Masaryk University Economic Seminars

Healthcare organizations increasingly invest in innovative technologies to improve quality, outcomes, and efficiency. Yet, the successful adoption of complex innovations depends not only on their technical performance but also on how they are integrated into organizational processes. Robot-Assisted Surgery provides an important example of this challenge, as implementation success is strongly influenced by organizational factors. This research examines how healthcare professionals’ involvement in technology evaluation influences the effective implementation of innovations. Building on organizational theory, Health Technology Assessment, and the implementation climate literature developed by Klein and Sorra in 1996 and Helfrich et al in 2007, the study argues that participation in assessment and decision-making fosters acceptance, legitimacy, and alignment between clinical and managerial priorities. Innovation adoption is therefore conceptualized as an organizational process in which professional involvement acts as a key governance mechanism.

The empirical setting is the IRCCS Sant’Orsola University Hospital of Bologna, where, in 2026, a participatory evaluation process was implemented to assess three robotic surgical platforms. Surgeons, anaesthesiologists, and operating room nurses were the protagonists in defining the evaluation criteria and designing the comparative testing protocols, which were implemented through both simulation-based exercises and clinical activities. The project led to the development of profession-specific questionnaires for the different stakeholder groups, resulting in the collection of 357 evaluations and the treatment of 39 patients over a 42-days period. The expected outcome is a healthcare-specific framework explaining how stakeholder involvement contributes to implementation effectiveness. The research highlights factors such as multidisciplinary coordination, shared responsibility, feedback integration, and alignment between managerial and clinical priorities, arguing that the value of innovation depends not only on technology itself but also on the organizational processes through which it is adopted and integrated into practice.

Tommaso Roccabianca is a PhD Candidate in Public Governance, Management and Policy at the Department of Management, University of Bologna, and a collaborator at IRCCS Sant'Orsola University Hospital since 2024. His research focuses on the adoption and implementation of technological innovations in healthcare organizations, with particular attention to robotic surgery, operating room management, and the organizational changes associated with the introduction of new technologies.

Sign up for a 1-to-1 meeting with Tommaso: https://is.muni.cz/tudle/mhlp

Why do shareholder activists disproportionately target female-led firms? Using US shareholder activism data from 2006 to 2018, we examine gender stereotyping and value creation as competing explanations for this phenomenon. To test these explanations and draw causal inferences, we employ an extended regression framework with instrumental variables. We find that CEO gender primarily affects activists’ targeting decisions rather than subsequent campaign dynamics. Specifically, after accounting for non-random CEO appointments and target selection, having a female CEO significantly increases the likelihood of activist targeting, but has little effect on campaign characteristics (e.g., activist hostility) or outcomes (e.g., activist success) once targeted. These findings are more consistent with gender stereotyping — particularly role congruity theory — than with value creation explanations. Overall, our results indicate gender bias in shareholder activism, suggesting that such bias may undermine the effectiveness of shareholder monitoring and distract female leaders from managing their firms.

Base-rate neglect—the failure of posterior beliefs to fully incorporate prior probabilities—is one of the most robust deviations from Bayesian updating. We argue that the literature has largely conflated two distinct psychological mechanisms that can generate this pattern. The first is the fallacy of the uniform prior (FUP), whereby individuals update as if the prior were uniform. The second is the fallacy of the transposed conditional (FTC), whereby individuals treat the precision of a signal as if it were the posterior probability. While both mechanisms imply base-rate neglect, they map information into beliefs in fundamentally different ways. We show that they are observationally equivalent under symmetric information structures, which dominate existing designs, but diverge under asymmetry. We develop a framework that nests both mechanisms and an experimental design that identifies them empirically.

Ro'i Zultan is a professor at the Department of Economics at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and the director of the Negev Experimental Economics Laboratory. He is an experimental economist with a background in cognitive and experimental psychology. His research focuses on understanding how group dynamics influence cognition and behavior, as well as on broader questions of cooperation, coordination, and decision-making in teams. He is also interested in game theory, market efficiency, ethics, and the methodological foundations of experimental research.

Sign up for a 1-to-1 meeting with Ro'i: https://is.muni.cz/tudle/ailg
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