Posts filed under ‘Strategic Management’
More on Property Rights and Strategic Management
| Nicolai Foss |
The economics of property rights in the tradition of Ronald Coase, Armen Alchian, Harold Demsetz, Steven Cheung, Winston Bush, Eirik Furubotn, Yoram Barzel, John Umbeck, Dean Lueck and Doug Allen is a very minor voice in the conversation of strategic management scholars. Although the EPR is basically generalized micro-economics (mostly done verbally), it does employ terminology and develops insights that lie outside the domain of economics knowledge of most strategy scholars. (more…)
MDE Special Issue, “Frontiers of Strategic Management Research”
| Peter Klein |
The March-April 2008 issue of Managerial and Decision Economics features a special issue on “Frontiers of Strategic Management Research,” edited by Catherine Maritan and Margaret Peteraf. Contributors include Mary Tripsas, Bill Hesterly, Jeff Dyer, Kyle Mayer, Janet Bercovitz, Ranjay Gulati, Bob Hoskisson, Jay Barney, Kathy Eisenhardt, Michael Jacobides, and many others. From the introduction:
Scholars working in the field of strategic management are fundamentally concerned with developing an understanding of how firms compete and how they can create competitive advantage. In addressing this overarching issue we ask questions about such diverse topics as the relationship between firms and industry conditions, the origins and consequences of heterogeneity among firms, how the scope of a firm’s activities affects how it competes, and factors that affect inter-organizational relationships. (more…)
BYU-Utah Winter Strategy Conference
| Nicolai Foss |
The BYU-University of Utah Winter Strategy Conference 2008 ended a couple of hours ago here in Sundance. Before I embark upon my 23-hrs trip home, I offer some fresh impressions.
As usual I was struck by the difference in the overall quality level relative to comparable arrangements in Europe. I submit that it would not be possible to make a similar conference in Europe (with only Euro scholars participating). The research that was presented was top-notch, the presentation skills that were exercised were impressive (Brian Silverman should seek alternative employment as a stand-up comedian), and the organization was just perfect. Add to this the magnificent surroundings of Sundance and the result is essentially conference perfection. The only possible critique that might be raised is that there was a significant, and in IMHO excessive, diversity in terms of the subjects, research methods, etc.
In terms of the presentations some of the highlights were these: (more…)
Off to Sundance
| Nicolai Foss |
Teppo Felin has been raving about the BYU-University of Utah Winter Strategy Conference, and I decided to accept an invitation for this year’s conference which takes place at the Sundance Resort. I am off tomorrow, and should arrive after about 17 hours of travel (sigghhh!). The program (which doesn’t seem to be online) looks magnificent with talks by Michael Tushman, Dan Levinthal, and Brian Silverman, and panels with Jay Barney, Joel Baum, Jackson Nickerson and other illustrious people in the strategic management community. The conference seems to be relatively small (max. 50 people) and largely Euro-free (with the exception of Gino Cattani and yours truly), which means clear and focused. I will offer some thoughts here on O&M on what I hear at the Sundance conference.
Langlois Economics of Organization Course
| Peter Klein |
Don’t you wish you could sign up? Fortunately the reading list and slides are available to all. And check out this great homework assignment.
Porter’s Five Forces, Updated
| Peter Klein |
The current issue of HBR features Porter’s “The Five Competitive Forces That Shape Strategy,” a review and update of his famous framework (via Luke). The revision doesn’t include a sixth force, but Porter does add some refinements and clarifications (e.g., the differences between an industry’s underlying structure and observable attributes like the number of firms, industry growth, etc.), and he includes some discussion of dynamics. There’s also a video. Here’s the introductory blurb:
In 1979, Harvard Business Review published “How Competitive Forces Shape Strategy” by a young economist and associate professor, Michael E. Porter. It was his first HBR article, and it started a revolution in the strategy field. In subsequent decades, Porter has brought his signature economic rigor to the study of competitive strategy for corporations, regions, nations, and, more recently, health care and philanthropy. “Porter’s five forces” have shaped a generation of academic research and business practice. With prodding and assistance from Harvard Business School Professor Jan Rivkin and longtime colleague Joan Magretta, Porter here reaffirms, updates, and extends the classic work. He also addresses common misunderstandings, provides practical guidance for users of the framework, and offers a deeper view of its implications for strategy today.
There is of course a huge secondary and practitioner literature on the five-forces framework and its applications. (more…)
Adoption and Diffusion of Organizational Innovation
| Peter Klein |
Most theories of organizational form are framed in comparative-static, equilibrium terms. What organizational forms — degree of vertical integration, use of incentive pay, assignment of decision rights, and the like — are “optimal” in given circumstances (transactional attributes, industry conditions, legal or political environments)? There are lots of theoretical and empirical studies on these questions. And yet, we know relatively little about how new organizational forms emerge and how existing organizations change. Is change explained best in a comparative-statics framework — some underlying condition changed, leading firms to jump from the previously optimal, equilibrium form to a new, equilibrium form? Or is some kind of experimental, evolutionary, or institutional model required?
A new paper by Lisa Lynch, “The Adoption and Diffusion of Organizational Innovation: Evidence for the U.S. Economy,” addresses these questions empirically:
Using a unique longitudinal representative survey of both manufacturing and non-manufacturing businesses in the United States during the 1990’s, I examine the incidence and intensity of organizational innovation and the factors associated with investments in organizational innovation. Past profits tend to be positively associated with organizational innovation. Employers with a more external focus and broader networks to learn about best practices (as proxied by exports, benchmarking, and being part of a multi-establishment firm) are more likely to invest in organizational innovation. Investments in human capital, information technology, R&D, and physical capital appear to be complementary with investments in organizational innovation. In addition, non-unionized manufacturing plants are more likely to have invested more broadly and intensely in organizational innovation.
See also this paper on the evolution of contractual practices in US agriculture.
“The Age of Temporary Advantage”
| Nicolai Foss ]
Rich D’Aveni, Gianbattista Dagnino and Ken Smith have just disseminated a call for papers for a special issue of the Strategic Management Journal on the above subject. The purpose of the special issue, they explain, is to “develop theory and empirical evidence about whether and why competitive advantages are becoming less sustainable, and how organizations can successfully compete using a series of temporary or dynamic competitive advantages. The primary goal is to ask: What would the field of strategy look like if the sustainability of competitive advantage was very rare or nonexistent?” (more…)
Call for Papers: Honoring the Life and Works of Alfred Chandler
| Peter Klein |
Shawn Carraher and John Humphreys are editing a special issue of the Journal of Management History devoted to the life and work of the late Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. (1918-2007). Submissions are due 7 April 2008. Details below the fold. (more…)
ASSA 2008 Papers on Organizations
| Peter Klein |
Some interesting papers from the ASSA Meeting in New Orleans, where I’ll be spending the next couple of days. (I don’t have links, so you’ll have to do your own Googling to find the texts.)
ROBERT GIBBONS and REBECCA HENDERSON, Massachusetts Institute of Technology — What Do Managers Do? Suggestive Evidence and Potential Theories about Building and Managing Relational Contracts
CLAUDE MENARD, ATOM – University of Paris Pantheon-Sorbonne — The Governance of Interfirm Agreements: A Relational Contract Perspective
RICARD GIL, University California-Santa Cruz, and JEAN-MICHEL OUDOT, ATOM – University Paris Pantheon-Sorbonne — Contractual Completeness and Ex-post Efficiency: Trade-Offs between Ex-Ante and Ex-Post Costs in Contract Design
LUIS GARICANO and PAUL HEATON, University of Chicago — Information Technology, Organization, and Productivity in the Public Sector: Evidence from Police Departments
DANIEL SPULBER, Northwestern University — Entrepreneurs in the Theory of the Firm (more…)
Et Tu, Opera?
| Peter Klein |
Opera is an innovative company that makes a fine web browser and has a devoted following. I use Opera Mini, which is in many ways superior to the native browser on my BlackBerry. So I was dismayed to learn that Opera has adopted the “if you can’t beat ’em, file an antitrust suit against ’em” approach to its dealings with Microsoft. Happily for Opera, the company is based in Norway, allowing it to make its case before the Microsoft-unfriendly European Commission without being accused of forum-shopping. But, really, haven’t we been through all this already?
Ratings Agencies
| Steve Phelan |
One of my hobbies is to perform counterfactual exercises in organization design (yes, sad, I know). Here is my current challenge. Ratings agencies like Moody’s are paid by the issuers of securities rather than the purchasers of the securities. This creates an agency problem because the rater has an incentive to give high ratings to stay in the good graces of the issuer — who will presumably “shop around” to get the best ratings.
Assuming this arrangement is efficient then what are the counterbalancing factors that offset the agency costs? How much would agency costs have to increase to trigger an adjustment in design? Was the the subprime fiasco such a trigger? What would the new design look like?
I know that economists are reluctant to second-guess how the market will work out its problems — but strategists are in the business of being proactive about these things :-)
Fundamental Questions About Organizations
| Peter Klein |
Our most popular tag here at O&M seems to be ephemera, but occasionally we write a “big think” post (e.g., this one). Today I’ll offer another. A colleague recently asked me to write down, for a research project we’re sketching out, some “fundamental questions about organizations.” He wanted my off-the-cuff response, not a carefully crafted set of ideas. Here’s what I came up with:
1. Does organizational form matter? How much does it really affect performance, however measured? Organizational form might not be that important because (a) its effects on performance are small relative to the performance effects of technical or allocative efficiency; (b) organizational form is easily changed and always chosen optimally to fit the circumstances; or (c) organizational form is merely a legal distinction without any economic significance. (more…)
Poor INSEAD
| Peter Klein |
Business school Insead, founded in 1957 in Fontainebleau, France, opened a campus in Singapore in 2000 and markets itself as “Business School for the World.” “People assume the majority of faculty and students are French,” complains Insead Dean Frank Brown. “That’s not true.”
We’re not French — not that there’s anything wrong with that. This comes from an interesting item about firms with multiple corporate headquarters in yesterday’s WSJ. Lenovo has corporate offices in Beijing, Singapore and Raleigh, N.C. Thomson SA CEO Frank Dangeard says he doesn’t “want people to think we’re based anyplace.” Lenovo’s William Amelio claims the concept of a home country is “outdated.” (Pankaj Ghemawat, call your office!)
There’s a bit of work in multinational strategy about the distribution of subsidiaries across countries and the relationships between subsidiaries and the corporate office. I’m not aware of any studies on multiple corporate offices, however. Any suggestions?
Relevance and Practice
| Steve Phelan |
Peter, thank you for the warm introduction. In addition to 15 years in academia, I also had another life working in strategic planning in major corporations in Australia and undertaking the odd strategy consulting gig. I’ve also had the pleasure of teaching executive courses on four continents.
In all this time, the most common critique I encounter is the lack of relevance of academic courses to the “real world”. I am sure that many readers will agree that the 1980s and 1990s were an exciting time to be a strategy practitioner or researcher. The work of Porter and Barney (among many others) brought a level of rigor to the discipline that promised to revolutionize the practice of strategy.
(more…)
Individuals and Organizations at DRUID Redux
| Nicolai Foss |
There are few things more time-consuming than hustling for slush funds in the university system (as George Stigler once quipped, academic infights are particularly violent because the stakes are so low!) — which explains my very low blogging frequency over the last 4-5 weeks. However, I should have more time on my hands now, so here goes:
As I related earlier, this year’s D(anish) R(esearch) U(nit) (for) I(ndustrial) D(ynamics) conference highlighted methodological individualism in a panel debate between Peter Abell, Thorbjørn Knudsen, Sid Winter, and yours truly (here is the stream). Although the DRUID crowd didn’t wholeheartedly embrace methodological individualism, the broader theme of micro-foundations — explicitly promoted in a management context for some time now by Teppo Felin and I (eg., here, here, and here) — seems to have caught on.
Thus, Thorbjørn Knudsen organizes a one day event, a “DRUID Fundamental” back-to-back to next years DRUID conference on the subject of micro-foundations in strategy and organization. It takes place on June 17. Among the speakers are Rich Burton, Linda Argote, Ranjay Gulati, Sid Winter, and the present blogger. Check Thorbjørn’s call here.
I’m Not Narcissistic, Just Really Important
| Peter Klein |
If you have the kind of sophisticated sense of humor I have, you enjoy Bud Light’s “Real Men of Genius” series. Yesterday I heard the salute to “Mr. Stadium Scoreboard Marriage Proposal Guy”:
You’ve combined the three things you love most in the this world:
Your girlfriend, your team, and lots and lots of attention.
I thought of that when reading Arijit Chatterjee and Donald Hambrick’s recent ASQ paper, “It’s All About Me: Narcissistic CEOs and Their Effects on Company Strategy and Performance” (working-paper version here).
This study uses unobtrusive measures of the narcissism of chief executive officers (CEOs) — the prominence of the CEO’s photograph in annual reports, the CEO’s prominence in press releases, the CEO’s use of first-person singular pronouns in interviews, and compensation relative to the second-highest-paid firm executive — to examine the effect of CEO narcissism on a firm’s strategy and performance. Results of an empirical study of 11 CEOs in the computer hardware and software industries in 1992-2004 show that narcissism in CEOs is positively related to strategic dynamism and grandiosity, as well as the number and size of acquisitions, and it engenders extreme and fluctuating organizational performance. The results suggest that narcissistic CEOs favor bold actions that attract attention, resulting in big wins or big losses, but that, in these industries, their firm’s performance is generally no better or worse than firms with non-narcissistic CEOs.
Remember, there’s no “I” in “team” — but if you look closely, you’ll find a “me.”
More on the Noble Prize (or the Economics Prize in Memory of Nobel)
| David Hoopes |
Since the O&Mers have been so quiet about the N prize I guess I’ll ramble a bit. In a comment on one of Peter’s posts I mentioned Demsetz and Alchian. For some reason I had it in my head that A.A. had already won. That’s what I get for staying at UCLA for so long (Alchian had just quit teaching when I got there).
I don’t know why I thought Alchian had won it. “Production, Information costs and Economic Organization” (with Harold Demsetz), American Economic Review 62 (1972): 777-95 is a pretty amazing paper. And “Vertical Integration, Appropriable Rents, and the Competitive Contracting Process” (with Robert Crawford and Bejamin Klein), Journal of Law and Economics (1978) has been very influential. Though I think people think of Ben Klein for that paper. As noted above, Alchian is very well known for (and thought of because of ) “Uncertainty, Evolution and Economic Theory,” Journal of Political Economy 58 (1950): 211-21.
Having said all that, I think srp is correct in that Alchian’s best chance is going in with Nelson and Winter for evolutionary economics or Demsetz and Williamson or Oliver Hart for theory of the firm. It’s hard to imagine that evolutionary economics is that appreciated. I think Sid Winter is grossly underrated. His body of work in economics and strategy is pretty amazing.
As readers of my posts might guess, I am a pretty big fan of Demsetz. I don’t know that Harold is as productive or quantitative as most award givers might like. Stilger and Coase were pretty big fans. But, Hart and Williamson seem more likely award winners.
Over at orgtheory.net they’ve been discussing sociologists and management people who (in some alternate universe) might win. There are not too many Herb Simons out there.
Call for Papers: Entrepreneurship — Strategy and Structure
| Peter Klein |
The Journal of Economics and Management Strategy, founded and edited by Dan Spulber, seeks papers for a special issue on “Entrepreneurship: Strategy and Structure.” Thomas Hellmann and Scott Stern are editing the special issue.
While submissions from a wide range of perspectives and topics are welcome, we specifically invite theoretical and empirical papers on the following:
- The sources of value creation by entrepreneurial ventures
- Game-theoretic approaches to the organization of new firms, and the impact of entrepreneurs on market outcomes
- The determinants of entrepreneurial activity across industries and locations
- The determinants and consequences of the structure of entrepreneurial finance
- The impact of formal and informal networks (including strategic alliances) on the structure and conduct of entrepreneurial firms
- The impact of innovation policy, including intellectual property rights policy, the tax system, and the legal system, on the formation and strategic impact of new ventures
Here are the submission guidelines. Deadline is 15 November 2007.
What Are Hybrid Forms and How Can They Be Modeled?
| Nicolai Foss |
Many scholars have argued that hierarchies are increasingly infused by market mechanisms (e.g., here and here), and that elements of authority can increasingly be witnessed in market transactions. This has been referred to as the “swollen middle hypothesis.” A major step forward in the understanding of such hybrid governance is Williamson’s seminal 1991 paper in the ASQ, “Comparative Economic Organization: The Analysis of Discrete Structural Alternatives,” and Holmström and Milgrom’s equally important 1994 paper in the AER, “The Firm as an Incentive System.” (more…)
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