Area: Organizational Behaviour
The Unfulfilled Promise of Meritocracy in Organizations
Date: November 22, 2024
Guest Speaker: Emilio J. Castilla (MIT Sloan School of Management)
Emilio J. Castilla is the NTU professor of Management and a professor of Work and Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is currently the co-director of the Institute for Work and Employment Research. Castilla joined MIT in 2005, after being a faculty member in the Management Department at the Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania. He is also a faculty member of the Work and Organization Studies Group at MIT, and a research Fellow at the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School. He received his PhD in Sociology from Stanford University. His work has appeared in Administrative Science Quarterly, Management Science, Organization Science, ILR Review, American Journal of Sociology, and American Sociological Review, among many. He is currently Division Chair for the Organization and Management Theory of the Academy of Management.
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Area: Operations Management
Date: 6 December 2024
Guest Speaker: Tinglong Dai (Carey Business School, Johns Hopkins University)
Area: Information Systems
Date: February 25th, 2025
Time: TBD
Room: TBD
Guest Speaker: Dr. Ling Xue
Topic: Using Generative AI to Address Puffery Advertising: Evidence from Two Field Studies
Using Generative AI to Address Puffery Advertising: Evidence from Two Field Studies Abstract Puffery advertising raises concerns about information manipulation in advertisements. This study uses two field studies to examine how generative artificial intelligence (GAI) can correct puffery while maintaining ad attractiveness. In the first study, taking advantage of a special context where media platforms enforce varying puffery tolerance policies, we examine cases where the same advertisement is corrected by some platforms but remains unaltered by others. The findings of analyzing 295,403 real advertising exposures show that using GPT to address puffery content significantly increases the clickthrough probability of advertisement by 16%. We further conducted a randomized field experiment on 32,200 advertising exposures, using prompt engineering to guide GPT in revising each of twelve individual linguistic and emotional features of the advertisements. The results reveal that enhancing linguistic readability is the most effective approach for transforming puffery advertisements into attractive and legitimate ones. The study generates important implications on how GAI can be used to effectively address puffery advertising and increase marketing performance. It also illustrates that puffery advertising may not always be as luring as it may appear. The tackling of puffery advertising by GAI can not only resolve ethical concerns in advertising but also enhance advertising effectiveness. Keywords: puffery advertising, generative artificial intelligence, linguistic feature, emotion, ChatGPT, prompt engineering.
Area: Accounting
Date/time: Friday, February 28, 2025
Room: Bronfman building, room 210
Guest Speaker: Vivian Fang (Indiana University)
Topic: Does Corporate Purpose Conflict With Shareholder Returns?
This paper studies the link between purpose statements and future shareholder returns. We use deep neural networks to identify a 鈥減urpose statement鈥� as one that views stakeholder value as a means to ultimately improve shareholder value, in contrast to 鈥減urpose-like鈥� statements that put shareholders and stakeholders on an equal footing. A value-weighted portfolio of companies with purpose statements earns a 0.25% monthly alpha above characteristics benchmarks; a long-short portfolio that buys firms with purpose statements and sells those with purpose-like statements earns a 0.28% monthly alpha. These results are stronger for large firms, consistent with their greater latitude and pressure to invest in stakeholders even if inconsistent with shareholder value. Purpose statements are positively linked to future earnings surprises, suggesting a channel through which they lead to higher stock returns, but purpose-like statements are not. They are positively associated with unvested but not vested CEO equity ownership, suggesting that long-term equity more effectively aligns managers with shareholders鈥� long-term interests.
