ODC Webinar
Managing labor on and off platforms
Maggie Zhou
Professor of Strategy at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan,
--- 30th Oct. 2025, Thursday at 9am EST/2pm CET ---
In this webinar, I will talk about two of my recent studies. One is about temporary opportunity assignment as a source of labor productivity improvement in restaurants. Leveraging detailed transaction data, we find that temporary assignments of restaurant servers to a high-opportunity section led to an increase in their hourly sales in subsequent periods after they returned to low-opportunity sections, and this increase appears to be caused by a combination of skill learning and motivation enhancement. Our findings highlight opportunity assignment as a valuable managerial tool for fostering employees’ skill development, maintaining their motivation and improving long-term productivity. The second study is about platform workers (or complementors) oscillating their resources (e.g., time and assets) following platform diversification. Using datasets on the rideshare and food delivery businesses in New York City, we find that the launch of Uber Eats reduced Uber's and Lyft's rideshare trip volumes. Additional theoretical and empirical analyses suggest that, while platform diversification enables rideshare drivers to share some resources across businesses, it may also create opportunities for them to oscillate other complementary resources, thereby diverting their resources in the existing business from both the diversifying and competing platform firms. Such sharing-enabled resource oscillation may be due to resource exclusivity at the transactional level and the lack of control by platform firms over complementor resources at the organizational level.
About the Speaker:
Maggie Zhou is a professor of strategy at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. Her research is in the areas of corporate strategy, competitive strategy, institutional strategy and organizational structure. Her recent studies investigate the role of task complexity and competing institutional demands in setting limits to firm growth, the use and effects of competitive strategies between firms on and off digital platforms and within technological ecosystems, as well as organizational design for domestic and multinational corporations. In addition to theoretical models, she has examined these issues in a broad range of empirical settings including air transportation, commercial spaceflight, electricity, fintech, healthcare, manufacturing, oil and gas, restaurant, rideshare, soft drink, and solar photovoltaic installation industries. Her work has been published in the Strategic Management Journal, Management Science, Organization Science, Strategy Science, Journal of Corporate Finance, and Advances in Strategic Management. She is an Associate Editor for Management Science and Strategic Management Journal, a Contributing Editor for Strategy Science, and an editorial board member for Organization Science.
Last date for registration is 29th Oct 2025 9 am EST
Hope you will be able to join us!
