Claudine Gartenberg

• Claudine Gartenberg (Forthcoming), Corporate Purpose and Polarization, Cambridge University Press. Abstract

  The role of corporations in society is again the subject of debate across finance, law, and management. This essay aims to expand the debate beyond whether social benefits and costs be included in the corporation’s objective function. I make the following two arguments. First, corporate purpose is broader than the debate recognizes. It is a mechanism for social choice, defining which problems a firm takes up, which solutions it pursues, whose interests count, and how conflicts among them are adjudicated. Purpose thereby shapes the admissible domain of corporate action, guides judgment among incommensurable alternatives, and helps form an organizational constituency capable of acting on that ordering. Second, polarization creates a larger divergence in values across the population, reducing consensus on the social issues raised by the modern economy. The appropriate locus of social choice—and therefore the appropriate scope of corporate purpose —depends on both the breadth of the parties materially affected and the degree of contestation over the end. Purpose has its greatest capacity and legitimacy within bounded constituencies, while broad and contested effects call for government and the political process. Revisiting the institutional settlement that emerged from the debates of the 1930s, the essay presents corporate purpose and public authority as complementary institutions for governing modern capitalism.

• Claudine Gartenberg and Todd Zenger (Working), Corporate Ownership, Purpose, and the Social Choice Problem. Abstract

  Firms face social choice problems whenever the participants on whose cooperation they rely hold incommensurable values. We discuss how owners occupy a distinctive dual role in this context: they are both participants with values of their own and the arbiters that determine how social choice problems are resolved. Corporate purpose is one important instrument through which owners exercise this authority. By committing the firm to problems they aim to solve, purpose restricts the domain of preferences the firm must reconcile and signals a preference ordering to employees and other participants. The firm’s composition is a second instrument. Because firms can alter their membership through hiring and termination, owners assemble coalitions whose values sustain the chosen purpose, constrained by employees’ capacity to exercise voice or exit. This chapter therefore expands corporate governance beyond mitigating agency issues by describing its central role in framing how firms resolve their social choice problems.

• Claudine Gartenberg, Sharique Hasan, Alex Murray, Lamar Pierce (2026), More Versus Better: Artificial Intelligence, Incentives, and the Emerging Crisis in Peer Review, Organization Science. Abstract

  As the AI Task Force for Organization Science, we provide an early account of artificial intelligence’s (AI) impact on both submissions and reviews at a major academic journal. Submission volume has risen 42% since the late 2022 release of ChatGPT, while writing quality has declined. The rise in AI-generated writing accounts for nearly all of these trends. AI-generated writing in reviews has also increased, and is characterized by lower writing quality and less topical diversity than human-generated writing. We are, to our knowledge, the first journal to report these early impacts of AI in the review process. Conversations with editors across scientific disciplines, however, suggest that what we observe is not limited to our journal or to the social sciences. At this early stage of AI adoption, we cannot make a normative assessment about appropriate or ideal levels of AI usage. We can, however, conclude that the current state of AI tools, amplified by existing publish-or-perish incentives, appears to be pushing the system toward an equilibrium of more rather than better research. Reaching an equilibrium in which AI serves as a critical engine of innovation will require that our institutions and the incentive structures they create adapt.

• Claudine Gartenberg and Elaine Pak (2026), Internal Versus Market Pay References in Knowledge-Intensive Firms, Organization Science, 37 (4), pp. 1320-1341. 10.1287/orsc.2024.19959 Abstract

  How do firms balance market competitiveness with internal cohesion when setting employee pay? We examine this question using confidential compensation data on 19 million U.S. employees across 479 firms varying in knowledge intensity. We construct precise pay reference groups: internal benchmarks based on skill-equivalent peers across functions and market benchmarks based on same occupation, skill level, and region at other firms. We find that in low knowledge-intensity firms, pay is equally sensitive to both internal and market benchmarks, whereas in high knowledge-intensity firms, pay becomes decoupled from market forces and aligns with internal benchmarks. Internal pay alignment also increases following chief executive officer transitions that prioritize innovation. These patterns are driven by high-skilled employees in roles requiring complex problem-solving and collaboration. Moreover, firms with greater internal pay alignment generate more patents, including breakthrough innovations. Altogether, our findings reveal that although some firms maintain close market alignment, knowledge-intensive firms appear to decouple pay from market forces. This is particularly the case for their skilled workers, consistent with firms prioritizing internal social dynamics in contexts where complex problem-solving and collaboration are important for value creation.

• Claudine Gartenberg and Elaine Pak (2026), More Monitoring, Less Pay: Active Ownership and Employee Compensation, Management Science (forthcoming). Abstract

  The rise of active owners—hedge funds and private equity firms—has raised questions about the influence of corporate owners on employee compensation. Prior research documents that active owners reduce overall compensation through workforce restructuring and slower wage growth. What remains unexplored is whether active owners also pay less for comparable work: whether they compensate the same jobs differently than other owners. Using detailed compensation from over 20 million employee records across 896 U.S. firms, we compare pay within narrowly defined labor markets that hold constant year, region, occupation, and skill level. We find that firms with active owners pay 2 to 4% less for comparable work than other firms. These differentials manifest both as lower base salary and flatter incentive pay, and appear to reflect, at least in part, an owner treatment effect. Notably, the effects are concentrated in more monitorable contexts, including routine jobs, jobs with quantifiable outputs, and those in less knowledge-intensive industries. These patterns are consistent with active owners substituting compensation-based incentives with managerial oversight, particularly in quantifiable and routine settings. This suggests that, as work becomes more measurable, firm ownership may play a greater role in shaping employee outcomes.

• Claudine Gartenberg (2024), Corporate Purpose and Firm Strategy, Strategic Management Review. Abstract

  This paper explores the relevance of corporate purpose to strategy research. Corporate purpose can be conceived as a shared understanding of why an organization exists, made real by the beliefs of employees and tangible actions by firm leaders. While it has a long history within organization theory, law, and finance, purpose has received relatively less attention within the field of strategy. This essay argues that incorporating purpose into strategy research is both consistent with the view from practice and can open up the field to new channels by which firms compete and survive. It also outlines potential areas for future research, including links between corporate purpose and strategy at the individual, firm, and industry level.

• Sinziana Dorobantu, Claudine Gartenberg, Sergio Lazzarini, Anita McGahan (2024), What Would the Field of Strategic Management Consider if We Took Stakeholders Seriously?, Strategy Science .
• Claudine Gartenberg and Todd Zenger (2024), Corporate Purpose and the Problem of Social Choice in Firms, .
• Claudine Gartenberg (2023), The Contingent Relationship Between Purpose and Profits, Strategy Science (in press). Abstract

  When do for-profit corporations pursue both purpose and profits and when do they prioritize one over the other? This study explores this question, measuring the strength of purpose based on the perceptions of nearly 1 million employees across 635 U.S. public companies within 14 industry categories. Two main findings emerge. First, the relationship between purpose and profits varies widely across companies and industries. Second, companies with higher levels of innovation intensity, intangible capital, or long-term investors tend to pursue both purpose and profits, whereas companies with lower levels of these factors tend to prioritize one over the other. This evidence suggests that purpose and profits are compatible in settings that rely on innovation and long temporal horizons for value creation and opposed in settings that do not.

• Claudine Gartenberg and Shun Yiu (2023), Acquisitions and Corporate Purpose, Strategy Science (in press). Abstract

  Purpose is undergoing a resurgence of interest across research and practice. Yet, we know little about how it relates to strategy and specifically, how strategic actions reinforce or undermine purpose in organizations. This study explores this question in the context of acquisitions. We examine 831 transactions using data from approximately 1.7 million employees to construct our measure of purpose. We find that, on average, employees’ sense of purpose drops after acquisitions. This drop is particularly pronounced among firms that undertake unique acquisitions: those involving unusual industry combinations. This relationship suggests a possible tension between strategic and motivational consequences of boundary changes. Firms may benefit strategically from these changes, particularly those that enable expansion into unique areas. These same actions, however, may also erode the purpose of the organization, with consequences for downstream performance.

• All Research from Claudine Gartenberg »

Current Courses

• MGMT9000 - Economic Foundations Of Management

  This course examines some of the central questions in management with economic approaches as a starting point, but with an eye to links to behavioral perspectives on these same questions. Economics concerns itself with goal directed behavior of individuals interacting in a competitive context. We adopt that general orientation but recognize that goal directed action need not take the form of maximizing behavior, particularly for organizations comprised of individuals with possibly divergent interests and distinct sub-goals. Further, we treat competitive processes as playing out over meaningful periods of calendar time and, in general, not equilibrating instantaneously. A central property of firms, as with any organization, is the interdependent nature of activity within them. Thus, understanding firms as "systems" is quite important, a perspective which has important implications for understanding processes of organizational adaptation. Among the sorts of questions we explore are the following: What underlies a firm's capabilities? How does individual knowledge aggregate to form collective capabilities? What do these perspectives on firms say about the scope of a firm's activities, both horizontally (diversification) and vertically (buy-supply relationships)? As a "foundations" course, readings will cover key conceptual foundations, but also provide an arc to current work --- an "arc" that will be developed more fully in our in-class discussions.

  MGMT9000001 ( Syllabus )

Past Courses

• MGMT6110 - Managing Est Enterprise

  This course is about managing large enterprises that face the strategic challenge of being the incumbent in the market and the organizational challenge of needing to balance the forces of inertia and change. The firms of interest in this course tend to operate in a wide range of markets and segments, frequently on a global basis, and need to constantly deploy their resources to fend off challenges from new entrants and technologies that threaten their established positions. The class is organized around three distinct but related topics that managers of established firms must consider: strategy, human and social capital, and global strategy.

• MGMT6130 - Manag Estab Enterprise

• MGMT7820 - Strategic Implementation

  Much more is known about strategy formulation than its implementation, yet valid, sensible strategies often fail because of problems on the implementation side. This course provides you with tools to turn good strategy into successful reality. It covers the choices, structure, and conditions that enable the successful attainment of strategic objectives. Students learn from rigorous academic research on successful implementation, as well as a series of seasoned business leaders who will visit to share their own experience from the front lines.

• MGMT8910 - Advanced Study-Smgt

  This 1.0-credit experiential learning course matches small teams of MBA students with innovative technologies developed by Penn researchers. Students will engage directly with inventors to understand the science behind early-stage innovations and explore their potential for commercialization. Through a combination of instructor-led discussions on commercialization frameworks and independent team research, students will gain hands-on experience at the intersection of strategy, innovation, corporate venturing, and entrepreneurship. Projects for this class have been sourced from the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, School of Arts and Sciences, Center for Innovation & Precision Dentistry, and the Stuart Weitzman School of Design. In some cases, established corporations may also be involved, providing additional industry context and pathways to impact. Students must apply to be considered for the course. The course is open to second-semester and second-year MBA students; Wharton Executive MBA (WEMBA) students may also be considered. Ideal candidates have experience or a strong interest in commercialization, innovation, or entrepreneurship.

• MGMT9000 - Sem Strat Mgmt

  This course examines some of the central questions in management with economic approaches as a starting point, but with an eye to links to behavioral perspectives on these same questions. Economics concerns itself with goal directed behavior of individuals interacting in a competitive context. We adopt that general orientation but recognize that goal directed action need not take the form of maximizing behavior, particularly for organizations comprised of individuals with possibly divergent interests and distinct sub-goals. Further, we treat competitive processes as playing out over meaningful periods of calendar time and, in general, not equilibrating instantaneously. A central property of firms, as with any organization, is the interdependent nature of activity within them. Thus, understanding firms as "systems" is quite important, a perspective which has important implications for understanding processes of organizational adaptation. Among the sorts of questions we explore are the following: What underlies a firm's capabilities? How does individual knowledge aggregate to form collective capabilities? What do these perspectives on firms say about the scope of a firm's activities, both horizontally (diversification) and vertically (buy-supply relationships)? As a "foundations" course, readings will cover key conceptual foundations, but also provide an arc to current work --- an "arc" that will be developed more fully in our in-class discussions.

• MGMT9260 - Sem Strat & Org Des

  This half-semester course examines one of the foundational questions in strategy: the role of organizational structure in both supporting and shaping strategy. As Winston Churchill famously said: "We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us." This course examines this proposition from two traditions, the "institutional economics" and "information processing" schools of organizational design. We will examine foundational works from both schools, such as Coase, Williamson, Simon, March, and others, and then proceed to recent work in the area. Some of the questions that we will explore in the class are: why do firms exist? What determines their boundaries? What determines formal and informal structures within firms? How does the strategic context shape the answers to these questions? How might the nature of the firm and its boundaries relate to innovation, human capital, and knowledge creation? The aim of this class is to provide students with a grounding in the fundamental questions and contributions in this area, and to spark ideas for research in their own graduate work.

• MGMT9950 - Dissertation

  Dissertation

• Glueck Best Paper Award, (Best Conference Paper, STR Division) AOM, 2024
• Best Paper Proceedings of the Academy of Management, 2024
• “Above and Beyond” MBA Teaching Award, 2024
• Wharton Teaching Excellence Award, 2024
• SMS Best Research Methods Award, Nominated, 2023
• Wharton Teaching Excellence Award, 2020
• Iron Prof MBA Teaching Competition (third place), 2019
• Ralph Gomory Best Industry Studies Award, Runner Up, 2018
• SMS Best Paper Award Nomination (voluntarily opted out once paper was accepted for publication), 2018
• SMS Best Paper Award Nomination (voluntarily withdrew from consideration when paper was accepted for publication), 2018
• SMS Best Interdisciplinary Paper Award Nomination (voluntarily withdrew from consideration when paper was accepted for publication), 2018
• Best Paper Proceedings of the Academy of Management, 2018
• Ralph Gomory Best Industry Studies Award, Runner Up, 2018
• Wyss Award for Excellence in Doctoral Research, Harvard Business School (one of 4 recipients across all departments), 2010
• Financial Management Association, Best Paper Awards Semifinalist, “Did fair valuation depress equity values during the 2008 financial crisis?” with George Serafeim., 2010
• Wyss Award for Excellence in Doctoral Research, Harvard Business School, 2010
• Harvard University, Derek Bok Center Teaching Award, (rated 5.0 / 5.0 by students versus division average of 4.0 / 5.0)., 2008
• Harvard University, Derek Bok Center Teaching Award, (rated 5.0 / 5.0 by students versus division average of 4.0 / 5.0), 2008
• Harvard Business School, Baker Scholar (top 5% of class)., 2006
• Harvard Business School, Baker Scholar (top 5% of MBA class), 2006

• AI Slop Is Flooding Academic Journals. A Top Journal Measured It, Forbes - 04/30/2026
• How Does Corporate Ownership Affect Employee Compensation?, Columbia Law School Blue Sky Blog - 10/18/2023
• Corporate Purpose and Acquisitions, Columbia Law School Blog - 05/24/2021
• How Corporate Purpose Affects Firms, Promarket - 02/17/2021
• Corporate Ownership Matters to Corporate Purpose and Performance, Forbes - 02/16/2021
• Can Purpose Deliver Better Corporate Governance?, IESE-ECGI Conference - 10/30/2020
• The Next Move: Rethinking Fair Pay, Aspen Institute - 10/29/2020
• 181 Top CEOs Have Realized Companies Need a Purpose Beyond Profit, Harvard Business Review - 08/20/2019
• Professor Claudine Gartenberg's joint research on corporate purpose is highlighted, The Australian - 06/16/2017
• Make every employee a chief purpose officer, Forbes - 04/24/2017
• Competition not always such a healthy thing in the workplace, The Irish Times - 04/18/2017
• It’s Good to Be a Big Corporation Again, Bloomberg - 10/28/2016
• Drive your company’s ‘purpose’ to boost business, HRD Austraria - 10/25/2016
• The Link between Corporate Purpose and Financial Performance, The PNR Paper - 09/23/2016
• People Literally Don’t Understand What’s In Their Credit Card Agreement, BuzzFeed News - 09/13/2016
• When Workplace Competition Causes Negative Results, WorkingCapital Review - 09/30/2015
• Why Employee Ranking Can Backfire, New York Times - 07/11/2015
• Data-Driven Tools Not a Productivity Panacea, CFO.com - 06/04/2015
• When data dooms your company, USA Today - 06/01/2015
• When Data Dooms Your Company, Ozy - 06/01/2015
• Data Can Make for Cutthroat Coworkers, The Atlantic - 05/07/2015
• Is your employer effective at measuring performance?, MPR News - 04/21/2015
• Millions of bees swarm highway; Incentives to pursue trade careers; Ranking employees can be risky, Fleet Owner - 04/20/2015
• The big risk of letting employees know where they rank versus their peers, Government Executive - 04/20/2015
• When Workplace Competitions Backfire, The Wall Street Journal - 04/14/2015
• Disclosures Are Found to Change Financial Behavior, New York Times - 02/22/2012

Knowledge @ Wharton

• Is Overreliance on AI Causing Agency Decay?, Knowledge @ Wharton - 09/15/2026
• Top Tips for Persuading Others, Knowledge @ Wharton - 09/15/2026
• The Liquidity Risk in Private Credit, Knowledge @ Wharton - 09/15/2026
• How AI Is Reshaping Quantitative Finance, Knowledge @ Wharton - 09/14/2026
• The FDNY’s Transformation After 9/11, Knowledge @ Wharton - 09/11/2026
• How the NFL Is Winning a New Generation of Fans, Knowledge @ Wharton - 09/10/2026
• The Business of Shared Scooters, Knowledge @ Wharton - 09/09/2026
• Is This NFL Season More Wide Open Than It Appears?, Knowledge @ Wharton - 09/09/2026
• Greenhushing: When Firms Do More Than They Say, Knowledge @ Wharton - 09/08/2026
• AI Is Producing More Software. Why Isn’t It Being Used?, Knowledge @ Wharton - 09/08/2026