What determines vertical scope? Transactions cost economics (TCE) has been the dominant paradigm for understanding "make" vs. "buy" choices. However, the traditional focus on empirically validating or refuting TCE has taken attention away from other possible drivers of scope, and it has rarely...

In this paper, we consider how a better understanding of entrepreneurial activities can help explain how firm and industry boundaries change over time and how a more comprehensive understanding of boundary setting can explain where entrepreneurial activities are directed. We start from the...

This paper suggests that an unrecognized determinant of global expansion is the structure of the value chain, which is both country- and sector-specific. Value chain structure evolves in a path-dependent, country-specific way. Differences in vertical structures between countries predict the...

This article considers how ideas from evolutionary theory in general, and Sidney Winter in particular, can be fruitfully combined with ideas from Herbert Simon and the Carnegie tradition on decomposability and cognitive limits. Rather than focusing on any one individual issue, this article...

This paper shows how idiosyncratic resources can be the basis of sustained profitability and persistent heterogeneity under competitive conditions: Generic inputs purchased in the market become idiosyncratic resources by investments in customization. Analytically, we show how heterogeneous firms...

There are many instances where financial claims trade at prices set by intermediaries. Pricing by an intermediary introduces the potential for economic distortions from innumerable sources. As one example, we show that nonsynchronous-trading generates predictable, readily exploitable, changes in...

The authors study the effects of regulatory oversight on internal and external mechanisms to change corporate control by examining all thrifts that were publicly traded in 1990 for significant influences on whether these thrifts continued as public concerns, were acquired or were censured by the...