Designing B2B Markets

Published Research

This insightful Handbook provides a comprehensive state-of-the-art review of business-to-business marketing. It supplies an overview and pioneers new ideas relating to the activity of building mutually value-generating relationships between organizations – from businesses to government agencies to not-for-profit organizations – and the many individuals within them.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

A Hegelian Dialogue on the Micro-Foundations of Organizational Routines and Capabilities

Published Research

This paper aims to further the alignment among different theoretical approaches and future scholarship on the complex themes related to the micro-foundational processes characterizing the emergence and development of organizational routines and capabilities. It has been constructed with a typical Hegelian structure represented by a thesis, an antithesis and an attempt of a synthesis, each presented by different scholars.Read More

Capabilities: Their Origins and Ancestry

Published Research

In a statement that is relatively famous, considering its position at the back of an old book, Alfred Marshall remarked on the ‘the manifold influences of the element of time’. He noted the obstacles those influences pose to mathematical analysis (or, he said, any analysis) of a complex, ‘real life’ problem – and the tendencies to over-simplification that often result.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

For the Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Business

Published Research

Millions flock to their computers, consoles, mobile phones, tablets, and social networks each day to play World of Warcraft, Farmville, Scrabble, and countless other games, generating billions in sales each year. The careful and skillful construction of these games is built on decades of research into human motivation and psychology: A well-designed game goes right to the motivational heart of the human psyche.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

International R&D service outsourcing by technology-intensive firms: Whether and where?

Published Research

We combine the streams of literature on outsourcing and offshoring to investigate (1) whether choosing an R&D offshore outsourcing strategy by technological firms is advisable, and (2) where these firms are more likely to allocate these R&D services outsourcing agreements offshore, namely, in developed or developing economies.Read More

Capabilities: Structure, Agency and Evolution

Published Research

This paper examines conceptual issues and reviews empirical results bearing on the relationship between research approaches emphasizing organizational capabilities and those based in transaction cost economics (TCE)—or in organizational economics more generally.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

Team Incentives: Evidence from a Firm Level Experiment

Published Research

Many organizations rely on teamwork, and yet field evidence on the impacts of team-based incentives remains scarce. Compared to individual incentives, team incentives can affect productivity by changing both workers’ effort and team composition. We present evidence from a field experiment designed to evaluate the impact of rank incentives and tournaments on the productivity and composition of teams.Read More

Balance Within and Across Domains: The Performance Implications of Exploration and Exploitation in Alliances

Published Research

Organizational research advocates that firms balance exploration and exploitation, yet it acknowledges inherent challenges in reconciling these opposing activities. To overcome these challenges, such research suggests that firms establish organizational separation between exploring and exploiting units or engage in temporal separation whereby they oscillate between exploration and exploitation over time.Read More

Purpose and Progress in the Theory of Strategy: Comments on Gavetti

Published Research

This article comments on the behavioral theory of strategy advanced in Gavetti. His proposal offers valuable insights into the cognitive aspects of strategy when leaders are trying for big wins. It provides less guidance for understanding the actual achievement of success, partly because it underestimates the role of serendipity and of contextual factors illuminated by prior strategy research.Read More

The Evolution of Alliance Portfolios: The Case of Unisys

Published Research

How do alliance portfolios evolve? We develop grounded theory based on Unisys’ case, which reveals how exogenous technological changes at the industry level and shifts in a firm’s strategy shape the composition of partners and the nature of alliance relationships.Read More

Evolving Communication Patterns In Response to an Acquisition Event

Published Research

This study combines qualitative and quantitative methods, with particular emphasis on network data of worker behavior, to analyze changes in worker communication patterns during the first three years of a post-acquisition integration. The findings suggest that new communication routines develop slowly and are not entirely enduring even when a transformative event, such as an acquisition, occurs.Read More

Advancing the Conceptualization and Operationalization of Novelty in Organizational Research

Published Research

The construct of novelty is an important primitive for theories of organization learning, strategic change, and innovation. The organizational pursuit of novelty is generally theorized as necessary for long-term organizational adaptation and survival yet variance increasing in the short term.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

The Impact of Automation of Systems on Medical Errors: Evidence from Field Research

Published Research

Abstract: We use panel data from multiple wards from two hospitals spanning a three-year period to investigate the impact of automation of the core error prevention functions in hospitals on medical error rates. Although there are studies based on anecdotal evidence and self-reported data on how automation impacts medical errors, no systematic studies exist that are based on actual error rates from hospitals.Read More

Bounding an emerging technology: Para-scientific media and the Drexler-Smalley debate about nanotechnology

Published Research

‘Nanotechnology’ is often touted as a significant emerging technological field. However, determining what nanotechnology means, whose research counts as nanotechnology, and who gets to speak on behalf of nanotechnology is a highly political process involving constant negotiation with significant implications for funding, legislation, and citizen support.Read More

Governing Collaborative Activity: Interdependence and the Impact of Coordination and Exploration

Published Research

We examine the performance implications of selecting alternate modes of governance in interorganizational alliance relationships. While managers can choose from a range of modes to govern alliances, prior empirical evidence offers limited guidance on the performance impact of this choice.Read More