Explore the vast range of titles available.

Research Summary: Research on knowledge sourcing has generally treated firms as monolithic entities, even though firms most active in knowledge sourcing often comprise heterogeneous divisions, each possessing specialized knowledge and facing unique market prospects. This study examines how heterogeneity across divisions affects knowledge sourcing by multidivisional firms. We argue that firms source more early‐stage knowledge, whose market prospects are highly uncertain, for low‐performing divisions; by remaining active in the relevant markets, firms keep the flexibility to tap favorable market opportunities should they arise in the future. In contrast, firms source more late‐stage knowledge, whose market prospects are largely revealed, for high‐performing divisions so as to maximize current returns. The intra‐firm heterogeneity, in turn, explains inter‐firm differences in knowledge sourcing. Data from the pharmaceutical industry support these arguments. Managerial Summary: Firms that source external knowledge often span multiple technological areas and markets, and hence it is not immediately clear what to source and how much to source. This study examines how multidivisional firms tailor their knowledge‐sourcing strategies to differences in performance across their divisions. We find that firms source more early‐stage knowledge, whose market prospects are uncertain, for divisions with low innovation performance. This helps firms prop up those divisions and remain active in the related markets. In contrast, firms source more late‐stage knowledge, whose market prospects are more certain, for divisions with high sales performance. This helps firms leverage the strengths of those divisions and realize immediate gains. Performance differences across divisions inside firms, therefore, can explain differences in knowledge‐sourcing strategies across firms.

Research Summary: While research has focused primarily on stars as individual contributors, we examine organizational situations where stars must work closely with non-stars. We argue that, in such situations, building teamwork around a star is an exercise in learning under complexity. In response, organizations prioritize interactions involving the star to simplify learning. This simplification, however, creates organizational myopia. We claim that a star's temporary absence helps the organization overcome myopia by triggering a search for new routines. When he returns, the organization may combine these new routines with pre-absence routines to improve teamwork and performance. We exploit injuries to star players in the National Basketball Association as an exogenous shock and find that on average, teams perform better after a star's return than before his absence. Managerial Summary: This study examines the effect of the temporary absence of a star evidence that a star employee's temporary absence helps the organization overcome an over-reliance on the star and improve teamwork. Improved teamwork, in turn, enables the organization to perform better upon the star's return than it did prior to his absence. This result suggests that organizations might want to revisit the tendency to view stars as too valuable to lose, even for a short time. In particular, organizations may want to pull stars from ongoing projects and encourage them to attend professional development programs. A star's temporary absence and return from such a program improves not only the star's skills but also the organization's teamwork.

This study uses data from the National Basketball Association to explore organizational mechanisms that affect the division of firm surplus in human-capital-intensive activity. It builds on the idea that reciprocal interdependence among team members creates the potential for complementarity. Complementarity, in turn, translates into higher firm surplus. The division of this surplus is subject to bargaining between the firm owner and labor. We argue that when complementarity increases, the firm owner's share of surplus will grow if interdependence among team members is symmetric. Furthermore, we identify three levers that make complementarity amenable to managerial design: the nature of interaction among team members, the relative dominance of team members, and the composition of a team. We find that greater interaction among team members and higher recruitment of team-oriented individuals are associated with increased complementarity, whereas dominant team members are associated with reduced complementarity. The study contributes to the literature on organization design by extending its implications to the division of surplus in human-capital-intensive activity.

Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is an aggressive cancer with very poor outcomes. To identify additional drivers of leukemogenesis, we analyzed sequencing data from 1,727 unique individual patients with AML, which revealed mutations in ubiquitin ligase family genes in 11.2% of samples from adult patients with AML with mutual exclusivity. The SKP1/CUL1/F-box (SCF) E3 ubiquitin ligase complex gene, FBXO11, was the most significantly downregulated gene of the SCF complex in AML. We found that FBXO11 interacts with and catalyzes K63-linked ubiquitination of LONP1 in the cytosol, to promote LONP1 entry into mitochondria. We show that depletion of FBXO11 or LONP1 reduced mitochondrial respiration through impaired LONP1 chaperone activity to assemble electron transport chain Complex IV. Reduced mitochondrial respiration secondary to FBXO11 or LONP1 depletion imparted myeloid-biased stem cell properties in primary CD34+ hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells (HSPCs) in vitro. In a human xenograft model, depletion of FBXO11 cooperated with AML1-ETO and mutant KRASG12D to generate serially transplantable AML. Our findings suggest that reduced FBXO11 cooperates to initiate AML by priming HSPC for myeloid-biased self renewal through attenuation of LONP1-mediated regulation of mitochondrial respiration.

The problem of synthesizing adequate inductive invariants to prove a program correct lies at the heart of automated program verification. We investigate, herein, learning approaches to synthesize inductive invariants of sequential programs towards automatically verifying them. To this end, we identify that prior learning approaches were unduly influenced by traditional machine learning models that learned concepts from positive and negative counterexamples. We argue that these models are not robust for invariant synthesis and, consequently, introduce ICE, a robust learning paradigm for synthesizing invariants that learns using positive, negative and implication counterexamples, and show that it admits honest teachers and strongly convergent mechanisms for invariant synthesis. We develop the first learning algorithms in this model with implication counterexamples for two domains, one for learning arbitrary Boolean combinations of numerical invariants over scalar variables and one for quantified invariants of linear data-structures including arrays and dynamic lists. We implement the ICE learners and an appropriate teacher, and show that the resulting invariant synthesis is robust, practical, convergent, and efficient. In order to deductively verify shared-memory concurrent programs, we present a sequentialization result and show that synthesizing rely-guarantee annotations for them can be reduced to invariant synthesis for sequential programs. Further, for verifying asynchronous event-driven systems, we develop a new invariant synthesis technique that constructs almost-synchronous invariants over concrete system configurations. These invariants, for most systems, are finitely representable, and can be thereby constructed, including for the USB driver that ships with Microsoft Windows phone.

Human-capital-intensive firms contribute an increasing share of economic activity in developed countries. This dissertation builds on the idea that individuals have some unique attributes that influence value creation and value appropriation in human-capital-intensive firms. First, an individual is not a passive input and can exercise discretion. The extent of discretion for individuals leads to performance heterogeneity across firms and hence differences in value created by firms. Second, an individual can renegotiate her contract ex-post. An individual's ability to renegotiate her contract affects the share of value appropriated by the firm vis-à-vis its employees. This dissertation deepens our theoretical understanding of these two unique attributes of human capital by exploring questions related to value creation and appropriation in human-capital-intensive firms. The dissertation comprises two studies. The first study focuses on value creation by theorizing about the micro-foundations of product creation. It asks the question: How do the micro-motives of employees explain their product creation behavior? The study argues that in firms that rely primarily on individuals' capabilities to create value, we can view product creation as an outcome of the micro-motives of employees who compete for promotions and wage increases in the firm's internal labor market. The study focuses on the explicit incentives and career concerns of employees to theorize about their product creation behavior. It tests the empirical implications using data from the U.S. mutual fund industry from 1992 to 2010. The second study theorizes about value appropriation by building on the micro-foundations of team production. It asks the question: How does the organization of production affect the division of surplus between the firm owner and labor? The study argues that reciprocal interdependence among employees can create complementarity in human-capital-intensive activity. Division of the returns from complementarity depends on whether interdependence among employees is symmetric or asymmetric. The study also suggests that complementarity is amenable to design and identifies management practices that generate complementarity. The study tests the hypotheses using data from the U.S. National Basketball Association from 1991 to 2007. The dissertation highlights how the incentives of employees and the organization of production have unique implications in human-capital-intensive activity.

Static Analysis tools have rules for several code quality issues and these rules are created by experts manually. In this paper, we address the problem of automatic synthesis of code quality rules from examples. We formulate the rule synthesis problem as synthesizing first order logic formulas over graph representations of code. We present a new synthesis algorithm RhoSynth that is based on Integer Linear Programming-based graph alignment for identifying code elements of interest to the rule. We bootstrap RhoSynth by leveraging code changes made by developers as the source of positive and negative examples. We also address rule refinement in which the rules are incrementally improved with additional user-provided examples. We validate RhoSynth by synthesizing more than 30 Java code quality rules. These rules have been deployed as part of a code review system in a company and their precision exceeds 75% based on developer feedback collected during live code-reviews. Through comparisons with recent baselines, we show that current state-of-the-art program synthesis approaches are unable to synthesize most of these rules.

A well-engineered prompt can increase the performance of large language models; automatic prompt optimization techniques aim to increase performance without requiring human effort to tune the prompts. One leading class of prompt optimization techniques introduces the analogy of textual gradients. We investigate the behavior of these textual gradient methods through a series of experiments and case studies. While such methods often result in a performance improvement, our experiments suggest that the gradient analogy does not accurately explain their behavior. Our insights may inform the selection of prompt optimization strategies, and development of new approaches.

Ctenophores are an attractive lineage for studying animal evolution due to their early divergence from other metazoans. Among Ctenophora, Mnemiopsis leidyi is a model system for developmental, cellular, molecular genetic, and evolutionary studies. Until recently, many of these studies were conducted on wild-caught animals, limiting access to researchers on the coast. Here we present significant advancements towards culturing M. leidyi in laboratories without coastal access, enabling its wider use as an experimental and genetic model system. We detail updated feeding regimes that take advantage of co-culturing Brachionus rotifers with Apocyclops copepods, and quantify the reproductive output of our M. leidyi lab strain on this diet. Our updated feeding regime maintains reproductive fitness comparable to wild-caught individuals. Importantly, we have eliminated the logistical complexities and costs of regularly feeding live larval fish to M. leidyi. Our updated protocols make it feasible to maintain continuous ctenophore cultures independent of access to both coastal populations of wild M. leidyi and larval fish culturing facilities.

Let \\(t(H;G)\\) be the homomorphism density of a graph \\(H\\) into a graph \\(G\\). Sidorenko's conjecture states that for any bipartite graph \\(H\\), \\(t(H;G)\\geq t(K_2;G)^{|E(H)|}\\) for all graphs \\(G\\). It is already known that such inequalities cannot be certified through the sums of squares method when \\(H\\) is a so-called trivial square. In this paper, we investigate recent results about Sidorenko's conjecture and classify those involving trivial versus non-trivial squares. We then present some computational results. In particular, we categorize the bipartite graphs \\(H\\) on at most 7 edges for which \\(t(H;G)\\geq t(K_2;G)^{|E(H)|}\\) has a sum of squares certificate. We then discuss other limitations for sums of squares proofs beyond trivial squares.