Ulrich Kaiser

The optimal number of products to offer consumers is one of the core strategic problems that firms face. This is increasingly so in digital markets where many firms offer a large product variety. In these markets, consumers purchase products repeatedly, making customer retention an important aspect for firm performance. In this paper, we study the interplay between these two variables, product variety and customer retention. First, we provide a novel game-theoretic model to analyze this interplay and also determine how the optimal product variety depends on the market environment. Second, we provide suggestive evidence for our theoretical predictions using data for video games from Steam. Our data set allows us to measure the key variables in our game-theoretic model and additionally contains plausible instrumental variables for empirical identification. We show theoretically that investment in product portfolio size and investment in customer retention are substitutes because the former increases demand from switching consumers, whereas the latter increases the repurchase probability of current consumers. We then derive predictions on how market conditions determine a firm’s product variety, for which we find evidence in our empirical analyses: there is (i) a negative relation between product portfolio size and customer retention, (ii) an inverted U-shaped relationship between market value and product variety, and (iii) a positive relation between consumer heterogeneity and product variety. Both our theoretical and empirical results are robust to a wide set of robustness checks. This paper was accepted by Alfonso Gambardella, business strategy. Funding: This work was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) [Grant 462020252]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.00985 .

Gender wage discrimination is a grand challenge that constrains economic growth worldwide and denies women fair opportunities. Yet, we know surprisingly little about how women’s own experiences of wage discrimination steer their career decisions. We adopt the perspective of job-seeking women and argue that prior exposure to wage discrimination reshapes their employer preferences. Specifically, it can flip the liability of foreignness typically faced by foreign MNCs into a perceived employer advantage because foreign MNCs can deviate from the host country’s gender-biased norms. We study this mechanism for 165,624 female professionals and managers who changed jobs in Denmark between 2002 and 2015, using a pay transparency law from 2006 for identifying the underlying mechanism. We find that women who have suffered larger wage discrimination in domestic employment are more likely to start working for foreign MNC subsidiaries. This effect is weaker in labor markets in which high-performing domestic employers can offer other benefits, such as reputation or job security. The effect is stronger when foreign MNC subsidiaries signal gender fairness through a higher share of women in management. Overall, our findings show how wage discrimination redirects female career paths, transforming a grand challenge into a strategic advantage for foreign MNCs.

Research Summary : The ability of innovative firms to create and capture value depends on innovations that are quickly and widely adopted. Yet, stakeholder concerns can establish important barriers to diffusion. We study the human capital aspect of this challenge and investigate whether innovative firms pay salary premiums to new hires with work experience from advocacy groups like Transparency International. We integrate strategic human capital with stakeholder theory and suggest that advocacy group experience creates signals for valuable human capital in terms of stakeholder knowledge and legitimacy transfers to innovative firms. Using matched data for 3,562 employees in Denmark, we find that new hires with advocacy group experience enjoy larger salary premiums at technologically leading firms, in occupations with direct stakeholder interaction, and for advocacy group top management. Managerial Summary : Innovation research is increasingly aware of the non‐technological factors behind successful innovations. Users, regulators, or public opinion can be benevolent supporters or stingy opponents of innovations. Employees with an understanding of the needs and sensitivities of societal stakeholders should therefore be valuable to innovative firms. We find this to be the case when innovative firms hire employees from advocacy groups representing such stakeholders (e.g., Transparency International). Such employees receive higher salaries than an otherwise comparable reference group. These findings indicate that recruiting needs of innovative firms reward stakeholder experience, not merely technological expertise. They demonstrate how firms can create value in the pursuit of the public interest. Further, advocacy groups emerge as an important career stage allowing individuals to develop credible signals for stakeholder expertise.

Research Summary: A learning‐by‐hiring approach is used to scrutinize scientists' mobility in relation to the recruiting firms' subsequent innovation output. Our starting point is that among firm hires, individuals with university research experience—hired from universities or firms—can be particularly valuable. However, conflicting institutional logics between academia and industry makes working with academic scientists challenging at times for firms. We suggest two solutions to this difficulty: hiring “ambidextrous” individuals with a mix of experience of university research and working for a technologically advanced firm, and a strong organizational research culture in the recruiting firm reflected by the presence of a scientist on the top management team. We track the mobility of R&D workers empirically using patent and linked employer‐employee data. Managerial Summary: An important way to make organizations more innovative is hiring individual researchers with the right types of skills and experience. We show that individuals with university research experience beyond their final degree are particularly likely to help boost firm‐level innovation output after hiring compared to R&D workers with other types of skills and experience. However, to obtain good returns to innovation from hiring such individuals, firms need a university research–friendly organizational culture when hiring individuals with university research experience, from either firms or academia.