Research

Below, you’ll find a list my past and current research projects.

Composing New Product Development Portfolios with Internal and External Projects

with Moritz Fleischmann and Jochen Schlapp

Major Revision from Management Science

Abstract: The process of building portfolios with competing internal and external new product development (NPD) projects---a key task for NPD portfolio managers in many innovation-driven industries---comprises two daunting challenges: (i) the collection of relevant information about the projects under consideration and (ii) the selection of the most promising projects under uncertainty. In order to create optimal NPD portfolios, firms must implement resource allocation policies that carefully control the tensions that arise between these two challenges. Hence, we ask the following question: Which resource allocation policies can best align a firm's (ex ante) information acquisition efforts with its (ex post) project selection decisions when the firm contemplates investing in competing internal and external NPD projects?

Delegating decisions and blame to humans and machines (2023)

with Mirko Kremer and Francis de Véricourt

Abstract: We study human-machine interaction in an environment where a principal delegates to an agent a risky diagnostic decision and pays the agent a discretionary bonus after observing the outcome that results from a combination of decision and luck. To make better decisions in expectation, the agent can rely on two sources of information – their own privately observed information and a recommendation from a statistical model (“machine”). We predict that bonus payments depend on outcomes and on whether the agent’s decision aligned with the machine recommendation, with the result that agents effectively over-rely on the machine. We design experiments to test these predictions under controlled laboratory conditions.

Optimal Stochastic Feedback in Asymmetric Dynamic Contests (2022)

with Jochen Schlapp and Jürgen Mihm

Abstract: Contests, in which contestants compete at their own expense for prizes offered by a contest holder, have become the foundational primitive of many theories of competition. Recently, the focus in contest research has turned to the role of in-contest performance feedback. The extant literature on feedback has focused on specific ad-hoc policies in symmetric contests and hence failed to more broadly characterize optimal feedback policies. In this paper we solve a general formulation of an asymmetric contest involving feedback, and thus characterize the optimal feedback policy in a very wide class of (stochastic) feedback policies. We find that, in many settings where informative feedback is useful, feedback is optimal when it is both truthful and fully informative.

Composing New Product Development Portfolios: To Share or Not to Share information? (2022)

Abstract: When composing their innovation portfolios, firms often select from a pool of internally developed and externally acquired initiatives. The potential value of the initiatives is very uncertain in the beginning. Senior management of the organization eventually obtains more refined information about the value of external projects. The question is: Should she subsequently reveal this information to the internal project managers, or not? We investigate senior management's optimal communication strategy in combination with financial incentives to see how portfolio composition and agency costs are affected.