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The U.S. shale revolution, using new technologies to extract crude oil, has led to new dynamics in the supply side of the global oil market. We ask whether the shale revolution has dampened the role of geopolitical risk in oil price volatility. We extend a reduced form Structural Break Threshold Vector Autoregressive (SBT-VAR) model to a structural SBT-VAR model and identify the structural innovations by allowing for conditional heteroskedasticity. Compared with the conventional reduced form VAR and TVAR models, a SBT-VAR with a constant threshold and a break in April 2014 are supported by the data. We then analyse the conditional (co)variance impulse response with respect to two distinct shock scenarios, one with only a geopolitical risk shock, the other with a simultaneous shale production shock and a geopolitical risk shock. The volatility responses are due to the identified contemporaneous relationships amongst geopolitical risk, shale production and oil prices, and are conditional on volatilities at the points in time. With the extra unit shale production shock, we find that the volatility response of oil prices to a geopolitical risk shock is higher, but the response is less correlated with the geopolitical risk factor.

Conspiracy theories arise during important societal and political events, with negative consequences. Yet, conspiracy theories remain to be investigated in the context of sporting tournaments, in spite of the importance of such events in contemporary societies. During the 2018 FIFA World Cup, conspiracy theories alleging that the newly introduced video Assistant Referee (VAR) was used with malevolent motives gained popularity online. In this paper, we used a Twitter content analysis to explore VAR conspiracy theories during the World Cup (N = 2,768 tweets). Conspiracy tweets peaked after eliminations of some teams and were strongly associated with labels referring to self-categorization at the group-level, supporting the notion that conspiracy beliefs are triggered by contexts threatening one's social identity. Conspiracy tweets were also correlated with tweets expressing skepticism or defiance against the VAR, suggesting that conspiracy beliefs might be related to sport fans' other identity management strategies. Finally, we drew an intergroup typology of VAR conspiracy beliefs' recurrent figures, highlighting that higher ordered categorization helped conspiracy narratives and content to adapt throughout the tournament. We discuss the identity management strategy status of sport fans' conspiracy beliefs.

Research SummaryThis paper investigates how firms select reference organizations, that is, other firms to which they compare themselves. We question the exogenous nature of references (i.e., them being defined via industry-categorizations) but suggest that, via motivations or purposes, firms endogenously select them. We evaluate our findings when analyzing proprietary data on hotels' self-selection of comparison-hotels. In support of our arguments, we find that in situations of increased uncertainty regarding firms' own relative abilities and standing, firms make adjustments to their selected references toward more similar ones. This enables them to obtain more diagnostic information about their relative abilities and this effect holds constant of (exogenous) industry-entry or exit events. Our findings contribute to an updated understanding about the role of comparison organizations in firms' decision-making.Managerial SummaryPrior work shows that comparisons with other firms (i.e., references) play an important role for our understanding of firms' decision-making. For example, performance comparisons with references can trigger search or a decision-need, ultimately, leading to acquisition-decisions, new-product-introductions, and the like. When questioning the selection of such references, prior work has typically derived them from (exogenous) industry-categorizations. We review this practice by relying on rare, longitudinal data on firms' reference self-selection. When controlling for industry level effects, we find that firms adapt references as a function of changes in their comparison needs (e.g., self-assessment). This is important because it implies an endogenous reference selection mechanism and shifts the attention from industry-categorizations toward an understanding of comparison needs and their emergence when attempting to understand firms' decision-making.

Using a continuous-time model of litigation, we show that the increasingly popular practice of third-party litigation financing has ambiguous welfare implications. A defendant and a plaintiff bargain over a settlement payment. The defendant takes costly actions to avoid deadweight losses associated with large transfers to the plaintiff. Litigation financing bolsters the plaintiff, leading to larger deadweight losses. However, by endogenously deterring the defendant from taking costly actions, litigation financing can nonetheless improve the joint surplus of the plaintiff and the defendant. In contrast to popular opinion, litigation financing does not necessarily encourage high-risk frivolous lawsuits.

Drawing on emotion regulation theory, this study investigates if and how emotion suppression informs relationship viability within new venture teams (NVTs) when such teams face obstacles. In particular, we use a dyadic approach to examine the suppressor’s authenticity and team members’ perceptions of appropriateness as mediators in the link between emotion suppression and relationship viability. A round-robin study with 93 respondents nested in 37 NVTs, which generated 167 observations, provides empirical support for the theoretically derived model by showing that both authenticity and appropriateness fully mediate the relationship between emotion suppression and relationship viability. In particular, the findings show that the negative indirect effect of emotion suppression on relationship viability via authenticity is larger than the positive indirect effect via appropriateness. A follow-up study after two years indicates that relationship viability and emotion suppression significantly predict venture survival. Together, these findings make ample contributions to the literature and provide interesting opportunities for further research.