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• Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2020

  Gender Inequality in Research Productivity During the COVID-19 Pandemic

  Ruomeng Cui, Hao Ding and Feng Zhu

  We study the disproportionate impact of the lockdown as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak on female and male academics’ research productivity in social science. We collect data from the largest open-access preprint repository for social science on 41,858 research preprints in 18 disciplines produced by 76,832 authors across 25 countries in a span of two years. We find that during the 10 weeks after the lockdown in the United States, although the total research productivity increased by 35%, female academics’ productivity dropped by 13.9% relative to that of male academics. We also show that several disciplines drive such gender inequality. Finally, we find that this intensified productivity gap is more pronounced for academics in top-ranked universities, and the effect exists in six other countries.

  Keywords: Research; Performance Productivity; Gender; Equality and Inequality; Health Pandemics;

  Citation:

  Cui, Ruomeng, Hao Ding, and Feng Zhu. "Gender Inequality in Research Productivity During the COVID-19 Pandemic." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 20-129, June 2020.  View Details

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• Case | HBS Case Collection | April 2020 (Revised June 2020)

  Ping An: Pioneering the New Model of ‘Technology-driven Finance’

  Feng Zhu, Anthony K. Woo and Nancy Hua Dai

  In mid-December 2018, Peter Ma, Chairman and CEO of Ping An Insurance (Group) Company of China, Ltd. was considering whether the company should grow a fifth ecosystem of Smart City Services. Established in 1988, Ping An was one of the top 10 global financial institutions in terms of market capitalization with 342, 550 employees and nearly 1.4 million sales agents. Under Ma's leadership, Ping An was transforming from a traditional financial institution to a leading global technology-powered personal financial services group. In recent years it executed a strategy of "Finance+Ecosystem" by leveraging three frontier technologies-AI, blockchain, and cloud technology-to develop four ecosystems: Financial Services, Healthcare, Automobile Services and Real Estate Services. Smart City Services, with its business potential and social impact, had become an attractive new opportunity for Ping An to leverage its technology expertise and business experience while gaining new traffic for the other four ecosystems. Ma wondered: How important would this new ecosystem be strategically for the future of Ping An? If Ping An decided to go after this market, how should Ping An differentiate itself from competitors?

  Keywords: business ecosystems; fintech; Finance; Technology; Business Model; Expansion; Competitive Strategy; Financial Services Industry; Technology Industry;

  Citation:

  Zhu, Feng, Anthony K. Woo, and Nancy Hua Dai. "Ping An: Pioneering the New Model of ‘Technology-driven Finance’." Harvard Business School Case 620-068, April 2020. (Revised June 2020.)  View Details

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• Article | Management Science | June 2020

  Frenemies in Platform Markets: Heterogeneous Profit Foci as Drivers of Compatibility Decisions

  Ron Adner, Jianqing Chen and Feng Zhu

  We study compatibility decisions of two competing platform owners that generate profits through both hardware sales and royalties from content sales. We consider a game-theoretic model in which two platforms offer different standalone utilities to users. We find that incentives to establish one-way compatibility—the platform owner with smaller standalone value grants access to its proprietary content application to users of the competing platform—can arise from the difference in their profit foci. As the difference in the standalone utilities increases, royalties from content sales become less important to the platform owner with greater standalone value but more important to the other platform owner. One-way compatibility can thus increase asymmetry between the platform owners’ profit foci and, given a sufficiently large difference in the standalone utilities, yields greater profits for both platform owners. We further show that social welfare is greater under one-way compatibility than under incompatibility. We also investigate how factors such as exclusive content and hardware-only adopters affect compatibility incentives.

  Keywords: compatibility; platform competition; profit foci; Two-Sided Platforms; Competition; Profit; Decision Making;

  Citation:

  Adner, Ron, Jianqing Chen, and Feng Zhu. "Frenemies in Platform Markets: Heterogeneous Profit Foci as Drivers of Compatibility Decisions." Management Science 66, no. 6 (June 2020): 2432–2451.  View Details

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