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Publications
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- October 2013
- Article
How Much to Make and How Much to Buy? An Analysis of Optimal Plural Sourcing Strategies
By: Phanish Puranam, Ranjay Gulati and Sourav Bhattacharya
While many theories of the firm seek to explain when firms make rather than buy, in practice, firms often make and buy the same input—they engage in plural sourcing. We argue that explaining the mix of external procurement and internal sourcing for the same input... View Details
- September–October 2013
- Article
Discretion Within Constraint: Homophily and Structure in a Formal Organization
By: Adam M. Kleinbaum, Toby E. Stuart and Michael Tushman
Homophily in social relations results from both individual preferences and selective opportunities for interaction, but how these two mechanisms interact in large, contemporary organizations is not well understood. We argue that organizational structures and geography... View Details
- September–October 2013
- Article
The Role of Organizational Scope and Governance in Strengthening Private Monitoring
By: Lamar Pierce and Michael W. Toffel
Governments and other organizations often outsource activities to achieve cost savings from market competition. Yet such benefits are often accompanied by poor quality resulting from moral hazard, which can be particularly onerous when outsourcing the monitoring and... View Details
Keywords: Crime and Corruption; Decision Choices and Conditions; Corporate Accountability; Governance Compliance; Policy; Management Practices and Processes; Demand and Consumers; Market Design; Market Entry and Exit; Market Transactions; Service Delivery; Service Operations; Business Processes; Organizational Structure; Performance Effectiveness; Performance Expectations; Practice; Transportation; Transportation Industry; Service Industry; United States; New York (state, US)
- 2013
- Working Paper
Bank Failures and Output During the Great Depression
By: Jeffrey Miron and Natalia Rigol
In response to the Financial Crisis of 2008, macroeconomic policymakers employed a range of tools designed to prevent failures of large, complex financial institutions (“banks”). The Treasury and the Fed justified these actions by arguing that bank failures exacerbate... View Details
- August 2013
- Article
Customer-Driven Misconduct: How Competition Corrupts Business Practices
By: Victor Manuel Bennett, Lamar Pierce, Jason A. Snyder and Michael W. Toffel
Competition among firms yields many benefits but can also encourage firms to engage in corrupt or unethical activities. We argue that competition can lead organizations to provide services that customers demand but that violate government regulations, especially when... View Details
- Article
Media versus Special Interests
By: Alexander Dyck, David Moss and Luigi Zingales
We argue that profit-maximizing media help to overcome the rational ignorance problem highlighted by Anthony Downs. By collecting news and combining it with entertainment, media are able to inform passive voters about regulation and other public policy issues, acting... View Details
- 2013
- Working Paper
Debating the Responsibility of Capitalism in Historical and Global Perspective
By: Geoffrey Jones
This working paper examines the evolution of concepts of the responsibility of business in a historical and global perspective. It shows that from the nineteenth century American, European, Japanese, Indian and other business leaders discussed the responsibilities of... View Details
Keywords: Rachel Carson; Sustainability; Local Food; Operations Management; Supply Chain; Business And Society; Business Ethics; Business History; Corporate Philanthropy; Corporate Social Responsibility; Corporate Social Responsibility And Impact; Environmentalism; Environmental Entrepreneurship; Environmental And Social Sustainability; Ethics; Globalization; History; Religion; Consumer Products Industry; Chemical Industry; Beauty and Cosmetics Industry; Energy Industry; Food and Beverage Industry; Forest Products Industry; Green Technology Industry; Manufacturing Industry; Asia; Europe; Latin America; Middle East; North and Central America; Africa
- Summer 2013
- Article
A Tale of Two Stories: Sustainability and the Quarterly Earnings Call
By: Robert G. Eccles and George Serafeim
One of the challenges companies claim to face in making sustainability a core part of their strategy and operations is that the market does not care about sustainability, either in general or because the time frames in which it matters are too long. The response of... View Details
- 2013
- Chapter
Market Imperfections and Sustainable Competitive Advantage
By: Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Dennis Yao
This chapter reviews the main theories in strategic management that seek to explain persistent differences in profitability across companies. We argue that these differences are ultimately explained by market imperfections. Studying differences in financial performance... View Details
- Summer 2013
- Other Article
The Roots of Our Tax Debates
Our fiscal debates are endlessly frustrating. The outlines of a compromise seem clear, yet both sides remain incapable of agreement. But is the proper balance between spending less and taxing more really so obvious? A look at what underlies the political wars over... View Details
- June 2013
- Case
Hess Corporation
By: Jay W. Lorsch and Kathleen Durante
On January 29, 2013, Elliott Management, a hedge fund run by Paul E. Singer, which owned 4.5% of Hess Corporation stock, put forward a slate of five independent directors it wanted elected to improve the company's performance. Elliott argued that Hess lacked focus and... View Details
- June 2013
- Article
Signals across Multiple Networks: How Venture Capital and Alliance Networks Affect Interorganizational Collaboration
By: Umit Ozmel, Jeffrey J. Reuer and Ranjay Gulati
In this paper, we examine the contingent effects of signals generated by different types of networks on new ventures' formation of future strategic alliances. We argue that the signaling value of a given tie in reducing adverse selection is more pronounced when another... View Details
- 2015
- Working Paper
Measurement Errors of Expected-Return Proxies and the Implied Cost of Capital
Despite their popularity as proxies of expected returns, the implied cost of capital's (ICC) measurement error properties are relatively unknown. Through an in-depth analysis of a popular implementation of ICCs by Gebhardt, Lee, and Swaminathan (2001) (GLS), I show... View Details
- Spring 2013
- Article
America's Changing Corporate Boardrooms: The Last Twenty-Five Years
By: Jay W. Lorsch
This article outlines several significant changes in corporate boardrooms over the past twenty-five years and uses those lessons to propose a thought experiment about how boards can be shaped in the future. Professor Lorsch argues that the major problems in the last... View Details
- Article
Intermediary Functions and the Market for Innovation in Meiji and Taisho Japan
By: Tom Nicholas and Hiroshi Shimizu
Japan experienced a transformational phase of technological development during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We argue that an important, but so far neglected, factor was a developing market for innovation and a patent attorney system that was... View Details
- April 2013
- Article
Overcoming Resistance to Organizational Change: Strong Ties and Affective Cooptation
By: Julie Battilana and Tiziana Casciaro
We propose a relational theory of how change agents in organizations use the strength of ties in their network to overcome resistance to change. We argue that strong ties to potentially influential organization members who are ambivalent about a change (fence-sitters)... View Details
- 2013
- Working Paper
Entrepreneurs, Firms and Global Wealth since 1850
By: G. Jones
This working paper integrates the role of entrepreneurship and firms into debates on why Asia, Latin America and Africa were slow to catch up with the West following the Industrial Revolution and the advent of modern economic growth. It argues that the currently... View Details
Keywords: Institutional Change; Political Economy; Emerging Economies; Developing Countries; Industrial Development; Culture; Human Capital; Economic History; History; Wealth and Poverty; Business History; Emerging Markets; Globalization; Developing Countries and Economies; Manufacturing Industry; Mining Industry; Service Industry; Latin America; Asia; North and Central America; Africa; South America; Europe
- 2013
- Working Paper
Managers and Market Capitalism
By: Rebecca Henderson and Karthik Ramanna
In a capitalist system based on free markets, do managers have responsibilities to the system itself? If they do, should these responsibilities shape their behavior when they are engaging in the political process in an attempt to structure the institutions of... View Details
- March 2013
- Article
From Social Control to Financial Economics: The Linked Ecologies of Economics and Business in Twentieth Century America
By: Marion Fourcade and Rakesh Khurana
This article draws on historical material to examine the co-evolution of economic science and business education over the course of the twentieth century, showing that fields evolve not only through internal struggles but also through struggles taking place in adjacent... View Details
Keywords: Professions; Disciplines; Neo-Liberalism; Education; Economics; Finance; Society; United States
- Article
Beyond Magic Bullets: True Innovation in Health Care
By: Vaibhav A. Narayan, Marco Mohwinckel, Gary Pisano, Michael Yang and Husseini Manji
The molecular medicine revolution—based on advances in fields such as genomics and network modeling in the decade since the human genome sequence was completed—has changed the way we think about, study, and approach the development of novel therapies. However, these... View Details