(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2022-01-14)
Chhabra, Param Pal Singh
Inventors often translate their ideas into commercially viable new products through a sequential process called innovation value chain. First, I revisit the innovation value chain and study various innovation platforms, such as crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, and hackathons, highlighting the roles and challenges of utilizing these platforms that create value by decoupling the different stages of the innovation value chain. Next, I delve deeper into reward-based crowdfunding, which provides a signal of future demand, and focus on an inventor's critical decision of reward-structure design, affecting the funding success of the product. To test the hypotheses, I collect data from Kickstarter, the US's preeminent reward-based crowdfunding platform. I find that a crowdfunding campaign's success improves with the number of rewards but at a diminishing rate. Finally, inventors seek patents for technical viability that undergo a patent examination for a long duration. I study the effect of longer patent pendency on the inventor's effort allocation to innovative and routine activities through a multi-period analytical model, where belief update about the expected patent pendency happens in a Bayesian framework. The analytical model's results motivate the hypotheses, and I test it using patent data published by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). The empirical tests show significant evidence that patent pendency negatively affects the future patenting activities of inventors.
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2020-06-16)
Mahmoudzadeh, Mahdi
With the growth of global interest in sustainability and social responsibility, more companies and manufacturers have started practicing sustainable operations and social and environmental responsibility in their supply chains. Recent advancements in the field of behavioral economics have uncovered many relevant insights that can be of help in understanding interests and motives among different entities in supply chains including suppliers, manufacturers, policy makers, and customers. Utilizing both experimental and analytical methods, this dissertation's focus is to incorporate some of the relevant insights from behavioral economics into topics related to sustainable operations, circular economy, and social responsibility in supply chains. The first chapter looks at replacement purchases and buyback schemes by durable goods manufacturers. In contrast to the classical model and conventional wisdom that ignore the relevance of framing effects in difference schemes, this chapter explores the framing difference between trade-ins and upgrades and studies how relaxing the equivalence assumption modifies predictions of the classical model and provides predictions more in line with today's durable goods markets. The second chapter looks at social/environmental responsibility in supply chains and examines what type of consumer reactions—encouraging ones that highlight the value of responsible sourcing or discouraging ones that highlight the possibility of a consumer boycott—can lead supply chains towards more responsible sourcing. Our results enrich the normative model's insights and lead to a straightforward recommendation for NGOs that is also in line with what can be expected from consumers. This third chapter, motivated by Best Buy's recent recycling program, studies the potential of a charging for recycling program from a circular economy perspective. We find evidence that, in contrast to the long-standing practice of free recycling, charging for recycling can increase adoption of green electronics among consumers. This chapter suggests that current environmental laws that prohibit retailers from charging for recycling may be counterproductive to circular economy.