- Original authors / creators
- Yuanbo Hu; Ruiyuan Cong; Ran Teng; Baolong Ji
- Original publication
- PLOS One · Public Library of Science · 2025-11-25
- License & retained notices
- CC BY 4.0
© 2025 Hu et al
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https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Article-specific license URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ - Edition changes
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- Evidence limits
- Adjacent research, not a directly sampled family-office study. Applicability to a family office requires separate assessment. This study, while contributing to the literature, is subject to several limitations that offer promising avenues for future research. First, our study relies on the number of patent applications as the primary proxy for corporate technological innovation. We acknowledge that patents represent a quantifiable but incomplete measure of a firm’s innovative output. This metric may not fully capture non-patentable forms of innovation, such as novel business models, organizational process improvements, or service innovations, nor does it inherently differentiate between high-impact and incremental patents. Despite this limitation, the use of patent data is a widely accepted practice in innovation research, providing an objective and comparable measure of innovative activity that aligns with numerous prior studies. Future research could extend our work by incorporating alternative or complementary metrics, such as R&D expenditure, new product announcements, or citation-weighted patent quality, to provide a more holistic view of the innovation landscape. Third, to operationalize the challenging construct of CEO greed, this study adopts a scientifically robust, multi-dimensional approach. Grounded in authoritative prior literature [5,23,39], we employ a composite index derived from three distinct compensation-based proxies, synthesized using Principal Component Analysis (PCA). This method provides a valuable and replicable means of capturing the behavioral manifestations of this intrinsic personality trait. We acknowledge, however, that our compensation-based proxy could, to some extent, also reflect other factors, such as efficient contracting outcomes or specific board-level governance policies. Future research might therefore build upon our findings by employing more direct psychological assessments to further disentangle these complex motivations.
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