The latest research from INSEAD faculty offers novel ways to dissect persistent challenges: decision making under uncertainty, creating value through service encounters, right down to the very personal issue of loneliness at work. 

Research featured this month also questions assumptions about share repurchases and suggests that counterfeiting concerns much more than law and reputation. A shift in perspective can reveal more and make the picture whole.
 

Tackling counterfeiting through operation management

Counterfeiting is more than a legal or reputational concern; it represents a core operational issue with consequences for supply chain configuration, product lifecycle control and strategic alignment. This research by Luk Van Wassenhove and his co-authors* examines how decisions such as outsourcing, offshoring or reshoring affect the likelihood of intellectual property leakage. It also considers how reverse logistics and circular economy models, when not carefully monitored, may introduce vulnerabilities.

The study provides a foundation for determining when and how to adopt traceability technologies and information-sharing mechanisms to reinforce product authenticity without introducing excessive complexity or cost. Viewing counterfeiting as a problem of operations and execution beyond legal and marketing, this work supports the development of cohesive, cross-functional strategies that strengthen supply chain integrity, protect brand equity and sustain competitiveness in high-risk markets. 

*Nafiseh Shamsi Gamchi, Alzahra University; Mehrdad Mohammadi, Eindhoven University of Technology; Reza Zanjirani Farahani, Paris School of Business

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Share repurchases for price impact: Evidence from fragile stocks

How does financial fragility affect corporate actions? Massimo Massa and his co-authors* highlight an important but overlooked characteristic of fragile stocks: While they register higher return volatility, they also command higher liquidity. This reduces their sensitivity to corporate actions, such as share repurchase, that have an impact on price. 

The authors show that firms with fragile stocks have a lower incentive to repurchase their shares, since the stocks’ high liquidity attenuates the positive price impact of share repurchases. They also show that these firms are able to invest more as a result. 

*David Schumacher, McGill University, and Yan Wang, McMaster University 

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Uprooting loneliness by changing the self-narrative

Negative work experiences can be rooted in self-narratives. Through a study of executives reporting persistent loneliness at work, INSEAD professor Jennifer Petriglieri and Elizabeth Sheprow from Harvard University examine the mechanisms leading to loneliness, and the process by which they can be uprooted.

The executives’ self-narratives, which affected how they behaved and felt at work, revolved around how they related to others. Some executives drew on constraining scripts that portrayed self-isolating behaviour as necessary for success. This made loneliness a persistent feature of their working selves. The authors developed a theory of self-narrative change that reveals how people can separate their past and present selves.

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Three approaches to optimising service encounters
To service providers, value creation mostly occurs during service encounters involving customers, employees and service organisations. However, managers tend not to optimise them because their tools fail to fully comprehend these interfaces, or predate digital technologies. 

Guillaume Roels reviews the recent development of three levers for optimising service encounters: co-production of service design, delighting customers through experience design and fostering employee engagement by putting people first. These lie at the core of service value creation and are especially relevant today, given the availability of abundant datasets and short feedback loops that enable scientific experimentation.

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The role of radical uncertainty in decision-making

Radical uncertainty refers to decision-making contexts characterised by unknown or unstable relationships between variables, choice options with attributes that cannot be directly compared, and the potential for decisions to induce transformative change. In this study, Asher Lawson considers the effects of such uncertainty on decision-making from a dual process theory perspective.

Lawson discusses the effect of radical uncertainty on the appropriateness of normative frameworks and standards, best practices for decision-making, and best practices for improving decision-making. He distinguishes the effect of radical uncertainty among four sources of decision-making performance: the accuracy of baseline strategies, the ability to detect errors, the knowledge of rules and the ability to apply rules. 

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