Research

Patent monetization

Non-practicing Entities (NPEs, Patent Trolls) and implications to the market of technology.

Property rights

How does the protection of property rights shape firm behavior?

AI & Strategy

How will Machine Learning and AI change organizational learning?

Publications

Substituting Human Decision-Making with Machine Learning: Implications for Organizational Learning, with Natarajan Balasubramanian and Yang Ye, 2022, Academy of Management Review, 47(3): 448-465.

The richness of organizational learning relies on the ability of humans to develop diverse patterns of action by actively engaging with their environments and applying substantive rationality. The substitution of human decision-making with machine learning has the potential to alter this richness of organizational learning. Though machine learning is significantly faster and seemingly unconstrained by human cognitive limitations and inflexibility, it is not true sentient learning and relies on formal statistical analysis for decision-making. We propose that the distinct differences between human learning and machine learning risk decreasing the within-organizational diversity in organizational routines and the extent of causal, contextual, and general knowledge associated with routines. We theorize that these changes may affect organizational learning by exacerbating the myopia of learning, and highlight some important contingencies that may mute or amplify the risk of such myopia.
Key words: Machine learning, organizational learning, learning myopia.

How Property Rights Matter to Firm Resource Investment: Evidence from a Property Law Enactment, with Tony Tong and Wenlong He, 2022, Organization Science, 33(1):293-310.

Although property rights theory has long been used to explain firms’ ownership of resources, research on the channels through which property rights affect heterogeneous firms’ investment in building resources remains scarce. Leveraging a unique property law enactment, we find that strengthening property rights protection leads private firms to make greater intangible and tangible asset investment compared to state-owned firms, and that these effects are mediated by external equity and debt financing. Further, we unpack resource heterogeneity by explicating key differences between intangible and tangible assets, and we document an alignment between asset intangibility and financing approaches in that for intangible asset investment, equity plays a larger mediation role, whereas for tangible asset investment, debt’s mediating effect is greater. We contribute to the strategy literature by using property rights theory to link together asset intangibility and financing approaches, and by showing that the strength of property rights protection affects firms’ resource investment and shapes firm heterogeneity.
Key words: organizational economics, property rights, capabilities, intangible assets, external financing, mediation effects.

Property Rights and Firm Scope, with Tony Tong and Zhimin Li, 2023, Journal of Management.

The corporate strategy research on the determinants of firm scale and scope is often premised on a well-established property rights regime, which contrasts with the weak property rights institution that still characterizes most countries today. We address this gap by studying how the strengthening of the property rights regime may affect firm scale and scope. Exploiting the enactment of a property law that enhanced formal protection of private property rights in China as a quasi-experiment, we find that with a strengthened property rights regime, i) private firms grow in size; and ii) the horizontal relatedness among the firms’ businesses increases, but the vertical relatedness decreases. Further, these effects are less prominent for politically connected firms that are afforded informal protection of property rights.
Key words: property rights theory, scale, scope, organizational economics, institutions.

working papers

Trolling for Dollars, with Richard Makadok.

Distinguished Student Paper Award, STR Division AOM 2019.
Best Paper Proceedings, STR Division AOM 2019.
Key words: patent monetization, value appropriation, technological strength, exclusionary strength.

Patent Monetization and Acquisition, with Tony Tong.

Best paper runner-up, Wharton Innovation Doctoral Symposium (WINDS), 2019.
Best paper runner-up, Krannert Doctoral Research Symposium, 2019.
Key words: patent monetization, market of patents, litigation, PAEs.

Patent Litigation and Entrepreneurial Financing, with Tony Tong and Huiyan Zhang.

Key words: patent litigation, venture capital, entrepreneurial financing.

The Spillover Effect of Patent Litigation on Patent Strategies, with Aija Leiponen, Yifan Liu, and Yolanda Xue.

Key words: patent litigation, spillover, knowledge search.

Geopolitical Risk and GVC Involvement, with Victor Cui, Tan Li and Delin Yang.

Key words: geoplitical risk, GVC, entrepreneurial financing, institutional logic.

Hedge Fund Activism and Patent Litigations, with Kubilay Cirik, Wei Shi, and Yurun Tian.

Key words: activism, patent litigation, shareholder, hedge fund.

Agglomeration Density and Business-Consumer Matching: Evidence from Yelp.

Key words: agglomeration, density, matching.

WORK in progress

Interaction Effects of the Four Theories of Profit, with Richard Makadok.

Domain Expertise and AI Commercialization, with Natarajan Balasubramanian.

Presentations: ISA.

Internationalization of Patent Assertion Entities, with Minyuan Zhao