Featured Projects

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Heightened Elite Capture During Political Transition

Y. Cai, Y. Shui, H. Yang
Kwok Leung Memorial Dissertation Fund Grant
Dissertation Chapter

By examining the strategies employed by politically active firms to navigate social scrutiny and sustain political rents, we offer a framework that enhances understanding of the interactions among civil society, private sectors, and governments.

We underscore the critical role of business groups in leveraging internal coordination to maintain their advantages, even in the face of increasing transparency and societal scrutiny.

We suggest that transparency reforms could unintentionally create new asymmetries in political access and that corporate political activities may generate externalities. Politically active business groups, being better positioned to benefit from political engagement, may capture rents relinquished by standalone firms.

We highlight a broader concern: social movement for transparency alone may be insufficient to dismantle entrenched systems. Rather than eliminating rent-seeking, transparency may instead reshape it—enabling more covert or sophisticated strategies that continue to serve elite interests.

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Gendered Politics

Y. Cai, D. Wang, S. Yan
Competitive Graduate Student Research Grant
Dissertation Chapter

We offer a gendered, demand-side perspective to explain the gender gap in corporate campaign donations.

We suggest that female politicians show more reservations in accepting or seeking corporate donations due to social gender role expectations, and this gap is further amplified for candidates with political family backgrounds.

However, we also find that strong social trust in business-political relations, fostered by a positive corporate social image, can help mitigate this gap.

We highlight that even political elites, often perceived as powerful and independent, are not immune to deep-rooted gender biases. These biases shape their resource acquisition strategies and reinforce systemic inequalities in political markets.

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The Neuroticism of Our Technological Age: CEO Personality and Engagement with Technological Evolution Trajectory

Y. Cai, Y. Lin, Q. Fan
1st Round Revision and Resubmission at Strategic Management Journal

How can Larry Ellison, characterized as high in neuroticism by Harvard Business Review (Maccoby, 2004), so dramatically contradict himself regarding cloud computing?

We propose that the risks and opportunities unfolding along technological trajectories interact with psychological mechanisms to drive corporate engagement.

Specifically, high-neuroticism CEOs demonstrate heightened threat sensitivity and negative affective biases, steering their reactions depending on environmental stimuli, while trait anxiety amplifies their responses, driving extreme behavioral outcomes.

Turning point events significantly reshape environmental stimuli by shifting technological perceptions from ambiguous unknown domains to structured known domains, leading high-neuroticism CEOs to exhibit contrasting behaviors toward breakthrough innovation. We test this theory in the context of AI innovation, using AlphaGo’s victory as a turning point event.

Our findings underscore that radical technological change is influenced not only by technological factors but profoundly by influential social events and managerial psychological characteristics. Thus, a deeper examination of psychological mechanisms within their social contexts is essential to understanding corporate engagement with technological changes.

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