Forging the Future of Work
Advisor-Advisee Research Overlap and Its Implications for Scientists’ Early-Career Performance in the U.S.
Organization Science
A genealogical training process, in which senior (advisor) scientists engage in cross-generational transfer of skills and knowledge to junior (advisee) scientists is one of the core organizational features of modern science. In this paper, we examine the consequences of the tension faced by all junior scientists: to build upon an advisor’s skills or to strike out on one’s own? We study the implications of advisor-advisee research overlap for emerging scientists’ performance by constructing a novel, bibliometric-record-based dataset on 15,271 U.S. biomedical scientists (advisees) who were trained in 7,924 PI advisors’ labs between 1972 and 2009. We assessed the junior scientists’ performance in the first ten years of their careers as independent PIs. Tests across multiple research-overlap measures and model specifications reveal a consistently positive relationship between maintaining a higher degree of proximity to advisor’s research areas and the junior scientist’s early-career funding and publication performance. However, evidence is weak regarding scientific impact and non-existent regarding research disruptiveness. We further test how advisor status moderates the research overlap-performance relationship using both a large-sample analysis comparing the performance of academic siblings, and a more stringent difference-in-difference analysis leveraging the exogenous timing of the status elevation events experienced by the advisor scientists when they receive major scientific awards. Both tests yield consistent evidence that the positive relationship between advisor-advisee research overlap and advisee’s early-career performance is reduced as the advisor’s status increases. Taken together, these findings provide a more complete understanding of how advisor-advisee relationships shape new scientists’ performance during early careers.
Waverly W. Ding
Associate Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship
R.H. Smith School of Business
University of Maryland
Christopher C. Liu*
Associate Professor
Lundquist College of Business
University of Oregon
Andy (Seungho) Back*
University of Hong Kong
Beril Yalcinkaya
Wharton School
University of Pennsylvania
Market Formation, Pricing, and Revenue Sharing in Ride Hailing Services
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, September 2025
Problem definition: We empirically study the market for ride-hailing services. In particular, we explore the following questions: (i) How do the two-sided market and prices jointly form in ride-hailing marketplaces? (ii) Does surge pricing create value and for whom? How can its efficiency be improved? (iii) Can platforms' strategy on revenue sharing with drivers be improved? (iv) What is the value generated by ride-hailing services, including hosting rival taxi services on ride-hailing apps? Methodology/Results: We develop a discrete choice model for the formation of mutually dependent demand (customer side) and supply (driver side) that jointly determine pricing. Using this model and a comprehensive data set obtained from the largest mobile ride platform in China, we estimate customer and driver price elasticities and other factors that affect market participation for the company's two main markets, namely basic ride-hailing and Taxi services. Based on these estimation results and counterfactual analysis, we demonstrate that surge pricing improves customer and driver welfare as well as platform revenues, while counterintuitively reducing Taxi revenues on the platform. However, surge pricing should be avoided during non-peak hours as it can hurt both customer and platform surplus. We show that platform revenues can be improved by increasing drivers' revenue share from the current levels. Finally, we estimate that the platform's basic ride-hailing services generated customer value equivalent to 13.25 Billion USD in China in 2024, and hosting rival Taxi services on the platform boosted customer surplus by 3.6 Billion USD. Managerial Implications: Our empirical framework provides ride-hailing companies a way to estimate demand and supply functions, which can help with optimization of multiple aspects of their operations. Our findings suggest that ride-hailing platforms can improve profits by containing surge-pricing to peak hours only and boosting supply by increasing driver compensation. Finally, our results demonstrate that restricting ride-hailing services create significant welfare losses while including taxi services on ride-hail platforms generate substantial economic value
Liu Ming, Tunay I. Tunca, Yi Xu, and Weiming Zhu
Public Pension Contract Minimalism
American Business Law Journal, November 2024
The national pension debt and COVID crises have collided. Post-pandemic economic decline has escalated existing financial strains on state and local pension plans, impacting workers and the public welfare. With unfunded obligations exceeding one trillion dollars, many of these plans are in jeopardy. But the movement to reform government pension contracts has yet to adopt an anchoring idea, leaving judicial decisions in disarray and policymakers without guidance about how to shore up troubled retirement systems. The crux of the problem is the many meanings of contract under state and U.S. Contract Clauses that prevent pension reform. This Essay endorses a promising path forward—contract minimalism. “Contract minimalism” concentrates on the duration of government pension contracts. It posits that public and private employment law should be treated the same. Like its private law counterpart, public sector employment at-will ought to consist of a daily contract interval. A contract-a-day concept entitles employers to change the plan prospectively, with employees receiving a proportionate share of benefits for work performed. Just as several agreements safeguard salaries for labor, they should also mirror the protection afforded to deferred benefits like pensions. Contract minimalism additionally puts public and private sector employers on the same legal footing as to the authority to change pension plan terms. Thus, it aligns public pension benefits with overlapping fields of law, placing them on a firm conceptual foundation. The minimalist approach also has the advantage over approaches that are insufficiently attentive to scarce government resources or employee old-age security. By protecting pension benefits early and incrementally, it advances a middle path with fairer, more coherent results. In the present post-pandemic era of hard choices, minimalism provides an equilibrium between the over and under-protection of pension benefits.
T. Leigh Anenson, Professor of Business Law, University of Maryland and Hannah R. Weiser, Assistant Professor of Law, Bentley University