Hanken School of Economics

I analyze secret bilateral forward contracting in a Cournot oligopoly. A secret bilateral forward contract affects the production quantities of the firms which are party to the contract but not of the outsiders. On the one hand, forward contracts facilitate for heterogeneous firms to rationalize production across facilities. On the other hand, firms also consider how forward contracting affects their combined production. I show that the spot market is less concentrated than the ownership of dispatchable facilities in the industry. Furthermore, the ownership distribution of nondispatchable facilities is irrelevant for consumer welfare. I discuss implications for policy in electricity markets.

Extant literature has pointed to a positive relationship between sustainable-driven management and business competitiveness and organizational size as a moderating factor in such a relationship. In this vein, the Economy for the Common Good is a sustainability framework based on stakeholders’ management that allows embedding sustainable behavior into business strategy and counts with a version adapted to organizations working at a smaller scale like entrepreneurial ventures and SMEs. Hence, the present study aims to assess the impact of sustainable financial management implemented using the Economy for the Common Good framework on business competitiveness and the possible moderating effects of organizational size on this relationship. To do so, the authors apply hierarchical regression analysis to data gathered from 206 European enterprises that implemented sustainable-driven financial management using the Economy for the Common Good framework. Results confirmed the positive impact of sustainable financial management on business competitiveness. However, organizational age and size resulted in nonsignificant variables. Thus, we conclude that sustainable financial management using the Economy for the Common Good framework is a suitable tool for implementation in entrepreneurial ventures and SMEs.

This study examines the domestic overnight travel motivations of Finnish disc golfers, with a specific focus on the concept of serious leisure. Data gathered from 989 Finnish disc golfers were divided into clusters based on the serious leisure inventory and measure model. The results indicate that disc golfers are generally interested in travelling domestically to participate in disc golf, and that they tend to share common push and pull motives. Preferences for general destination attributes and specific disc-golf-related destination attributes tend not to vary significantly between the clusters. Although the relationship is not strictly hierarchical, disc golfers who are more serious tend to report higher mean values than their more-casual counterparts. Disc golfers travelling to play their sport expect well-maintained and versatile courses and tend to prefer courses they have not previously visited. Factors related to the quality of courses are significantly more influential in disc-golfers' motivations to travel than those associated with the destination in general, such as accommodation or nightlife. This knowledge is vital to inform marketers as participation in this relatively new sport continues to grow. ARTICLE HISTORY

The founders of Organization include Marta Calás and Linda Smircich who are among the most influential feminist theorists in organization studies. We take inspiration from their work to outline ideas for feminist and other critical scholars studying organizations and organizing. We draw especially on their consistent interest in transnational feminism, engagement with feminist new materialisms, and emphasis on epistemological and ontological questions about (feminist) organization studies. We highlight key theoretical points and show how feminism(s) can remain socially, societally, and globally meaningful. Our aim is to continue to create feminist organization theorizing that, as Calás and Smircich’s scholarship does, remains critical and vigilant about who its knowers are, what kind of knowledge it produces, and what this knowledge is for.

This paper considers a class of growth models with idiosyncratic human capital risk and private information about individual effort choices (moral hazard). Households are infinitely-lived and have preferences that allow for a time-additive expected utility representation with a one-period utility function that is additive over consumption and effort as well as logarithmic over consumption. Human capital investment is risky due to idiosyncratic shocks that follow a Markov process with transition probabilities that depend on effort choices. The production process is represented by an aggregate production function that uses physical capital and human capital as input factors. We show that constrained optimal allocations are simple in the sense that individual effort levels and individual consumption growth rates are history-independent. Further, constrained optimal allocations are the solutions to a recursive social planner problem that is simple in the sense that exogenous shocks are the only state variables. We also show that constrained optimal allocations can be decentralized as competitive equilibrium allocations of a market economy with a simple tax- and transfer scheme. Finally, it is always optimal to subsidize human capital investment in the market economy.

Scholarly understanding of customer journeys has evolved from a linear, single service provider perspective to encompass complex service delivery networks that involve multiple touchpoints governed by various service providers. This intricate setting often gives rise to experiential pain points for customers. To investigate this phenomenon within the context of airport services, our research employs critical incident and problem‐centered interviews as well as an analysis of 7192 online airport reviews. In Studies 1a and 2a, we explore the crucial pain points that travelers encounter throughout their airport journey. Complementing these insights, Studies 1b and 2b assess the impact of the identified pain points on travelers' emotions. Building upon a classification of pain points into information, performance, and hospitality themes, Study 3 further examines how smart service solutions, as new technologies, can address and resolve these pain points, ultimately enhancing the customer experience (CX). By accomplishing these objectives, our work contributes a comprehensive classification scheme for experiential pain points in complex customer journeys to the academic discourse on customer journeys. Furthermore, it establishes a connection to the emerging field of research on the impact of smart service solutions on the CX.

We offer a critical inquiry into the faltering entry of an anthropomorphised AI (ro)bot, an algorithm without physical or visual form, into the workplace in a media consultancy company. While living a digital life in the virtual world, the ro(bot) was given a human name. We highlight the unexpected consequences the humanisation of an early form of artificial intelligence (AI) has on the affects circulating between people and the new technology and between members of different organisational groups. We argue that anthropomorphising technologies such as AI influences the affective life of organisations and amplifies existing discontent between organisational members, complicating the introduction of the technology. Focusing on human–AI interaction, our analysis reveals a rift between managers who are excited and hopeful about the future capabilities of AI and employees who are frustrated and angry about its present shortcomings. We conclude that collective affects play a central role in contemporary technology-driven organisations in which the role people play in relation to the avalanche of AI technologies is often neglected.

The proliferation of deceptive content online has led to the recognition that some actors in the digital media ecosystem profit from disinformation's rapid spread. The reason is that a market designed to monetize engagement with fringe audiences encourages actors to create content that can go viral, hence creating financial incentives to circulate controversial claims, adversarial narratives, and deceptive content. The theoretical claim of this piece is that the actors and practices of digital media platforms can be analyzed through their market practices. Through this lens, scholars can study whether digital markets such as programmatic advertising, commercial content moderation, and influencer marketing make money from circulating disinformation. To show how disinformation is an expected outcome, not breakage, of the current media market in digital platforms, the article analyzes the business models of pre-digital broadcasting media, partisan media, and digital media platforms, finding qualitatively different forms of disinformation in each media market iteration.

The improvement of well-being in society has moved away from centralized and government-led configurations to more market-based and individual solutions, where consumers are expected to take on more responsibility for their well-being. This shift also calls market actors to assume more central roles in providing service for well-being. This article uses literature on neoliberal responsibilization and an integrative literature review of transformative service research to conceptualize a framework of responsibilization in transformative service. The framework provides a critical examination of the relationship between actors’ responsibilities and consumer well-being. Based on the framework, the article provides implications for research and practice on how service can uplift consumer well-being.

This study presents the main features of patent law in the European Union, the United States and China, with a special focus on patentability. Each patent regime is reviewed in its historical context, exploring the stages leading to the given jurisdiction's contemporary patent law. After mapping the differences and similarities of patent law in the EU, the US and China, possible reasons for the detected divergence and convergence will be explored. This study reveals that the differences in codified patent law between the EU, the US, and China are for the most part a matter of nuance and much of the convergence stems from international harmonization efforts and common historical roots as well as external pressure to convergence in patent law for mainly economic reasons. Whereas patent laws in the EU and US are more established, China's patent law has been moulded into its contemporary form only recently. Differences across the chosen jurisdictions are explained not only by cultural factors but also by underlying theoretical differences in patent doctrine and differing aims of patent protection, as well as the divide concerning the role of statutory law and case law between the common law and Romano-Germanic law.

This meta-analysis of 31 studies over 20 years advances our understanding of the gender gap in entrepreneurial bank finance. Findings from previous research on the relationship between entrepreneurs’ gender and bank financing are mixed, which suggests the need to pay particular attention to entrepreneurs’ social context. In this study, we develop a model of how social gender norms explain variation in women entrepreneurs’ (vis-à-vis men entrepreneurs’) access to bank finance. Specifically, we theorize how women’s formal (their nations’ political ideologies) and informal (women’s empowerment) social standing within their societies influence gender discrimination in entrepreneurial bank financing. Consistent with most previous studies, our baseline results show that women entrepreneurs’ business loan applications are rejected to a greater extent than men entrepreneurs’ loan applications. Women entrepreneurs also pay higher interest rates on loans than men entrepreneurs. Further, in societies dominated by a conservative (rather than a liberal) political ideology, the positive relationship between women entrepreneurs and loan interest rates is more positive. Interestingly, gender discrimination in loan rejection and interest rates is magnified in societies with greater women’s empowerment. Taking a social gender-norm perspective, our analysis establishes a gender gap in entrepreneurial bank finance, and we outline an agenda for further research.

The asymmetric timeliness (AT) coefficient as a measure of accounting conservatism has been subject to much debate. We clarify the conditions under which the AT coefficient identifies accounting conservatism in the presence of skewness. Specifically, using an extensive simulation-based approach, we examine the joint impact of return skewness, earnings skewness, and return endogeneity. We show that skewness of returns and earnings distorts the AT coefficient as a measure of conservatism when returns are endogenous. While earnings skewness is a predicted consequence of conditional conservatism, return skewness is arguably unrelated to conservative reporting and cannot be tackled by simple skew reducing transformations or outlier-robust estimators. Empirically, we analyze AT and skewness of firms sorted on size and MTB, highlighting the importance of constant skewness across groups for accurate comparisons of accounting conservatism.

Organizational members face a motivational dilemma in influencing the social relationships of others: The organization benefits from high connectedness among employees, but personal advantages accrue to those who occupy brokerage positions between disconnected others. In this study, we draw on the organizational paradox perspective to argue that the reconciliation of these contrasting objectives lies in recognizing one's agency to facilitate connectedness ( closing ) within a social structure and the search for new connections ( opening ) as mutually supportive. Across two field studies, we examine how individuals' advantageous position in an organizational network emerges from the interplay between a tertius iungens orientation to join others in collaboration and network building to open new brokering opportunities. In Study 1, analyses of a sample of two‐wave, cross‐lagged panel data show that a tertius iungens orientation contributes to the number of outgoing ties to other actors via network building. Study 2 uses a network survey to add that a tertius iungens orientation is positively associated with incoming ties from others and network brokerage, and again, these relationships are mediated by network building. Overall, our results indicate that by increasing connectedness in their organizational social network, individuals simultaneously activate opening behaviors that facilitate the expansion of their network, thereby revitalizing their structurally advantageous position.

We analyze a multi-stakeholder process that succeeded in creating a joint forest management strategy for the city of Jyväskylä, Finland. The analysis draws on the participants’own account of the process, elicited via interviews and questionnaires.We attend to critical context and process factors to account for the success of the collaborative process and evaluate the effectiveness of the agreement in terms ofecological and social outcomes. The process created a practical agreement, which increased the share of protected forests and introduced new biodiversity protection measures for commercial and recreational forests. It also created innovative solutions, like the new concept of a nature value forest, which helped the parties to negotiate around their differences. However, disagreement over the impacts of forest management practices, especially continuous cover forestry,remained. The crucial contextual conditions contributing to the agreement were strong initiating leadership and political mandate, which motivated the participants to engage in collaborative dialogue and stick with the process. The key process factors were a third-party facilitation and joint fact-finding. Most importantly, the process was not constrained by a pre-defined agenda or assumptions related to the status quo, but the participants were granted considerable influence over decisions and outputs.

Along with the growing popularity of game-based teaching, research on how to design serious games has gained momentum. While some prior work discusses the creation of learning experiences, the role of player emotions and their potential in enhancing learning has largely been overlooked. This paper discusses the design and development of Aalto Manufacturing Game, a board game on manufacturing and service operations dynamics for students and practitioners. We elaborate on the process of crafting a learning experience, with a specific emphasis on emotional engagement. We argue that learning experiences can be crafted through constructing framing events. Based on our experience in game design, we arrive at design propositions for creating and controlling emotional engagement during a serious game. Further, we discuss the effectiveness of our design based on feedback provided through a learning protocol, filled by students that participated in the game. Through our design propositions we make the case for “emotional engineering” in serious game design.