本文精选了管理学国际顶刊《Management Science》近期发表的论文，提供管理学领域最新的学术动态。

Political Polarization and Nonmarket Strategy over the Policy Life Cycle

原刊和作者：

Management Science, Volume 72, Issue 8

Thomas P. Lyon （University of Michigan）

John W. Maxwell （Indiana University）

Abstract

Growing political polarization has reshaped the business landscape, shifting the mix of private and public politics companies face and requiring managers to develop more sophisticated nonmarket strategies. Yet the literature has largely continued to study strategies aimed at public and private politics in isolation. We analyze repertoires of nonmarket strategies and how they evolve over time in a formal game theoretic model of the policy life cycle, providing an integrated framework for studying public and private politics. Industry may resist activist campaigns or concede to them and may also lobby to block legislation when public politics is viable. The evolution of public opinion in a polarized world divides the game into two distinct phases, an initial phase of pure private politics and a subsequent phase with both public and private politics. Polarization delays social consensus and intensifies activism while increasing industry resistance to it. As public concern about an issue rises over time, industry resistance to activist campaigns weakens, and lobbying becomes costlier and less likely. We reveal important complementarities between strategies: The ability to lobby in the latter phase makes industry more resistant to activist campaigns during both phases of the life cycle. Our analysis demonstrates clearly and precisely how suboptimal strategic decisions may result from a failure to fully coordinate nonmarket strategy instruments.

Link: https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2025.00819

Incentivizing Resource Pooling

原刊和作者：

Management Science, Volume 72, Issue 8

Chen Chen （New York University）

Yilun Chen （The Chinese University of Hong Kong）

Pengyu Qian （Boston University）

Abstract

Resource pooling improves system efficiency drastically in large stochastic systems, but its effective implementation in decentralized systems remains relatively underexplored. This paper studies how to incentivize resource pooling when agents are self-interested, and their states are private information. Our primary motivation is applications in the design of decentralized computing markets, among others. We study a standard multiserver queueing model in which each server is associated with an ??/??/1 queue and aims to minimize its time-average job holding and processing costs. We design a simple token-based mechanism where servers can earn tokens by offering help and spend tokens to request help from other servers, all in their self-interest. The mechanism induces a complex game among servers. We employ the fluid mean-field equilibrium (FMFE) concept to analyze the system, combining mean-field approximation with fluid relaxation. This framework enables us to derive a closed-form characterization of servers’ FMFE strategies. We show that these FMFE strategies approximate well the servers’ rational behavior. We leverage this framework to optimize the design of the mechanism and present our main results: As the number of servers increases, the proposed mechanism incentivizes complete resource pooling—that is, the system dynamics and performance under our mechanism match those under centralized control. Finally, we show that our mechanism achieves the first-best performance even when helping others incurs higher job processing costs and remains nearly optimal in settings with heterogeneous servers.

Link: https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.03550

Collaborative Learning and Decision Making on Pricing and Recommendation: A Simple Framework for Planning

原刊和作者：

Management Science, Volume 72, Issue 8

Junyu Cao （The University of Texas）

Abstract

We formulate a collaborative learning and decision-making problem involving contextual information. In current business practices, pricing and recommendation decisions often are made jointly by multiple teams in sequence. The decision-making processes for different teams can be controlled by either a centralized or decentralized planner. We propose a simple collaboration framework that integrates the learning about decision making in an unknown environment. The main challenge in a decentralized framework is that the decision-making process in other teams is unknown, but the subsequent decisions are mutually dependent. From a practical concern about high exploration costs and implementation complexity, we propose a simple greedy algorithm for centralized planners and a “greedy” + “weighted sampling” (GWS) algorithm for both centralized and decentralized planners to balance the learning and earning. We show that the exploration-free greedy algorithm can achieve the optimal rate when context diversity holds. The GWS algorithm works effectively for either centralized or decentralized planners under a much weaker condition, which we call context variation. Furthermore, we extend our framework to the multiproduct pricing and ranking problem and study the model misspecification issue. We validate our results using simulations on synthetic and real data. Numerical studies show the superior performance of the two proposed frameworks for different types of planners.

Link: https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.00320

Misreporting of Mandatory ESG Disclosures: Evidence from Gender Pay Gap Information

原刊和作者：

Management Science, Volume 72, Issue 8

McKenna Bailey （University of Michigan）

Stephen Glaeser （University of North Carolina）

James D. Omartian （University of Michigan）

Aneesh Raghunandan （Yale School of Management）

Abstract

We examine environmental, social, and governance (ESG) misreporting in the context of the UK government requirement to report gender employment ratios and pay gaps. Highlighting misreporting, many employers report a set of disclosures that are together mathematically impossible. Further, a disproportionate number of employers report perfectly balanced gender statistics, consistent with misreporting as a form of ESG-washing. Suggesting that a lack of ethical considerations encourages misreporting, employers involved in ESG controversies and who commit labor violations are more likely to misreport. Suggesting that capital market and media scrutiny discourage misreporting, employers that are the subject of an article about their gender pay gap reports and employers that receive an ESG audit or financial audit from a Big 4 auditor are less likely to misreport. Overall, our results suggest that 12%–15% of employers misreport in 2017 and 8%–11% misreport in subsequent years. Our findings highlight the importance of meaningful oversight within the context of ESG reporting.

Link: https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2024.05125

Does Personality Similarity Influence the Formation of Auditor-in-Charge–Client Relationships and Audit Quality? Evidence from Swedish Military Conscription Data

Management Science, Volume 72, Issue 8

Daniel Aobdia （Pennsylvania State University）

Ting Dong （Stockholm School of Economics）

Henrik Nilsson （Stockholm School of Economics）

Liwei Zhu （CUNEF Universidad）

Abstract

This study investigates the role of personality similarity in the formation of auditor-in-charge (AIC)–client management dyads and the development of a collaborative relationship in auditing engagements. We apply the principle of homophily from sociology, that is, the attraction of individuals with similar traits to one another, to the formation of supplier–customer dyads in auditing engagements. Our analyses suggest that AIC–management personality similarity increases the likelihood of dyad formation and facilitates client retention. Using an instrumental variable approach, we further find evidence that AIC–chief executive officer (CEO) personality similarity enhances audit quality, and that this effect is stronger for clients with higher misreporting risk and at the beginning of the AIC–client tenure relationship. Among publicly listed clients, where chief financial officer (CFO) data are available, we find that AIC–CFO personality similarity plays a more important role in AIC–client matching and audit outcomes than AIC–CEO personality similarity. Collectively, our results suggest that a personality homophily-based relationship facilitates collaboration in auditing engagements, ultimately enhancing audit quality. Overall, our evidence highlights the benefit of interpersonal relationships in the production of audit services.

Link: https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.04195