Contributions published at Department of Business Administration (Egon Franck)

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Empirical studies show that first- and second-generation immigrants are less likely to be members of sports clubs than their non-immigrant peers. Common explanations are cultural differences and socioeconomic disadvantages. However, lower participation rates in amateur sport could be at least partly due to ethnic discrimination. Are minority ethnic groups granted the same right to belong as their non-immigrant peers? To answer this question, this paper uses publicly available data from a field experiment in which mock applications were sent out to over 1,600 football clubs in Germany. Having a foreign-sounding name significantly reduces the likelihood of being invited to participate. The paper concludes that amateur football clubs are not as permeable as they are often perceived to be. It claims that traditional explanations for lower participation rates of immigrants need to be revisited.

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This paper develops a duopoly model of user-generated content (UGC) platforms that compete for consumers and content producers in two-sided markets with network externalities. Each platform can choose the level of investment into a content quality assurance (CQA) system and the level of advertising. Our model shows that network effects are crucial in determining the platforms' optimal strategy and the behavior (single vs. multi-homing) of their users. Specifically, we find that consumers are multi-homing and producers are single-homing when the network effects obtained by producers are weak, while the opposite is true if these network effects are strong. Moreover, our model shows that the user behavior and the network effects determine whether a platform has incentives to place ads and/or invest into CQA. In general, weak network effects induce a platform to invest into a CQA system except when consumers and producers are multi-homing. The results in our model suggests the need for platform companies to assess the magnitude of network effects on their platform to predict the behavior of their users, which in turn will determine the optimal CQA and advertising strategy.

Studying networked systems in a variety of domains, including biology, social science and internet of things, has recently received a surge of attention. For a networked system, there are usually multiple types of interactions between its components, and such interaction type information is crucial since it always associated with important features. However, some interaction types which actually exist in the network may not be observed in the metadata collected in practice. This paper proposes an approach aiming to detect previously undiscovered interaction types (PUITs) in networked systems. The first step in our proposed PUIT detection approach is to answer the following fundamental question: is it possible to effectively detect PUITs without utilizing metadata other than the existing incomplete interaction type information and the connection information of the system? Here, we first propose a temporal network model which can be used to mimic any real network and then discover that some special networks which fit the model shall a common topological property. Supported by this discovery, we finally develop a PUIT detection method for networks which fit the proposed model. Both analytical and numerical results show this detection method is more effective than the baseline method, demonstrating that effectively detecting PUITs in networks is achievable. More studies on PUIT detection are of significance and in great need since this approach should be as essential as the previously undiscovered node type detection which has gained great success in the field of biology.

Primary stressors are direct outcomes of extreme events (e.g., viruses, floodwater) whereas secondary stressors stem from pre-disaster life circumstances and societal arrangements (e.g., illness, problematic pre-disaster policies) or from inefficient responses to the extreme event. Secondary stressors can cause significant long-term damage to people affected but are also tractable and amenable to change. In this study we explored the association between secondary stressors, social identity processes, social support, and perceived stress and resilience. Pre-registered analyses of data from the COVIDiSTRESS Global Survey Round II (N = 14,600; 43 countries) show that secondary stressors are positively associated with perceived stress and negatively associated with resilience, even when controlling for the effects of primary stressors. Being a woman or having lower socioeconomic status (SES) is associated with higher exposure to secondary stressors, higher perceived stress, and lower resilience. Importantly, social identification is positively associated with expected support and with increased resilience and lower perceived stress. However, neither gender, SES, or social identification moderated the relationship between secondary stressors and perceived stress and resilience. In conclusion, systemic reforms and the availability of social support are paramount to reducing the effects of secondary stressors.

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We study a publicly traded firm that cares about its stock market performance, while collaborating with a privately owned firm in a business alliance. The firms each undertake a relation-specific investment and then bargain over the allocation of the joint surplus generated by the alliance. The public firm's market concerns affect both the total size of the surplus and how the surplus is divided by the firms. While the public firm always becomes more aggressive and obtains a higher portion of the surplus, the total size of the surplus may become larger or smaller due to the effect of market concerns on the firms' investment incentives. We establish conditions under which the investment and the value of each firm increase or decrease with market concerns. The market concerns could mitigate or exacerbate the hold-up problem between the two firms and thus could be either beneficial or detrimental for the whole business alliance. We also study two extensions with (i) the two investments being substitutes instead of complements, and (ii) both firms being publicly listed. In both cases, the insights from our main model still hold true.

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We study voluntary disclosure strategies in leader-follower games where firms choose real actions sequentially after simultaneously disclosing information. We show that the leader incurs an endogenous consistency cost when withholding information because it must choose a suboptimal real action to avoid that its private information is revealed to the follower. This consistency cost induces the leader to disclose more information in equilibrium than an equally informed follower. We establish this result in the context of a voluntary disclosure model with uncertain information endowment and show that it is robust under alternative modeling choices regarding the disclosure friction, the number of followers, and the impact of firms' private information on their rivals' profit.

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