Ryan L. Cooper
Scholar of Economics and Strategy

Working Papers (available upon request)

 

"The Limits of User Innovation: Physician Inventors, Medical Device Inventions, and AI" (with Colleen Cunningham and David Hall)

  Abstract: Expert users play a crucial role in driving innovation due to their unique perspectives and specialized knowledge. However, user motives, such as concerns about substitution, may influence the types of technologies they invent. We explore these ideas in the context of physician (or MD) inventors and medical inventions. We measure potentially substituting inventions as those leveraging AI applied to MD-performed tasks. We find MD inventors are more likely than non-MDs to incorporate AI into their inventions for non-MD tasks but less likely to do so for tasks performed by MDs, especially those within the MD’s specialty. In supplementary analyses, we examine mechanisms relating to technology substitution, knowledge, task complexity and risk. Our results provide evidence that expert user inventors direct invention away from potential substitutes.

​

"When Goals Get Harder: Role Design and the Feasible Paths of Adaptation in Professional Work"  (with Jillian Chown)

  Abstract: Organizations rely on professional roles to enact shared organizational priorities, yet little is known about how role design shapes adaptation when those priorities become harder to achieve. We examine how role design conditions professionals’ baseline alignment with organizational priorities and, by allocating discretion across domains of work, shapes not only the extent but the direction of adaptation under strain. We study this dynamic in a large U.S. health maintenance organization, where all physicians face the same organizational goal of cost containment but work in distinct role designs—hybrid owner-partner roles that embed organizational oversight into routine work and unitary employed roles focused primarily on patient care. Using panel data and exogenous increases in performance pressure (unexpected high-cost patient encounters), we find that hybrid roles promote stronger alignment with organizational cost-control goals under stable conditions. However, when performance pressure intensifies, physicians in these roles do not further reduce discretionary spending and instead exhibit increases in spending. In contrast, unitary roles—less tightly coupled to organizational oversight—retain greater structural latitude to recalibrate behavior in the direction of the focal organizational priority. These patterns indicate that role design can constrain adjustment along the focal goal and redirect observable behavior toward other domains of work when discretionary capacity is already committed. By theorizing role design as a structural allocation of discretionary capacity across domains of work, this study advances organization design perspectives on adaptation and clarifies how roles shape adaptive feasibility in professionalized settings.

​

"Selection in Professional Service Settings: Unpacking the Role of Human and/or Social Capital" (with Timothy Gubler and James Oldroyd)

  Abstract: In many professional service settings, effective economic transactions are limited by the difficulty inherent in the selection process. This makes it challenging to determine the quality of services provided before and often even after services have been rendered. While both human and social capital have been shown to be important signals to clients choosing a service provider, what remains unclear is the extent to which clients rely on the human or social capital of providers when choosing a professional service provider. Using a unique hand-collected dataset of players and agents in the National Football League, we test whether the human capital or social capital of agents is more salient to players in the selection decision. We find that the social capital of agents is orders of magnitude more important than their human capital in determining who players initially choose. We also find that social capital’s importance persists, although slightly attenuated, in subsequent choices.  These results suggest that social capital is a more powerful signal and a stronger determinate in clients choice of professional service providers and that providers might be better served highlighting their social capital over human capital stocks.

​

"Individual-Level Origins of Firm-Level Human Capital Resources" (with Timothy Gubler and David Kryscynski)

  Abstract: Understanding the emergence of firm-level human capital resources from individual-level human capital is crucial to explaining how firms can create and sustain competitive advantage from their people. We theorize that higher similarity among the individual-level components of a firm’s founding human capital resource leads to higher subsequent average overlap between individuals and the established firm-level human capital resource, and that this higher overlap improves firm performance. Analysis of individual- and firm-level human capital portfolios constructed using data from 872 real estate brokerages suggests that higher individual-level human capital similarity among agents at founding positively relates to individual-firm human capital overlap in future years, and that higher individual-firm human capital overlap positively relates to future firm sales. These results imply that managers from founding onward must carefully craft and manage individual- and firm-level human capital resources to generate persistent performance advantages.

​

"The Antecedents and Implications of the Specialization of Individual-Level Human Capital'' (with Timothy Gubler and David Kryscynski)

  Abstract: This paper examines the relationship between the autonomous specialization decisions of service professionals and the tacit human capital they develop. As individuals specialize in production in response to market and organizational factors, they develop task-specific human capital which induces them to continue to specialize. Task specificity of human capital benefits the firm due to its higher productivity, even after negative shocks to the market. Individual specialization in response to market forces also leads to human capital overlap, or shared expertise among co-workers, which may have positive and negative impacts on the firm. Using a novel approach that draws on longitudinal data from the Utah real estate industry, we examine these forces empirically and find that task-specific human capital does benefit firms, even after widespread negative market shocks. Overlap also benefits firms, though it is a substitute for task specificity rather than a complement.