Competing Technologies and Industry Evolution: The Benefits of Making Mistakes in the Flat Panel Display Industry

Published Research

This article investigates the post-entry implications of pre-entry technological choices made during the uncertain period before a dominant design. Building on work on technological dynamics and organizational inertia, I argue that too early commitments to the winning technology may impede the ability to bring the best product to market, but delaying investment too long limits the ability to accumulate useful knowledge.Read More

Differentiated Bidders and Bidding Behavior in Procurement Auctions

Published Research

Why do bidders in buyer-determined procurement auctions often bid above the lowest observed bid over the course of the auction? Are such bidding patterns meaningful? In this research, the authors propose that bidders infer their potential quality advantage or disadvantage through their observation of competitive bids and incorporate this information into their responses and price bids.Read More

Resources as Dual Sources of Advantage: Implications for Valuing Entrepreneurial-Firm Patents

Published Research

Why and how do resources provide sources of competitive advantage? This study sheds new light on this central question of resource-based theory by allowing a single resource—entrepreneurial-firm patents—to play distinctive roles in different competitive arenas. As rights to exclude others, patents serve a well-known role as legal safeguards in product markets.Read More

Falling Flat: Failed Technologies and Investment Under Uncertainty

Published Research

This study theorizes about the behavioral and knowledge creation implications of betting on the losing technology in a competing technology situation and focuses on three main outcomes. First, in a situation with competing technological options, firms that invest initially in the losing technology will be less successful subsequently in building new knowledge.Read More

When Do Firms Divest Foreign Operations?

Published Research

Extant literature on divestment has repeatedly found that firms are likely to divest their poorly performing operations. In this paper, I consider how product market relatedness and geographic market differences in growth, policy stability, and exchange rate volatility can moderate the negative relationship between performance and divestment.Read More

Coordinating and Competing in Ecosystems: How Organizational Forms Shape New Technology Investments

Published Research

We consider firms in the context of their business ecosystems and explore how differences in the ways in which firms are organized with respect to complementary activities affect their decision to invest in new technologies.Read More

Media Multiplexing Behavior: Implications for Targeting and Media Planning

Published Research

There is a growing trend among consumers to serially consume small, incomplete “chunks” of multiple media types—television, radio, Internet, and print—within a short time period. We refer to this behavior as media multiplexing and note the key challenges for integrated marketing communications media planners.Read More

Movie piracy and sales displacement in two samples of Chinese consumers

Published Research

Intellectual property piracy is widely believed, by authorities in both US industry and government, to be rampant in China. Because we lack evidence on the rate at which unpaid consumption displaces paid consumption, we know little about the size of the effect of pirate consumption on the volume of paid consumption. Read More

The Dynamics of Wealth, Profit and Sustainable Advantage

Published Research

This paper shows how idiosyncratic resources can drive sustained profitability and persistent heterogeneity under competitive conditions. Generic inputs purchased in the market become idiosyncratic resources as the result of firms’ investments in customization.Read More

The Challenge of Revenue Sharing with Bundled Pricing: An Application to Music

Published Research

Bundling can increase revenue and profits relative to selling products on a standalone basis, and this is an especially attractive strategy for zero-marginal-cost information products. Despite the clear benefits of bundling, it has one major problem: bundling produces revenue that is not readily attributable to particular pieces of intellectual property.Read More

The Immaterial Text: Digital Technology, the Google Book Settlement, and the Distribution of Print Culture in the United States

Published Research

In 2004 the Internet search firm Google announced an ambitious plan to scan and render searchable the contents of major research libraries. This amounted to a large-scale effort to render the contents of the books into immaterial and easily manipulated and transferred information.Read More

Preference Minorities and the Internet

Published Research

Offline retailers face trading area and shelf space constraints, so they offer products tailored to the needs of the majority. Consumers whose preferences are dissimilar to the majority — “preference minorities” — are underserved offline and should be more likely to shop online. The authors use sales data from Diapers.com, the leading U.S. online retailer for baby diapers, to show why geographic variation in preference minority status of target customers explains geographic variation in online sales.Read More

Perspectives on Firm Decision Making During Risky Technology Acquisitions

Published Research

A novel survey dataset on computed tomography (CT) machine acquisition is used to explore which theories best answer two questions from the decision making literature. First, what determines how much uncertainty a firm has when investing in updated technology? Second, what determines the value of the acquisition? In answering these questions, two theoretical comparisons are conducted.Read More

Capacity Investment Timing by Start-ups and Established Firms in New Markets

Published Research

We analyze the competitive capacity investment timing decisions of both established firms and start-ups entering new markets which are characterized by a high degree of demand uncertainty. Firms may invest in capacity early (when the market is highly uncertain) or late (when market uncertainty has been resolved), possibly at different costs.Read More

Stuck in the Adoption Funnel: The Effect of Delays in the Adoption Process on Ultimate Adoption

Published Research

Many firms have introduced Internet-based customer self-service applications such as online payments or brokerage services. Despite high initial sign-up rates, not all customers actually shift their dealings online. We investigate whether the multistage nature of the adoption process (an “adoption funnel”) for such technologies can explain this low take-up.Read More

Emergence of new markets, distributed entrepreneurship and the university: Fostering development in India

Published Research

University-industry partnerships facilitate socio-economic development by incubating innovations and diffusing entrepreneurial capabilities to create new markets in rural areas. Complexity theory based approaches are used to develop a process model of emergence based on a case study of a leading Indian technical institution involved in creating new technologies and markets.Read More

Opportunity Spaces in Innovation: Empirical Analysis of Large Samples of Ideas

Published Research

A common approach to innovation, parallel search, is to identify a large number of opportunities and then to select a subset for further development, with just a few coming to fruition. One potential weakness with parallel search is that it permits repetition. The same, or a similar, idea might be generated multiple times.Read More

Price Effects in Online Product Reviews: An Analytical Model and Empirical Analysis

Published Research

Consumer reviews may reflect not only perceived quality but also the difference between quality and price (perceived value). In markets where product prices change frequently, these price-influenced reviews may be biased as a signal of product quality when used by consumers possessing no knowledge of historical prices.Read More

Revenue Management with Strategic Customers: Last-Minute Selling and Opaque Selling

Published Research

Companies in a variety of industries (e.g., airlines, hotels, theaters) often use last-minute sales to dispose of unsold capacity. Although this may generate incremental revenues in the short term, the long-term consequences of such a strategy are not immediately obvious.Read More

Value Creation and Destruction: A Study of the US Medical Devices Industry

Published Research

This dissertation studies firm strategy to gain technological knowledge from external sources in dynamic industries and the performance implications of these strategies. In dynamic industries, firms need to integrate new knowledge, and build new resources and capabilities to maintain competitive advantage.Read More