To examine what women bring to the boardroom table, we first show a significant gender gap in viewing the tradeoff between environmental and economic benefits using the Gallup Poll. We next demonstrate that such a gender gap extends into boardrooms: Having female directors is associated with more environmentally friendly business operations, but also with higher selling, general, and administrative expenses at the same time. Employing a rich set of director demographics and board characteristics, we show that none consistently supersedes the share of female directors in explaining corporate environmental performance, suggesting that female directors play a unique role in explaining firms’ investment in environmental protection. Results from an analysis using a California law change that imposed a boardroom gender quota point to a potentially causal effect from female directors.
Artificial intelligence is increasingly being proposed as a tool to improve the efficiency of academic peer review. While such applications may alleviate reviewer shortages and enhance productivity, they largely preserve the existing architecture of scientific publishing. In this commentary I propose that AI also creates an opportunity to reimagine more fundamental aspects of how knowledge is evaluated and disseminated. Drawing on concepts from operations management and innovation, I propose disruptive alternatives that challenge the underlying design of the current process. Rather than simply helping referees review papers faster, AI may enable new models of scientific communication that are more open, timely, and adaptive to the needs of modern scholarship. This commentary was accepted by Christoph Loch.
This commentary responds to “Fighting Fire with Fire: Infusing AI into Peer Review to Sustain Quality Scholarship” [Bhargava HK, Bana S, Zhang Z, Brandimarte L, Choudary V, Li F, Loupos P, Zantedeschi D (2026) Fighting fire with fire: Infusing AI into peer review to sustain quality scholarship. Management Sci. Forthcoming.]. It shares the paper’s core position, that journals should govern artificial intelligence openly rather than leave it to the shadows, but it questions the premise that rising submission volume poses an existential threat. The safeguard is human judgment. Our shared fatigue with derivative, repetitive work is a sensor more discerning than any AI detector, because a model trained on what we have already rewarded cannot produce the novelty that our community prizes. The threat to a journal like Management Science is thus more contained than the original alarm implies, provided AI remains a non-final input and humans retain ownership of novelty and contribution. One test should govern any AI workflow: does it ask more of human judgment, or less? This commentary was accepted by Christoph Loch.
We examine the decision to become an entrepreneur in the context of online business. Using data on entrepreneurs from a large e-commerce marketplace in China, we find that individuals are more likely to start online businesses after observing the salient success of nearby stores. Leveraging the platform’s store rating system and detailed geographic information in rural China, we show that an upgrade in a local store’s rating leads to a significant increase in new store entries nearby. This effect diminishes with physical distance and intensifies with the salience of the upgrade. However, these entry decisions appear to be suboptimal; entrants driven by local upgrade events underperform in sales and are more likely to exit, especially during downturns in overall market conditions. Our findings are consistent with salience-based theories of decision making, in which individuals overweight highly visible local information. This paper was accepted by Lin William Cong, finance. Funding: C. Lin acknowledges financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Project 72192841] and the Research Grant Council of the Hong Kong SAR, China [Project T35-710/20-R]. S. Liu acknowledges financial support from the Research Grant Council of the Hong Kong SAR, China [Project 12503324]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2024.04409 .
We use career backgrounds of initial employees from a full cohort of U.S. startups to measure founding teams’ skillsets. Startups with more diverse prior industry experience grow faster than same-industry local peers. One-standard-deviation-higher diversity is associated with 16% (10%) higher five-year employment (sales) growth, controlling for demographic diversity, prestartup wages, and other observables. Startups in innovative industries and facing lower coordination costs among team members drive the results. To address endogeneity, we exploit shocks in which teams suddenly lose members with unduplicated skills. Overall, combining individual specialization with team-level diversification allows teams to act as “jacks of all trades and masters of each.” This paper was accepted by Bo Becker, finance. Funding: This research uses data from the Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamics Program, which was partially supported by the National Science Foundation [Grants SES-9978093, SES-0339191 and ITR-0427889], the National Institute on Aging [Grant AG018854], and grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Supplemental Material: The internet appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.00773 .
