[diss] Kauppakorkeakoulu / BIZ

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  • Sustainable platform activities: How online labour platforms engage in sociotechnical ecosystem orchestration to align divergent interests
    (2025) Suvivuo, Sampsa
    School of Business | Doctoral thesis (article-based) | Defence date: 2025-11-14
    Online labour platforms (OLPs) which intermediate transactions between providers and requesters, are predicted to spread to new industries as the number of platforms and the amount of labour purchased through them grows. However, these platforms face internal and external challenges. They depend on cross-side network effects, but providers’ high churn rates pose a challenge to platform sustainability (i.e. ensuring that all sides keep participating). Due to the platforms’ nature, much of their use is sporadic and temporal. However, OLPs have a wide range of issues and unresolved ethical concerns that apply to more and more people as the platforms grow. Starting from the perceived lack of oversight over the ecosystem and inability to offer quality matches with low search and transaction costs to OLPs generally transferring business risk almost completely onto providers, the platforms are, in many regards, dissatisfying for many. Some issues can be attributed to the fact that OLPs appear to have pursued technical efficiency and other instrumental goals without balancing them with humanistic goals. While dissatisfaction contributes to provider churn, OLPs’ issues also cause friction with their environments. This friction poses an external challenge, as there is increasing evidence that the platforms cannot keep operating as they have. For example, the European Union’s directive about improving working conditions on OLPs comes into effect in December 2026. Still, some people prefer working through OLPs and would not benefit from prohibiting the platforms or changing them too much. How, then, to address OLPs’ issues without changing their nature or the benefits they engender when OLPs and their users optimise their gain at the expense of the whole? In this dissertation, two ways OLPs seek to orchestrate their ecosystems are investigated by applying qualitative methods to platform managers’, providers’ and requesters’ semi-structured interviews and digital trace data collected from OLPs’ sites and forums, social media and from an unofficial user community. Stickiness refers to a website’s ability to attract and retain users, and one way to achieve this is to create a community. However, ways to build and maintain OLP communities in which users often compete with one another have remained understudied. Likewise, user communities are associated with several benefits, such as increased commitment towards a platform, but how the communities enact support in practice is less well understood. OLPs’ many issues and the friction they cause with society, on the contrary, are well known and documented and often related to single-minded pursuit of efficiency gains and cost savings for the platform. The information systems literature in general has focused on instrumental goals such as these, raising concerns about the discipline’s capability to contribute to the creation of better societies. This dissertation contributes to platform ecosystem orchestration literature in the following ways: a) identifying four community-building levers OLPs use to turn crowds of individuals into communities with collective commitment and responsibility towards each other, b) augmenting the prevalent view in the literature that a community’s enacted support is connected to increased platform commitment and continuance, because in the dissatisfaction context, appropriate support might work against staying on the platform, and c) outlining three high-level sociotechnical mechanisms and their constituting mechanisms that rely on synergies between instrumental and humanistic outcomes which help to address prevalent issues in the gig economy while retaining OLPs’ benefits. Additionally, this dissertation research contributes to the understanding of how to locate and analyse relevant parts of digital trace data and illustrates the related challenges’ interdependence.
  • Visual Bias in Digital Labor Market: Formation, Manifestation, and Mitigation
    (2025) Jiang, Yuting
    School of Business | Doctoral thesis (article-based) | Defence date: 2025-09-30
    The proliferation of digital labor platforms has reshaped global hiring by offering unprecedented accessibility and flexibility. However, these platforms also introduce visual bias, where hiring decisions are disproportionately influenced by facial appearance, perceived professionalism, and demographic cues. This dissertation investigates the formation, manifestation, and mitigation of visual bias in Digital Labor Market through a multi-method grounded in cognitive psychology and bias mitigation theory. The aim is to develop a comprehensive framework that addresses visual bias not only at the point of decision-making but across its entire lifecycle. Drawing on quantitative methodology and machine learning techniques applied to large-scale secondary data, the thesis comprises four interrelated empirical essays. Essay 1 introduces path dependence theory to conceptualize how early stereotype-based hiring decisions become self-reinforcing through reputation systems. It presents a two-stage framework showing how power asymmetry, uncertainty, and system complexity trigger initial biases, which then stabilize via feedback loops. A dual-phase intervention strategy is proposed: (1) reducing environmental triggers of stereotype formation and (2) disrupting reinforcement cycles. Essay 2 explores the manifestation of visual bias by analyzing 27,733 worker profiles from Upwork using computer vision, deep learning, and regression analysis. The study finds that demographic traits, physical appearance, image quality, and nonverbal cues significantly influence hiring outcomes and reemployment probabilities. Notably, overly polished portraits reduced perceived authenticity and hireability. Essay 3 investigates visual-based mitigation strategies, focusing on whether facial similarity between workers and clients can reduce racial discrimination in hiring. Using facial recognition (FaceNet) and a matched dataset of 24,511 worker pairs from Fiverr, the study found that perceived facial resemblance moderates racial bias—particularly benefiting underrepresented groups such as Black and Middle Eastern workers. While facial similarity alone did not directly predict hiring success, its interaction with race significantly improved outcomes, demonstrating the potential of strategic visual alignment as a bias-mitigation tool that preserves trust-building cues. Essay 4 examines non-visual interventions, analyzing how task characteristics, including complexity, selection ratio, and the structure of self-descriptions, can reduce gender bias. Drawing on the continuum model of impression formation, and using data from 33,086 workers on Upwork, the study shows that cognitively demanding tasks shift employer attention away from gender-based heuristics toward job-relevant qualifications, thereby mitigating bias at scale. The findings reveal that effective mitigation requires a dual strategy: combining targeted visual modifications with attention-shifting interventions that reframe how employers perceive and assess workers. This research makes theoretical contributions by extending path dependence theory and nonverbal communication models into the digital hiring context, while also offering practical guidance for platform designers, employers, and workers to build fairer, more inclusive hiring ecosystems.
  • How the evolving human-AI service encounter impacts customer experience: A value co-creation perspective
    (2025) Liao, Jiancai
    School of Business | Doctoral thesis (article-based) | Defence date: 2025-09-19
    This doctoral dissertation investigates how the evolving human-Artificial Intelligence (AI) service encounter impacts customer experience through the contextual lens of Value Co-Creation (VCC), examining AI’s influence across three critical VCC stages: value understanding, value creation, and value delivery. The first study (Paper 1), on value understanding, finds that heterogeneous (vs. homogeneous) AI disclosure enhances service adoption by increasing consumers’ propensity to understand AI agent relationships and perceived transparency, particularly for those with lower technology familiarity. The second study (Paper 2), on value creation, demonstrates that AI-generated (vs. human-generated) moral content supporting stigmatized groups decreases tourists’ brand avoidance, an effect mediated by psychological proximity and moderated by perceived common fate. The third study (Paper 3), on value delivery, reveals that interacting with humanoid service robots (vs. human employees) induces lower emotional intensity, leading to more reason-based (vs. feeling-based) decision strategies, moderated by service provider gender and consumer anthropomorphism tendency. Collectively, this dissertation extends VCC research by empirically establishing AI as an influential non-human actor that reconfigures co-creative dynamics. It contributes novel insights to AI disclosure research, AI’s role in ethical branding, and human-robot interaction by identifying underlying psychological mechanisms and boundary conditions. Practically, the findings offer guidance for designing AI disclosures, leveraging AI in ethical communication, and deploying service robots to foster positive customer experiences.
  • Industrial organization studies on mixed health care markets and waiting times
    (2025) Markkula, Tuomas
    School of Business | Doctoral thesis (article-based) | Defence date: 2505-09-19
    This dissertation consists of three unpublished essays on different aspects of the Finnish dental care industry. All essays are representative of the modern industrial organization as they employ structural models adjusted to fit the characteristics of the dental care industry as their methodological approach. Moreover, all essays use individual-level data on visits to dental care providers. The first essay uses visits to Finnish private dental care providers, while the second and the third essays use visits to both public and private dental care providers. These data allow me to observe visit level prices, waiting times and what dental care procedures are performed on the consumers. The first essay estimates the magnitude of choice frictions in the Finnish private dental care industry. Choice frictions make switching a dental care practice costly and I find that in this setting consumers only rarely switch their dental care provider. However, two competing hypotheses can explain the lack of switching. First, consumers might be facing choice frictions. Second, consumers might have heterogenous preferences for dental care providers, and thus, the lack of switching might simply result from consumers repeatedly visiting their most preferred dental care practice over years as their preferences remain unchanged. I disentangle the choice frictions from the unobserved preference heterogeneity by controlling for consumers’ time invariant practice specific preferences. I find that choice frictions are important in the Finnish dental care industry and their magnitude is similar as moving the average consumer’s dental practice of choice 21% closer to the consumer. The second essay studies how reducing waiting times at public dental care providers by increasing their production capacity affects market outcomes, when consumers can bypass the queue by paying more at a private alternative. I construct and estimate a model of the industry with consumer demand, public practice waiting times and private practice prices as equilibrium objects. In my counterfactual simulations I increase the number of full-time equivalent dentists at the public dental care providers by 20%. I find that waiting times decrease by only 1.5 days or 5%, because the initial decrease in waiting times after the capacity increase is offset by a large demand increase. Private practices do not decrease their prices, even though they lose on average 0.5 percentage points of market share, as the consumers most sensitive to prices switch away from private practices. Finally, consumer welfare and the use of dental care increases for all consumers, but less for the consumers with the lowest income. The lowest income consumers are not very likely to visit a public dental care provider, and they dislike waiting the least among all consumers, and thus they benefit the least. The third essay studies how public dental care providers prioritize consumers with more severe oral health conditions and how the prioritization affects consumers’ welfare and their choices of dental care providers across public and private providers. We first obtain a measure of consumers’ oral health using machine learning and then estimate demand models separately for consumers with better and worse oral health. Healthier consumers wait on average 30 days, while sicker consumers are prioritized and wait seven days less. We find that consumers with worse oral health are willing to pay twice as much to wait a day less compared to consumers with better oral health. In our counterfactual simulation, where the consumers with worse oral health wait as long as the healthier consumers, consumer welfare per capita decreases by 5.9 euros for the consumers with worse oral health. Equalizing waiting times prompts these consumers to switch from public to private providers, and some ultimately go without care.
  • Essays on corporate income taxation and multinational enterprises
    (2025) Viertola, Marika
    School of Business | Doctoral thesis (article-based) | Defence date: 2025-09-22
    Multinational enterprises may exploit international differences in corporate income taxation and minimize their global tax liability by shifting profit from high tax countries to low tax countries. This dissertation comprises three essays that examine this tax avoidance behavior from different perspectives. In the first essay, I study how Nordic multinational enterprises respond to international corporate income tax rate differences by adjusting their pretax profit. Using firm level panel data on ownership and accounting information from 2012 to 2017, I study this profit shifting behavior. Applying a panel data adjusted Hines-Rice approach with firm and year fixed effects, I estimate statistically significant tax semi-elasticity estimates between -0.7 and -1.3. Robustness checks and the latest methods in the two-way fixed effects literature confirm these results. My findings indicate that multinational enterprises with Nordic ultimate owners adjust their pretax profit in response to changes in tax rates, providing evidence of profit shifting. Furthermore, multinational enterprises within the euro area exhibit a more pronounced response. The second essay examines transfer pricing as a mechanism for profit shifting. In this essay, I utilize detailed transaction-destination level data from Finland for years 2013-2019 to examine how multinational enterprises manipulate transfer prices to shift profit from high tax countries to low tax countries. Employing a triple difference strategy that leverages variations in corporate income tax rates and affiliate ownership, I provide robust evidence that multinational enterprises underprice exports to low tax destinations. Additionally, my findings suggest that transfer pricing serves as a complementary channel of profit shifting, as firms more prone to other profit shifting mechanisms also underprice their exports more. Furthermore, I provide evidence that firms with more affiliates as well as firms with tax haven affiliates transfer misprice more. My results also suggest asymmetries: while there is clear evidence of transfer mispricing in exports to low tax destinations, there is no consistent evidence of transfer mispricing in imports. In recent years, global and national policymakers have introduced multiple measures to curb profit shifting. The third essay examines the impact of a widely implemented reporting requirement designed to curb profit shifting by increasing tax transparency among multinational enterprises. In this essay, my co-author and I study the impact of the country-by-country (CbC) reporting on multinational enterprises. Since 2016, this requirement has mandated the largest multinational enterprises to disclose their global activities at a country level to tax authorities. Using a unique dataset that combines CbC reports with detailed tax records and corporate group data, we analyze its domestic and foreign effects on Finnish-owned multinational enterprises using a difference-indifferences approach. Our findings indicate that CbC reporting increases taxable profits in Finland, particularly among corporate groups with a pre-reform tax haven presence or low effective tax rates, suggesting a potential reduction in profit shifting. Additionally, we find evidence of temporary real effects, as the most affected firms reduce investments in Finland. Finally, our results suggest that multinational enterprises downsize their presence in tax havens.
  • Constructing the quantum future: Future-oriented organizing in an emerging field and market
    (2025) Hilkamo, Oona
    School of Business | Doctoral thesis (article-based) | Defence date: 2025-09-19
    This doctoral dissertation explores the emergence of quantum computing, a new field of science, technology, and business. My dissertation sheds light on future-oriented organizing in field and market emergence by employing three lenses: linguistic, temporal and material. The research provides valuable insights into the social-symbolic aspects of field emergence. It also illustrates ventures and other field actors can manage public opinion and shape the nascent field beyond technological development. Quantum computing presents a specific case of deep tech—a category of technologies based on foundational scientific inquiry and characterized by long time-to-market and capital intensiveness. In the case of quantum computing, the ultimate goal of the field, a universal quantum computer is yet to be built. My thesis thus examines how a field emerges around a novel technology that itself is still emerging. This dissertation comprises an introduction and three essays. The introduction provides a review of liteature on field and market emergence and future-oriented organizing, an overview of the methodology, and a discussion focusing on future-oriented organizing in emerging settings. The first essay examines the linguistic tools of sensemaking by focusing on the visual and verbal sensemaking of quantum computing as a de novo market category. In this paper, we examine how actors use metaphors, analogies, and other linguistic devices to construct a novel market category. Through a multimodal analysis of text and visuals, we show how cultural entrepreneurs use different types of tropes not only to legitimate the emerging technology, but also to demarcate it as profoundly different and novel. We introduce the concept of a temporal trope, used specifically to provide a future-oriented understanding of the category. In the second essay I study the case of quantum computing from a future-making perspective. Adopting a Communication as constitutive of organization (CCO) approach, I demonstrate how quantum computing materializes through communicative acts by central stakeholders, and how different degrees of materialization shape the hypotheticality and temporal distance of the future. The main contribution of this essay is to the nascent research stream on future-making, highlighting the role that materiality, even when absent or symbolic, plays in field-level future-making processes. The third essay sheds light on how consultants create a market for knowledge in a novel field by engaging in temporal work. This essay contributes to the literatures of temporal work and market intermediaries by showing how management consultants engage in temporal work to construct a market for knowledge in the emerging field. These three perspectives advance our understanding of future-oriented organizing in emerging settings by emphasizing the constitutive and performative role of language in meaning-making and the materialization of futures. What is more, the essays shed light on how actors from different communities make sense of and engage with the uncertain and ambiguous future of quantum computing, using it as an asset rather than a liability.
  • Optimized forest management via reinforcement learning
    (2025) Suominen, Antti
    School of Business | Doctoral thesis (article-based) | Defence date: 2025-09-05
    Forest management has substantial economic importance, largely due to the valuable timber forests produce. In recent years, its significance has grown further as many countries strive to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and leverage forests as carbon sinks. The economic output from forest management depends on harvest policies, which determine the timing and the intensity of harvests. Previous research has used various approaches to optimize these policies, typically relying on stand growth models to predict the outcomes. However, as the growth models have become more detailed and realistic, their use in economic optimization has become challenging, which has led to adoption of various simplifications either in the ecological models or in the solution structure. This dissertation presents four scientific papers that employ high-dimensional stand-level models without resorting to the simplifications present in the earlier literature. Stand-level optimization problems previously considered beyond reach are solved by applying reinforcement learning (RL) —a branch of machine learning focused on finding optimal policies for sequential decision-making tasks. RL algorithms are closely related to dynamic programming, but they scale better for large numbers of state and control variables, especially when coupled with function approximators such as neural networks. This is the first application of RL to optimize forest management. We optimize stand-level problems involving matrix and individual-based growth models. Our setup allows for optimization across different forestry regimes, determining harvest timing, type, and intensity, while incorporating stochastic components such as fluctuations in timber prices and stand growth. The results reveal new insights into how different economic and ecological factors influence the optimal solutions. Additionally, comparisons to simpler models suggest, for instance, that commonly used matrix models tend to overestimate economic profitability. The optimization problem is further extended to incorporate a carbon sequestration objective. This model advances the existing literature by combining an individual-based stand growth model with carbon stocks in living trees, timber products, and forest soil, while allowing optimal solutions to be selected from both rotation-based and continuous-cover forestry regimes. Our findings indicate that the inclusion of carbon price leads to longer rotation periods with fewer, lighter thinnings, while high carbon prices incentivize solutions featuring either clear-cuts only or passive management.
  • Overfitting reduction in convex regression: Theory, models, and applications
    (2025) Liao, Zhiqiang
    School of Business | Doctoral thesis (article-based) | Defence date: 2025-09-05
    Overfitting is a common pitfall in many statistical models. In the context of regression analysis, it refers to a phenomenon where the statistical model fits not only the underlying relationship between variables but also the noise in the data, often caused by measurement errors. An overfitted model is usually characterized by excessive complexity and poor generalization, thus failing to make accurate predictions on unseen or new data. Convex regression, a classical nonparametric regression method, aims to estimate a convex function from a data set. Given its high flexibility, especially near the boundary, convex regression is more prone to suffer from overfitting compared to simpler regression methods like linear regression. Therefore, this thesis focuses on developing new convex nonparametric least squares (CNLS) estimators for reducing overfitting and exploring their applications in the regulation of electricity distribution networks in Nordic countries. Essay I proposes a machine learning-based approach combining support vector regression and convex regression. This approach is motivated by the regulation of Finnish electricity distribution networks, in which the Energy Authority collects historical data on labor, capital, and cost over the past 10 years. The regulatory policy is related to the predictive power of CNLS, to provide the right incentive policies for regulated electricity distribution companies. Given that the CNLS estimator suffers from the overfitting problem, the proposed convex support vector regression offers a useful tool to combine machine learning techniques and flexible nonparametric modelling, thereby allowing one to alleviate overfitting and improve the accuracy of out-of-sample predictions. Essay II focuses on investigating the overfitting behavior of the CNLS estimator at the boundary from a statistical perspective. Drawing from numerical evidence of overfitting in the literature, this essay seeks to provide theoretical evidence about how the CNLS estimator performs near the boundary of the domain. In this regard, Essay II bridges the gap between empirical observations and theoretical properties in convex regression and, more importantly, sheds light on remedies for reducing overfitting. Based on the theoretical results, this study presents two techniques that help tackle the overfitting problem. Statistical theorems and numerical experiments confirm that these methods outperform the original CNLS estimator. Essay III addresses the problem of sparse regression when high-dimensional data are available. Selecting a sparse model is important for model interpretation and improving predictive power, especially when the number of variables is large. Essay III proposes the structured Lasso method by combining ℓ1-norm and ℓ∞-norm. This approach is also extended to a relaxed version to create a trade-off between variable selection and shrinkage. This variable selection technique, along with its extensions, demonstrates superior performance in numerical experiments compared to other methods regarding sparsity and accuracy.
  • Essays on climate policy and transportation
    (2025) Ahonen, Arttu
    School of Business | Doctoral thesis (article-based) | Defence date: 2025-06-24
    Private vehicles are a major source of greenhouse emissions and an exemplar of the political contentiousness of climate action. Through direct ballots and protest movements such as the Yellow Vests, voters have repeatedly rejected carbon pricing – a policy recommended by economists with remarkable consensus due to its theoretical efficiency and empirical effectiveness – with appeals to the costs it imposes on low-income households that depend on their fossil-fuel powered car. In this thesis, I study the distributional impacts and political acceptability of transportation sector carbon pricing (namely fuel taxation), and the abatement potential of alternative, place-based policies. In the first essay, my co-author and I use odometer readings recorded to the Finnish vehicle registry at mandatory vehicle inspections, with information on the fuel efficiency and ownership of all cars in the registered fleet, to show that lower income households pay a smaller share of their disposable income in fuel taxes than do those above median income. Aggregate regressivity is thus not a sufficient explanation for public resistance to fuel taxes at least in the Finnish context. Instead, voters may perceive them as unfair because their impacts are very heterogenous within income levels: we show that income deciles account for just 1.5% of the total variation in tax burdens. The remaining variation is also only partially explained by household composition, degree of urbanity, employment status, and a rich set of other characteristics we observe in the data, making it difficult to substantially diminish this “horizontal” inequity through recycling of the tax revenues – in contrast to the “vertical” inequity between income classes which could be addressed easily through equal rebates. The objective costs also paint only a partial picture of the winners and losers of carbon pricing, as voters have heterogenous attitudes towards climate policies, too. In the second essay, I link a government-backed poll on the acceptability of fuel price increasing climate policy to the aforementioned registry data to show that variation in voters’ willingness to pay for a well-known climate target dominates the cost-side variation even for very large price increases. Furthermore, the willingness to pay is practically uncorrelated with the cost side, and even less well-predicted by household characteristics, which makes it so that compensation optimally targeted at likely swing voters ends up creating only a few more expected winners than the simple equal rebates. As such targeting is also at a general tension with distributional objectives, the equal rebates may ultimately be the best compensation strategy for increasing the political feasibility of carbon pricing. Beyond compensation, influencing voter beliefs has a lot of potential given their predictive power, but may be difficult to do – for example, I find that an information treatment appealing to the economists’ consensus on carbon pricing does not significantly increase agreement with the necessity of higher fuel prices in achieving the climate target. If carbon pricing cannot be made politically viable, policy makers may turn to other instruments, many of which target places rather than people (e.g. transit investments and other urban infrastructure). In the third essay, my co-authors and I use the odometer-data together with a long, granular panel of individual residential locations to decompose the variation in people’s annual kilometers driven into the contributions of neighborhood effects and individual habits, finding the latter to explain around half while the former explains less than 1%. This suggests that place-based policies may have limited impact on driving in the short term. However, we also find that the neighborhoods people grew up in can explain more than 10% of the variation in the individual driving habits, suggesting much larger, persistent long-term effects.
  • Essays on financial intermediation and asset pricing
    (2025) Rintamäki, Paul
    School of Business | Doctoral thesis (article-based) | Defence date: 2025-05-30
    This dissertation comprises three essays on financial intermediation and asset pricing. The first essay examines the endogenous matching between nonbank lenders and borrowers in the private debt market. Using data from the United States, it is shown that the organizational structure of business development companies plays an important role in how loans are priced and how capital is allocated in the decentralized private loan market. The second essay focuses on how leverage constraints causally affect investors' portfolio choices. Using a theoretical model and a quasi-natural experiment in financial markets, the essay demonstrates that investors' appetite for systemic risk increases after becoming leverage constrained. Finally, the third essay documents that, in many developed economies, the ratio between equity wealth and other aggregate wealth has fluctuated in low-frequency cycles. This valuation ratio exhibits strong predictive power for future stock market returns and these "equity wealth cycles" are explained using a macro-finance model where inflation, limited financial market participation, and redistributive income shocks are key drivers. Collectively, these essays provide novel insights into how various institutional features at both the micro- and macro-levels influence investor behavior, with implications for portfolio choices and asset pricing.
  • Affect in Collective Organizing
    (2025) Grünbaum, Leni
    School of Business | Doctoral thesis (article-based)
    This doctoral dissertation explores the role of affect in collective organizing, namely in the context of change processes. Current research has shown that affective flows, which emerge in encounters between humans and materialities, can energize groups, generate a sense of connection, and drive collective action. Overall, the potential of affect to enhance or constrain the participants’ capacity to act makes affect essential to the success of expert-led change processes. Scholars have, however, highlighted that despite the choreographing of managers, facilitators and other actors, affective flows remain unpredictable. We therefore need to extend our knowledge of how affect bears upon change processes. How do affective flows enhance and shut off possibilities for connection, openness, responsiveness, and multiplicity that allow participation and moving forward? The dissertation addresses these aims through three essays based on an ethnography with three child psychiatric teams at a Nordic university hospital. Each essay examines the coaching process—in which I acted as the researcher-coach—as it unfolded with one of the teams. Resting on a relational ontology, the essays do not foreground the actions of individuals. Instead, they focus on the ever-shifting relations among humans, and humans and materialities, viewing this ongoing movement as collective organizing. The first essay attends to the collective leadership process, through which the team pursued direction and created spaces for co-action, while tracing how the process unfolded through collective affective gravitation and affective points of inflection. The second essay focuses on affective attunement, or the intentional disposition to affect and be affected. It shows how affective intensities shape the participants’ capacity to act by enabling or disabling response-ability, which refers to the embodied ability to notice and respond to others. The third essay addresses communitas— spontaneous experiences of existential connection—conceptualizing it as a relational accomplishment that unfolds through an affective dynamic, in which both humans and nonhuman elements participate. This dissertation makes two main contributions to the studies of affect in organizational research. First, it theorizes and empirically illustrates two types of affective dynamics—centered on collective gravitation and affective points of inflection, and respectively, affective resonance—that shape how affective flows emerge and shift, thus either expanding or reducing the group’s collective capacity to act. In doing so, the dissertation provides tools to help scholars recognize and follow how affect shapes collective organizing in situated contexts. Second, the dissertation makes a methodological contribution by indicating that to grasp the lived sense of affective events, researchers must immerse themselves in the empirical setting and engage with the affective flows. Additionally, it encourages researchers to combine different forms of writing differently to craft texts that convey the affective tone and speak to the senses. Overall, the dissertation emphasizes that because affective flows are open-ended, the outcomes of collective organizing cannot be predetermined. The dissertation also offers practical suggestions to coaches, process consultants and organizational actors seeking to support change.
  • Deimosology - Producing enjoyment in the excessive impasse of techno-driven consumer culture
    (2025) Ahlberg, Oscar
    School of Business | Doctoral thesis (article-based) | Defence date: 2025-04-17
    This doctoral dissertation consists of three independent articles and one synthesising introduction. The introduction presents the concept of deimosology as a speculative endeavour to grapple with wicked eschatological problems of our capitalocentric present. The articles are grounded in a post-structural and psychoanalytic onto-epistemological stance and are developed with a sensitivity to the unconscious desires and affects that operate in the backdrop of our quotidian lives and shape our way of being in the world. While approaching different topics, the articles share an underlying motivation to map out affective deadlocks that occlude attempts at systematic change. This stark state of capitalist realism, where a socio-political form of organising beyond our current one is not only deemed unfeasible but presented as unimaginable, lies at the heart of what deimosology aims to address – namely why are we so locked in place, and what critical and affirmative projects can we envision if clarion calls to consumers, managers, and various stakeholders rationality continuously fail to produce effects. By theorising the central role of unconscious enjoyment in capitalist consumer culture, its intensification through technology and the subjects produced by it, the articles form the starting point for addressing such questions.
  • Essays on Blockchain Technology and Digital Economics
    (2025) Mohazab, Amin
    School of Business | Doctoral thesis (article-based) | Defence date: 2025-04-11
    In this first essay, together with my co-authors, we examine the economic mechanism of cryptocurrency mining. By presenting a profit function, a maximization equilibrium is obtained. The model provides a formal approach to the demand for hashing power as a function of revenues, mining costs and the number of miners. We consider how the equilibrium is affected by passive miners. We use these results to introduce a formulation of the price elasticity of the demand for hashing power with respect to the cost of energy. The model is simulated using Reinforcement Learning algorithms that arrive at similar equilibrium results. The article concludes with the implications of the model for policymaking. The Bitcoin Payment System (BPS) is the first and the most prominent decentralized protocol to send monetary transactions all around the world. The BPS does not use a predetermined fee mechanism. Instead, users propose fees they are willing to pay and the market determines the transactions that will be transmitted. In the second essay, I use a multi-unit share auction model to analyze the payoffs of the participants. I first use transaction data to non-parametrically estimate the marginal valuations of the bidders in the network and then estimate the payoff of the participants in every state of the system. As a result of the analysis, I realized that when the system is getting congested users bid closer to their marginal valuations so their payoffs would be decreased. On the other hand, miners would earn more since they are the service providers who collect fees at each step. Multiple cryptocurrencies suffer a bottleneck effect: blocks are limited in size and the protocols restrict their expected arrival rates. On the other hand, this congestion creates incentives to set transaction fees. We show that this incentive structure suffers from moral hazard, where miners have incentives to induce congestion to increase fees. In this third essay, together with my coauthor, we present this result using two approaches: Auction Theory and Reinforcement Learning. While Game Theory studies strategic behavior between rational players, Machine Learning is based on blind players finding optimal strategies by brute force iteration of trials. The Auction Theory model presented in this paper is a multiunit discriminatory (or pay-as-bid) auction with single-unit demand. We add to the standard model the element of supply reduction, characterize the symmetric equilibrium and present how to expand it as the number of players grows asymptotically. The Machine Learning part focuses on Q-learning, a well-known application of reinforcement learning algorithms. The main finding has significant policy implications: decentralization, one of the core strengths of proof-of-work protocols, doesn't necessarily apply to block-level incentives.
  • Essays on transportation and the environment
    (2025) Palanne, Kimmo
    School of Business | Doctoral thesis (article-based) | Defence date: 2025-03-21
    Tackling climate change requires setting a price on CO2 emissions. In the transportation sector, the most straightforward way to achieve this is to impose a tax on fuel. However, fuel taxes often face strong public opposition due to their perceived unfairness. To evaluate these concerns, the first two essays of this dissertation study how the economic burdens created by fuel taxation are distributed in society. In the first essay, my co-authors and I analyze the distributional impacts of fuel taxation by estimating how strongly fuel taxes are passed through to fuel prices. Using gas station-level data on fuel prices, we study the price effects of a large diesel tax increase implemented in Finland in 2012 and document two main findings. First, on average only 80 percent of the tax increase was passed through to diesel prices, meaning that a part of the tax burden was borne by fuel suppliers. Second, pass-through rates exhibited systematic regional variation such that diesel prices saw the largest increases in the most rural and lowest-income areas. In the second essay, my co-author and I study the distribution of fuel tax burdens in more detail at the household level. We measure tax burdens as the share of disposable income spent on fuel taxes and estimate these burdens for nearly all Finnish households in 2016. The analysis is made possible by car-level data on mileage and fuel economy, as well as individual-level data on income and other socioeconomic characteristics. We find that fuel taxes are not regressive among the population of all households. Rather, upper middle-income households bear the highest average burdens. This finding is explained by car ownership being uncommon at low incomes. In contrast, if we only consider car-owning households, fuel taxes do appear regressive. However, differences across income deciles explain only 1.5 percent of the total variation in tax burdens. The substantial horizontal variation is difficult to explain with observable household characteristics, but we find that households that live in more rural areas, have children, or are employed tend to face higher burdens. Finally, we show that average tax burdens across income deciles could easily be equalized by redistributing the tax revenue, but the large within-decile differences are almost impossible to eliminate with transfers. If fuel taxes cannot be increased due to public opposition, alternative climate policies might be needed. In the third essay, I study the effects of public transit pricing on car use and emissions. I analyze a 2019 pricing reform in the Helsinki region in Finland that lowered public transit fares by 45 percent for individuals living in a specific travel zone. Using individual-level data on mileage, car ownership and home locations, I compare individuals who received the price cut to those who lived just outside the travel zone and experienced almost no change in prices. I find a clear reduction in mileage in response to the price cut, with cross-price elasticity estimates ranging between 0.06 and 0.27. However, I find no response in car ownership. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that the cost of reducing emissions with this reform landed in the range of €1000–€3000 per tonne of CO2, making the price cut an expensive climate policy tool.
  • Essays on public procurement
    (2025) Jääskeläinen, Jan
    School of Business | Doctoral thesis (article-based)
    This thesis studies competition in public procurement. It consists of three essays, each of which looks at the competitive process in public procurement from a different perspective. In the first essay, we study the extent and determinants of competition and its role in determining prices in public procurement using uniquely comprehensive and rich data from Finland and Sweden. We supplement our study with qualitative interviews. Competition is extremely low in both countries. All regions and contracting authority types, and most industries face the issue. In addition, bidders are typically heterogeneous in size, which likely further limits competition. Competition seems to work as expected as (standardised) prices decrease with the number of actual and potential bidders. The perceived reasons for lack of competition are many and vary between industries but are typically related to communication practices and professionalism in public procurement. Accordingly, we show using contracting authority office level norms as instrumental variables that the use of scoring auctions is detrimental to competition, especially in industries where their use is not typical. Bidder friendly dialog, strategies and practices are proposed as remedies. In the second essay, we study preferences of 900+ real-world public procurement officials in Finland and Germany. This is an important pursuit as they report having sizeable discretion and minimal extrinsic incentives. Through conjoint experiments, we identify the relative importance of multiple features of the procurement outcomes. Officials prioritise avoiding unexpectedly high prices over seeking low prices. Avoiding winners with previous poor performance is the most important feature. Officials avoid very low competition, while litigation risks and regional favouritism matter less. Preferences and office interests appear well-aligned among bureaucrats. The third essay examines the consumer side of the public procurement process and what happens after the procurement auction is concluded. In the essay, I study the Finnish market for physiotherapy services, which can be divided into a private market and two public procurement markets - one organised by municipalities, the other by the Finnish social security institution. Using data on prices and firm characteristics across five regions, I estimate the demand in the three markets and find the following: First, unobserved quality is positively correlated across markets; second, demand is very price-elastic in the private market, somewhat price-elastic in the municipal market where civil servants choose the physiotherapist, and inelastic in the market operated by the Finnish social security institution where consumers choose their therapist without knowing or paying the price. These findings indicate that freedom of choice might come with a price when consumers themselves bear no costs.
  • Exploring behavioral economics in archival auditing research
    (2025) Nickpour, Mohammadali
    School of Business | Doctoral thesis (article-based) | Defence date: 2025-02-21
    This doctoral dissertation comprises an introduction and three self-contained essays that, using archival data, examine the role of innate personality traits, reputation concerns, and compensation incentives in shaping the judgment and behavior of individual auditors. The first essay investigates the relationship between the inherent characteristics of audit partners and audit quality. Drawing on political psychology literature, it argues that individuals' political activism reflects their extraversion and openness to experience. Using data on political campaign contributions in the United States, the study finds a consistent positive association between audit partners’ extraversion and openness to experience, as indicated by their political contributions, and various aspects of audit quality. These findings underscore the significance of considering individual differences in the recruitment and training processes within audit firms. The second essay explores the influence of reputation concerns on auditor behavior. It hypothesizes that the identification of individual engagement partners in the United States, as mandated by PCAOB’s Rule 3211, increases their reputation concerns. The results indicate that, among clients with existing or potential internal control material weaknesses, there is an increased likelihood of adverse internal control opinions in the post-Rule 3211 period. In addition, in the post-Rule 3211 period, clients with high internal control risk experience a significantly greater increase in audit fees and audit report delays compared to clients with effective internal controls. Furthermore, the study shows that adverse opinions increase the likelihood of early audit partner rotations within the same audit firm. These findings are valuable for regulators and audit firms seeking to understand how auditors’ reporting on internal controls has evolved in response to engagement partner identification and heightened reputation concerns. The third essay examines how individual audit partners respond to horizontal pay disparities among partners within audit firms. The study utilizes Belgian data, a setting in which most audit partners establish limited liability management entities through which they perform audit services and bill the audit firm. This structure allows for observing the actual partner compensations. The findings reveal that greater pay disparity among partners is associated with lower audit quality, with partners earning below the firm's average delivering lower-quality audits as overall compensation disparity increases. The results are more pronounced among male and early-career audit partners. Further analyses dismiss the alternative explanation that these findings are driven by auditors with lower ability or quality. This study provides practical insights for audit firms in designing effective compensation systems for partners.
  • Industrial Organization Studies on Pharmaceutical Markets
    (2025) Markkanen, Jaakko
    School of Business | Doctoral thesis (article-based) | Defence date: 2025-01-24
    This thesis comprises three unpublished essays. The first essay analyzes the effectiveness of consumer choice policies in the Nordic pharmaceutical markets. Using quasi-experimental methods and data matched across countries by active ingredients, the results show that pharmaceutical expenditure per dose decreases by 40% under stricter pricing regimes, without adversely affecting pharmaceutical availability or consumption. Regimes that increase consumer incentives are effective, but those that address both consumer and producer incentives are the most successful. The second essay examines the impact of retail markup regulation on wholesale and retail prices in the Finnish pharmaceutical market. Employing both reduced form and structural analyses, I find that a reduction in pharmacy markups leads to increased wholesale prices, with only half of this increase passed on to retail prices. The study also suggests that adjustments in VAT rates could counterbalance the increased manufacturer revenues resulting from lower retail markups. The third essay evaluates the impact of relaxing entry regulations in the Finnish pharmacy market. Our simulation results show that the existing entry restrictions primarily benefit incumbent pharmacists at the expense of consumers. Furthermore, although entry regulations are motivated by the goal of ensuring equal access to local pharmacy services, our results suggest that almost all consumers benefit from deregulation. The number of pharmacies increases, particularly in urban areas, whereas rural areas and regions with older populations benefit less. However, increases in fixed costs and reduced labor productivity outweigh consumer surplus gains, indicating excessive entry from a social welfare perspective.
  • Essays on Asset Pricing and Funding Conditions
    (2024) Nissinen, Juuso Petteri
    School of Business | Doctoral thesis (article-based)
    This thesis consists of an introduction and four essays that all address the impact that funding conditions have on global asset prices. The first essay, which is a joint work with Sara Ferreira Filipe and Matti Suominen, investigates the roles of global funding constraints and funding risk in the currency markets. We demonstrate how funding risks significantly influence global currency carry trade activity, currency volatilities, currency correlations, and currency returns. The second essay addresses the impact of currency-specific funding conditions on global markets. When funding is globally constrained, the relationship between expected returns and risks varies significantly depending on the choice of measurement currency. The expectedreturns align best with risks in the currency where the relative funding conditions are most favourable. The third essay shows that although rising interest rates and tightening credit constraints reduce funding positions in a given funding currency; the policy alternatives have opposing effects on an alternative funding currency. While increasing interest rates make the alternative currency more attractive as a funding source, tighter credit limits reduce the available risk exposure also for the alternative currency. In the fourth essay, joint work with Markus Sihvonen, we show that eurozone government bond convenience yields, which are the credit risk-controlled bond prices relative to the safe German bond, are driven by relative funding costs and funding risks. We provide novel causal evidence for this mechanism by leveraging exogenous changes in funding costs within the Eurosystem's funding programs.
  • An Employee Perspective on Management Control Effectiveness - Measurement and Mechanisms
    (2024) Falk, Kerstin
    School of Business | Doctoral thesis (monograph)
    Empirical research has mostly shown that management control (MC) practices are linked to positive organizational outcomes. However, it is not fully understood how these MC practices actually contribute to improved organizational performance. Grounded in emerging literature within management accounting and human resources, this dissertation aims to unravel intricate employee-level mechanisms through which MC practices affect individual behaviours and finally organizational performance. Hence, this work addresses research on MC effectiveness by shifting the focus from the traditional manager-centric perspective to the crucial yet often overlooked realm of employee perceptions. Two empirical studies are conducted. The first study systematically develops a novel scale for quantifying employee-perceived result and action control quality (eRCQ and eACQ). The second study explores a process model of MC effectiveness from an employees' perspective. According to this process, employees respond to management practices by forming individual perceptions and developing a certain attitude towards the work or organization which results in different individual outcome variables that finally lead to a certain behavior and performance at the organizational level. Four consecutive mechanisms can be revealed within the relationship of the use of MC and employee behavior: employee perceptions, employee engagement, mental wellbeing, and turnover intention. In conclusion, this dissertation advances our knowledge of effective MC systems by providing a nuanced understanding of how employees responses to controls can be explained. The proposed process model elucidates the sequence from control design to impact, offering useful guidance for organizations that seek to boost performance through engaged and happy employees.
  • Essays on Health Policy and Human Capital
    (2025) Olkkola, Maarit
    School of Business | Doctoral thesis (article-based) | Defence date: 2025-01-10
    This doctoral dissertation consists of three essays that explore topics related to health policy for children. The first two essays examine the introduction of publicly provided universal child health services in Finland in the 1940s. The first essay focuses on the effects of these services on the Finnish child mortality transition, while the second essay considers their longer-run impacts on human capital accumulation. In contrast to these broad-based health services, the third essay zooms in on the human capital effects of one specific publicly provided health service: a mass vaccination campaign against the childhood disease measles in the United States. Specifically, the first essay examines the introduction of universal child health centers in every municipality in Finland in the 1940s. These centers offered regular child health counseling visits for children under school age, both on-site and at home. The essay uses newly collected, individuallevel child mortality data to estimate the effects of the reform on child mortality at different ages. For children aged between one month and one year—who were the most intensively targeted by the policy—the essay finds that access to rural child health centers reduced postneonatal mortality by 9 deaths per thousand live births (27 percent of baseline postneonatal mortality). This figure corresponds to approximately half of the overall decline in postneonatal mortality in Finland during 1945–1950 or approximately one-fourth of the overall decline in the mortality of children under age five. For children aged one to four, the essay finds a reduction in the mortality of boys of approximately 18 deaths per thousand live births (67 percent of baseline mortality for boys in this age range). In contrast, the survival benefits for girls remain uncertain. The second essay follows the impacts of the child health centers into adulthood. It finds that children who gained access to universal child health services in the 1940s were two percentage points more likely to complete either academic secondary school or a tertiary degree and earned approximately two percent more income in adulthood. These benefits were largest for children who gained access prior to birth but they also accrued to children who gained access up to age three. The estimated benefits appear clearer for girls than for boys. However, the benefits for boys may be underestimated because boys were more likely to survive due to the child health centers, according to the findings in the first essay. A bounding exercise suggests that the true effect on income is more likely to lie in the interval between two and five percent. The third essay, based on joint work with Philipp Barteska, Sonja Dobkowitz, and Michael Rieser, also focuses on the human capital effects of a health intervention. It suggests that the first nationwide mass vaccination campaign against measles increased educational attainment in the United States. Its empirical strategy exploits variation in exposure to the childhood disease across states right before the Measles Eradication Campaign of 1967–1968, which reduced reported measles incidence by 90 percent within two years. The essay finds that the reduction in measles exposure increased the years of education on average by approximately 0.1 years in the affected cohorts.