Nina Teng - Research

My research examines how firms acquire and mobilize the people and capital needed to pursue new strategic opportunities. One stream studies how relationships with investors shape strategic choice and the evolution of firm scope, including which opportunities become priorities and how they are enacted. A complementary stream uses field experiments embedded in live organizations to examine how competitive positioning, compensation, and the design of work shape firms’ ability to attract talent and the terms on which employees are willing to join. Across these projects, I combine field experiments, proprietary data, and longitudinal qualitative research to explain how access to people and capital enables, constrains, and redirects strategy, and why some firms are better able than others to turn promising opportunities into new businesses.

Publications

[1] Singh, Jasjit, Teng, Nina and Netessine, Serguei. (2019). Philanthropic Campaigns and Customer Behavior: Field Experiments on an Online Taxi Booking Platform. Management Science, 65(2): 913–932. (Link)

Nominated for Best Paper Award, Strategic Management Society 2016 Annual Meeting
Nominated for Carolyn Dexter Award, Academy of Management 2016 Annual Meeting

Firms commonly undertake philanthropic campaigns as a means of attracting and retaining customers. Such campaigns often take the form of charity-linked promotions, whereby a firm donates a specific amount to a charitable cause when a customer takes up the promotion through a related purchase. We carried out three field experiments to study such promotions in the context of an online taxi-booking platform. Customers were randomly assigned to different treatment groups, which received either a charity-linked or a discount-based promotion from a range of monetary amounts. Take-up rates for charity-linked promotions were not only much smaller than for discount-based promotions but also less sensitive to the exact amount involved, consistent with a view that the decision to take up a charity-linked promotion was driven in part by a “warm glow” from mere association with giving. We also find a selection effect in promotion take-up: charity-linked promotions were disproportionately taken up by people who had already been more active customers. Although a promotion take-up does seem to represent new demand rather than mere substitution of a booking that would have occurred anyway, longitudinal data analysis reveals little evidence of a lasting treatment effect on long-term demand beyond the promotion period for either kind of promotion. Given the high cost relative to benefit for the promotional bookings themselves, this finding raises concerns regarding the prevalent practice of firms devoting significant funds for short-term promotions without rigorously examining their exact impact.

Papers Under Review

[2] Teng, Nina, Nataliya Langburd Wright, and Aleksandra (Olenka) Kacperczyk. (2025). Competitive Positioning and the Cost of Talent: Evidence from Firm Field Experiments; Revise & Resubmit (R&R) at Management Science

Finalist, Best Paper Prize, Strategic Management Society 2026 Annual Meeting
2025 BAIC (Bocconi Assembly for Innovation and Cooperation) Conference, 2025 Advances with Field Experiments Conference, 2025 Wharton People & Organizations Conference (Plenary Session)

[3] Teng, Nina. (2026). Competing for Talent Under Uncertainty: Evidence from a Firm Field Experiment

[4] Brahm, Francisco, Xia Li, Claudio Rizzi, and Nina Teng. (2026). Early-Stage Climate Capital and Climate Impact: Experimental Evidence from Seed Investors (link to paper)

Work in Progress

[5] Teng, Nina and Michael G. Jacobides. Who Shapes Strategy? Capital Markets and the Formation of Strategic Scope: Evidence from Grab

Finalist, Best PhD Paper Prize, SMS 2022 Annual Meeting
Designated as Best Paper for TIM, AOM 2022 Annual Meeting

[6] Teng, Nina and J. Daniel Kim. AI-Agent Supervision and the Valuation of Technical Leadership: Evidence from a Field Experiment