HEC Montréal

About: HEC Montréal is a education organization based out in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Vehicle routing problem & Corporate governance. The organization has 1221 authors who have published 5708 publications receiving 196862 citations. The organization is also known as: Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales de Montreal & HEC Montreal.

Change Management Choices and Trajectories in a Multidivisional Firm

Abstract: This paper draws on a comparative case study of the implementation of a planned change initiative across three different divisions of a multidivisional oil company to investigate the influences guiding division-level change agents in their choice of a change management approach and the impact of different approaches on change outcomes. While the contingency perspective suggests that change management approaches should be chosen to fit with change content and context, we found that change agents navigated amongst three concerns: substantive concerns related to goal attainment, political concerns related to conformity to corporate demands, and relational concerns concerning relations with employees. We identified three different change management trajectories across the three divisions based on alternative ways of balancing the concerns. The data show that, regardless of the change management approach adopted, change tends to be diluted in implementation. However, the various trajectories have differential consequences for other important dimensions such as corporate approval and relationships with employees.

The Mind in the Middle: Taking Stock of Affect and Cognition Research in Entrepreneurship

Abstract: In spite of substantial advances, entrepreneurship research on affect and cognition remains characterized by a multiplicity of theoretical approaches, methods, variables and measures. Although this multiplicity affords a lot of richness, it also poses potential risks – from the lack of a coherent knowledge base to the dangers of an atomistic evolution, with minimum exchanges between ‘siloed’ groups of scholars, limited theoretical integration and increased chances of redundant repetitions without real advances in understanding. To help guard against these risks and in order to augment the impact and value-adding contribution of future research, the six papers in this special issue analyse the progress made in entrepreneurship research on (1) situated cognition, (2) fear, (3) how affective dynamics influences entrepreneurship, (4) intuition, (5) opportunity evaluation and (6) entrepreneurial team cognition. This short introductory essay builds on the synthesis of the literature to summarize ‘the road travelled so far’. The six papers forming this special issue are then introduced and their respective focus and contributions are detailed. The authors conclude by reflecting on these papers’ implications, and offer a number of observations about future research and the ‘road ahead’.

Robust optimization of sums of piecewise linear functions with application to inventory problems

Abstract: Robust optimization is a methodology that has gained a lot of attention in the recent years. This is mainly due to the simplicity of the modeling process and ease of resolution even for large scale models. Unfortunately, the second property is usually lost when the cost function that needs to be “robustified” is not concave (or linear) with respect to the perturbing parameters. In this paper, we study robust optimization of sums of piecewise linear functions over polyhedral uncertainty set. Given that these problems are known to be intractable, we propose a new scheme for constructing conservative approximations based on the relaxation of an embedded mixed-integer linear program and relate this scheme to methods that are based on exploiting affine decision rules. Our new scheme gives rise to two tractable models that respectively take the shape of a linear program and a semi-definite program, with the latter having the potential to provide solutions of better quality than the former at the price of heavier computations. We present conditions under which our approximation models are exact. In particular, we are able to propose the first exact reformulations for a robust (and distributionally robust) multi-item newsvendor problem with budgeted uncertainty set and a reformulation for robust multi-period inventory problems that is exact whether the uncertainty region reduces to a L1-norm ball or to a box. An extensive set of empirical results will illustrate the quality of the approximate solutions that are obtained using these two models on randomly generated instances of the latter problem.

Prioritizing the Risk Factors Influencing the Success of Clinical Information System Projects - A Delphi Study in Canada

Abstract: Objective: The aim of this study is to gain a better understanding of the risk factors influencing the success of clinical information system projects. Methods: This study addresses this issue by first reviewing the extant literature on information technology project risks, and second conducting a Delphi survey among 21 experts highly involved in clinical information system projects in Quebec, Canada, a region where government have invested heavily in health information technologies in recent years. Results: Twenty-three risk factors were identified. The absence of a project champion was the factor that experts felt most deserves their attention. Lack of commitment from upper management was ranked second. Our panel of experts also confirmed the importance of a variable that has been extensively studied in information systems, namely, perceived usefulness that ranked third. Respondents ranked project ambiguity fourth. The fifth-ranked risk was associated with poor alignment between the clinical information systems’ characteristics and the organization of clinical work. The large majority of risk factors associated with the technology itself were considered less important. This finding supports the idea that technology-associated factors rarely figure among the main reasons for a project failure. Conclusions: In addition to providing a comprehensive list of risk factors and their relative importance, the study presents a major contribution by unifying the literature on information systems and medical infor - matics. Our checklist provides a basis for further research that may help practitioners identify the effective countermeasures for mitigating risks associated with the implementation of clinical information systems.

Global Forces and Monetary Policy Effectiveness

Abstract: In this paper, we quantify the changes in the relationship between international forces and many key US macroeconomic variables over the 1984-2005 period, and analyze changes in the monetary policy transmission mechanism. We do so by estimating a Factor-Augmented VAR on a large set of US and international data series. We find that the role of international factors in explaining US variables has been changing over the 1984-2005 period. However, while some US series have become more correlated with global factors, there is little evidence suggesting that these factors have become systematically more important. We don't find strong evidence of a change in the transmission mechanism of monetary policy due to global forces. Taking our point estimates literally, global forces do not seem to have played an important role in the US monetary transmission mechanism between 1984 and 1999. In addition, since the year 2000, the initial response of the US economy following a monetary policy shock --- the first 6 to 8 quarters --- is essentially the same as the one that has been observed in the 1984-1999 period. However, point estimates suggest that the growing importance of global forces might have contributed to reducing some of the persistence in the responses, two or more years after the shocks. Overall, we conclude that if global forces have had an effect on the monetary transmission mechanism, this is a recent phenomenon.