Based on a sample of 80 firms, this paper examines the risk/return performance of related and unrelated diversified firms at the level of accounting data. The results suggest that although on the average related diversified firms outperform unrelated diversified firms, related diversification...

Existing innovation diffusion models assume that individual experience with the product is always communicated positively through word-of-mouth. For certain innovations, however, this assumption is tenuous since communicators of the product experience may transfer favorable, unfavorable, or...

The management of coordination gaps is critical to the effective functioning of a customer support team. To address the managerial challenge of designing Information Technology (IT) to facilitate coordination in customer support teams, this paper develops a framework describing the drivers of...

Existing single-adoption diffusion models assume a static (constant) ceiling on the number of adopters, that is, a constant population of potential adopters, over the entire time frame of the diffusion process. However, for most innovations this assumption is tenuous. Rather, the ceiling, or the...

In recent years, the U.S. corporate world has been dominated by a spectacular spate of mergers and acquisitions. Firms are seeking out partners that will provide them the necessary leverage to achieve their various growth and diversification goals. Based on the balance model developed by...

In highly dynamic environments, characterized by changing customer preferences and uncertainty about competitive products, managing the development of a new product is a complex managerial task. The traditional practice, recommended in the literature, of reaching a sharp definition early in the...

For many high-tech and Internet-related products, utility to consumers depends in part on the size of the user base, a phenomenon called network externality. A firm with a portfolio of these and other products--that are often asymmetric in their degree of network externality or marginal...

Erratum to Mahajan, Vijay, Robert A. Peterson. 1978. Innovation diffusion in a dynamic potential adopter population. Management Sci. 24 (15) 1589--1597.

The study of organizational adoption of administrative innovations has been generally guided by the imitation hypothesis. This hypothesis states that, within a relevant population of firms, an innovation is first adopted by a select few innovators who communicate and influence others to adopt it...

We propose the optimal strategies in the end-product market for manufacturers of proprietary component brands, MPCBs for short. MPCBs can pursue one of three end-product roles: sole entrant, as with 3Com that, until recently, offered its Palm operating system only as part of its own Palm...