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.

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"The Interaction of Roles, Incentives, and Performance Feedback in Professional Decision-Making"  (with Jillian Chown)

  Abstract: Organizations often rely on financial incentives to shape professional behavior, but professionals in different roles may interpret and respond to the same incentives in divergent ways. We theorize that organizational roles shape professionals’ attention to and engagement with financial incentives, particularly when performance feedback suggests that targets are difficult to achieve. We focus on two common roles for professionals: owner-professionals, who balance strategic oversight of their organization with client service, and client-focused professionals, who focus primarily on client service. These roles generate different attentional orientations toward financial performance. Using data on 35,000 patients treated by 353 physicians in 13 medical groups within a Medicare HMO, we examine how physicians respond to a shared cost-control incentive. We find that owner-physicians maintain lower discretionary spending overall but increase spending in response to negative performance feedback—a pattern suggesting that professionals who are consistently attentive to financial goals may disengage when targets appear unattainable or when coordinated group effort breaks down. In contrast, client-focused physicians—typically less responsive to cost incentives—reduce spending after negative feedback, reflecting greater engagement when financial goals are made salient. Our findings contribute to research on roles, incentives, and performance feedback by showing that role-based attention shapes not only baseline behavior, but also how feedback is interpreted and acted upon. This has implications for incentive design in professional settings where role-based priorities and attentional demands vary.

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"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.

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"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. 

 

"Who Shows Whom the Money? The Effects of Social and Human Capital on Negotiating Agent Performance" (with Timothy Gubler and James Oldroyd)

  Abstract: In this paper, we analyze the NFL agent industry to understand how ties between agents and clients are formed and to identify to what extent superior performance on the part of NFL agents is attributable to their own ability compared to the ability and market value of their clients. We find that social ties are an important determinant of dyad formation, but that the types of ties that matter change over the course of a player’s career. We also find that agents have little effect on contract outcomes, on average, raising an important question of why they are employed at all.