse,” to identify data and model challenges posed by GenAI, from which we project the GenAI future of consumer research. This trajectory consists of three key phenomena: democratization broadens consumer participation, the average trap produces generic responses, and model collapses occurs when GenAI outputs lose human sensibilities. Data and model challenges arise as democratization enhances data representation but embeds real-world biases; the average trap, caused by next-token prediction algorithms, leads to generic outputs that lack individuality; and model collapse occurs when GenAI increasingly learns from its own outputs, amplifying machine bias and diverging from human behavior. To address these challenges, researchers can leverage democratization to study marginalized consumers and prioritize human-centered research over purely data-driven methods. The average trap can be mitigated by fine-tuning models with task-specific and marginalized consumption data while engineering responses for uniqueness. Preventing model collapse requires integrating human-machine hybrid data and applying theories of mind to realign AI with human-centric consumption. Finally, we outline three future research directions: preserving data distribution tails to support consumption democratization, countering the average trap in next-token prediction, and reversing the trajectory from democratization to model collapse.
Ming-Hui Huang, Distinguished University Professor, National Taiwan University
Roland T. Rust, Distinguished Professor and David Bruce Smith Chair in Marketing, University of Maryland
The referral penalty: Decreased perceptions of merit undermine helping behavior towards referred employees
Journal of Applied Psychology
Employee referrals are commonly used by organizations due to their numerous benefits. However, it remains unclear how organizational incumbents, who are uninvolved in the hiring process, perceive and react to referral beneficiaries. Although traditional views suggest that the presence of a referral signals merit, incumbents’ perceptions may differ. We theorize that incumbents are more likely to perceive referral beneficiaries as less merited than non-referred employees, due to perceived legitimacy concerns stemming from a simplified view that reliance on network contacts de facto compensates for lower qualifications. Drawing on equity theory, we then theorize that low merit perceptions lead to less positive and more negative behaviors towards referral beneficiaries, as an attempt to restore the equilibrium between beneficiaries’ perceived inputs (e.g., driven by perceived lower merit) and outputs (e.g., being on payroll). Sampling employees from industries in which referrals are normative (Study 1a) and from a cultural context that is positively predisposed toward referrals (Study 1b) confirmed our theorizing. In a subsequent study, aiming to enhance the generalizability of our findings, we found supporting evidence for perceived equity violations, leading incumbents to engage in corrective behaviors toward referral beneficiaries (Study 2). Finally, testing our hypotheses more conservatively, we found that negative attributions toward referral beneficiaries persisted even when the referred employees had demonstrated high performance, thereby underscoring the robustness of our findings (Study 3). This paper elucidates important unintended consequences of one of the most popular hiring methods - employee referrals - and draws implications for both theory and practice.
Tomova Shakur, Teodora, Texas Christian University and Derfler-Rozin, Rellie, University of Maryland
Should I Stand Up for My Mistreated Colleague? When and Why High-Status Team Members Stand Up for Their Coworkers
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, January 2026
Supervisory mistreatment has adverse consequences for its victims. Coworkers, as observers, can shape victims’ experiences by standing up for them. Yet doing so entails the risk of supervisory retaliation. High-status coworkers should be well-positioned to stand up for victims as they have greater social capital at work. However, such retaliation risks may loom large for them because they are highly motivated to protect what they have. Thus, prior research reports both positive and negative links between status markers and various forms of standing up. We suggest that these inconclusive findings stem from examining individuals’ status only within a single domain (e.g., work) while neglecting how their standing in other groups may shape their experiences in that focal domain. Building on status inconsistency theory (Lenski, 1954) and the concept of status portfolios (Fernandes et al., 2021), we argue that status variance (i.e., inconsistency of status across groups) shapes how high-status employees react to mistreatment. Specifically, we hypothesize that high-status employees with high (compared to low) status variance will experience greater fear of retaliation and reduced willingness to stand up. We argue that this occurs because they perceive their status portfolios as unstable and become more vigilant in protecting their elevated standing at work. Four complementary studies provided support for our hypotheses. We discuss implications for research on bystander intervention, supervisory mistreatment, and status.
Gencay, Oguz, PhD., Bilkent University., Derfler-Rozin, Rellie, PhD. University of Maryland, Arman, Gamze, UWE Bristol
Does earnings management matter for strategy research?
Strategic Managment Journal, August 2025
Strategic management research often uses accounting data, despite well-known concerns that earnings management could obscure the link between actual and measured performance. We apply methods from the econometric literature on bunching to estimate that around 15 percent of firm-year observations in Compustat manipulate accounting earnings to achieve profitability. We show that cash-based performance measures are less susceptible to manipulation and that the choice of accrual versus cash-based measures “matters” for two classic strategy research questions: a decomposition of ROA variance and an analysis of persistence in firm performance. These findings underscore the importance of robustness testing and contribute to an emerging literature that reconsiders the link between theoretical constructs and empirical performance measures.
Gibbs (Purdue), Simcoe (Boston U), and Waguespack (Maryland)
Unlocking Forecast Quality: The Power of Material Sustainability Disclosures
Accounting and Business Research
In 2013, the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) began releasing guidelines to identify material (or financially relevant) sustainability metrics. This study investigates the effects of material and immaterial sustainability activities on analyst forecast error and dispersion. We further examine how these effects are influenced by the issuance of stand-alone sustainability reports and the release of SASB’s material sustainability standards. Using a sample of US firms from 2005 to 2018, we find that material sustainability activities are associated with more accurate and less dispersed analyst forecasts when firms issue stand-alone sustainability reports. Among firms that do not release such reports, material sustainability activities improve forecast quality only after the initial release of the SASB standards. Immaterial sustainability activities appear to add noise to information in the financial market and confound earnings forecasts, especially during the pre-SASB period, but this confounding effect reverses in the post-SASB period. Overall, our findings provide empirical evidence that classifying and disclosing corporate sustainability activities yield economic and informational benefits in capital markets.
Sue A. Cooper PhD EA CMA MEd MBA, Visiting Associate Clinical Professor of Accounting, University of Maryland, College Park, and Jennifer Yin PhD, Professor of Accounting, University of Texas at San Antonio, and Harrison Liu PhD, Associate Professor of Accounting University of Texas at San Antonio
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