This dissertation contains a series of studies examining the effect of a firm's competitive strategy and operational effectiveness on its ability to gain advantage in its business-level competitive environment and in its corporate-level strategic actions, specifically its acquisition activity....

The purpose of this study is to explore organizational learning, using the lens of absorptive capacity, as a multi-level phenomenon spanning individual, group, and organizational levels of analysis. In the first chapter we explore how characteristics of individual employees interact with group...

This dissertation, entitled "Spin-offs and Innovation", examines the relation between spin-offs and both the intensity and distance of subsequent search (innovation) the parent and spun-off firms undertake. Previous work has found that spin-offs generally increase shareholder wealth. The source...

In recent years, cooperative buyer-supplier relationships, fashioned after the Japanese management style, have become popular in industrial markets. While buyers have explicitly benefited (from these relationships) in terms of better end-product performance and lower costs, it is not clear if...

This dissertation develops and tests a theoretical framework designed to provide a better understanding of the way that interfirm relationships are managed. To that end, two streams of literature are brought together: transaction cost economics (TCE) and that related to interfirm relationships....

This dissertation consists of three related studies that explore the effects of performance feedback on the timing of acquisitions, the direction of diversification, and the resulting acquirer returns. The first study investigates behavioral explanations for the timing of corporate acquisitions....

A common issue in strategic management research is competitive advantage and the search for sources of performance differences among firms. Traditionally, researchers drew from industrial organization perspectives, which examine the conditions where first-mover advantages are likely to exist,...