ASU Scholarship Showcase

The current research examines how the price of a medication influences consumers’ beliefs about their own disease risk—a critical question with new laws mandating greater price transparency for health care goods and services. Four studies reveal that consumers believe that lifesaving health goods are priced according to perceived need (i.e., communal-sharing principles) and that price consequently influences risk perceptions and intentions to consume care. Specifically, consumers believe that lower medication prices signal greater accessibility to anyone in need, and such accessibility thus makes them feel that their own self-risk is elevated, increasing consumption. The reverse is true for higher prices. Importantly, these effects are limited to self-relevant health threats and reveal that consumers make inconsistent assumptions about risk, prevalence, and need with price exposure. These findings suggest that while greater price transparency may indeed reduce consumption of higher-priced goods, it may do so for both necessary and unnecessary care.

Collaborating with a supplier in a buying firm's new product development (NPD) project is commonly advocated and adopted, but does not always improve project performance. Some pre-existing collaboration contexts, such as buyer–supplier NPD projects, are especially exposed to supplier opportunism due to the uncertain nature of the collaboration process. Adopting agency theory and transaction cost theory perspectives, we examine: (i) contextual antecedents and project consequences of supplier opportunism and (ii) if these causal influences vary in different cultural and institutional contexts. Using a survey sample of 214 United States (U.S.) and 212 Chinese buying firms’ responses about buyer–supplier NPD projects, we find that supplier opportunism is significantly influenced by the task and relational contexts. We also show that supplier opportunism damages both design quality and efficiency, two aspects of project performance. When comparing U.S. to China, we find that task and relational contexts have a greater impact on supplier opportunism in the U.S., but design efficiency is less hurt by supplier opportunism there. Finally, we show challenges of preventing supplier opportunism in certain NPD collaboration contexts, and offer solutions for overcoming these challenges.

Operations managers clearly play a critical role in targeting plant-level investments toward environment and safety practices. In principle, a “rational” response would be to align this investment with senior management's competitive goals for operational performance. However, operations managers also are influenced by contingent factors, such as their national culture, thus creating potential tension that might bias investment away from a simple rational response. Using data from 1,453 plants in 24 countries, we test the moderating influence of seven of the national cultural characteristics on investment at the plant level in environment and safety practices. Four of the seven national cultural characteristics from GLOBE (i.e., uncertainty avoidance, in-group collectivism, future orientation and performance orientation) shifted investment away from an expected “rational” response. Positive bias was evident when the national culture favored consistency and formalized procedures and rewarded performance improvement. In contrast, managers exhibited negative bias when familial groups and local coalitions were powerful, or future outcomes—rather than current actions—were more important. Overall, this study highlights the critical importance of moving beyond a naïve expectation that plant-level investment will naturally align with corporate competitive goals for environment and safety. Instead, the national culture where the plant is located will influence these investments, and must be taken into account by senior management.

We examine the relation between high frequency quotation and the behavior of stock prices between 2009 and 2011 for the full cross section of securities in the US. On average, higher quotation activity is associated with price series that more closely resemble a random walk, and significantly lower cost of trading. We also explore market resiliency during periods of exceptionally high low-latency trading: large liquidity drawdowns in which, within the same millisecond, trading algorithms systematically sweep large volume across multiple trading venues. Although such large drawdowns incur trading costs, they do not appear to degrade the price formation process or increase the subsequent cost of trading. In an out-of-sample analysis, we investigate an exogenous technological change to the trading environment on the Tokyo Stock Exchange that dramatically reduces latency and allows co-location of servers. This shock also results in prices more closely resembling a random walk and a sharp decline in the cost of trading.

This article develops welfare-consistent measures of the employment effects of environmental regulation. Our analysis is based on a microeconomic model of how households with heterogeneous preferences and skills decide where to live and work. We use the model to examine how job loss and unemployment would affect workers in Northern California. Our stylized simulations produce earnings losses that are consistent with empirical evidence. They also produce two new insights. First, we find that earnings losses are sensitive to business cycle conditions. Second, we find that earnings losses may substantially understate welfare losses once we account for the fact that workers may have to commute further or live in a less desirable community after losing a job.

Portrayals of the US Southwest's Native American inhabitants as “primitive” relics have been shaped by the intertwining practices of archaeological collection and museum display. Focusing on the Pueblo Grande Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, this essay analyzes the interpellation of museum visitors as citizen archaeologists, a process that re/produces racialized discourses through rhetorics of science and time. It is argued that as visitors excavate remnants of the past they engage an archaeological vision that reinforces dominant constructions of “modern” citizenship. This vision maintains colonial histories by disallowing Native peoples both authorship of the past and belonging in the present.

Using a natural experiment (Regulation SHO), we show that short selling pressure and consequent stock price behavior have a causal effect on managers’ voluntary disclosure choices. Specifically, we find that managers respond to a positive exogenous shock to short selling pressure and price sensitivity to bad news by reducing the precision of bad news forecasts. This finding on management forecasts appears to be generalizable to other corporate disclosures. In particular, we find that, in response to increased short selling pressure, managers also reduce the readability (or increase the fuzziness) of bad news annual reports. Overall, our results suggest that maintaining the current level of stock prices is an important consideration in managers’ strategic disclosure decisions.