This study considers the decision to undertake an acquisition using a framework built around the concepts of motivation and ability to acquire. The paper develops an integrative model to examine how firm characteristics contribute to motivation and ability in predicting the likelihood of an...

Recent popular business literature has suggested that there is a significant trend in the United States for firms to decrease the size and increase the focus of manufacturing plants they operate, and that this leads to higher productivity. This paper tests empirically the validity of these...

This paper examines acquisition performance from the perspective of acquirer capabilities. It argues that the strategic capabilities underpinning a firm’s competitive strategy can be utilized to create economic value in acquisitions. Acquirers with strong cost leadership capabilities are...

Most strategic decision-making (SDM) approaches advocate the importance of decision-making processes and response choices for obtaining effective outcomes. Modern decision-making support system (DMSS) technology is often also needed for complex SDM, with recent research calling for more...

Outsourcing generally involves non-strategic resources and/or non-asset specific capabilities. However, in this paper, the authors examine the non-traditional, but increasingly more common, use of IT to facilitate theoretically inconsistent outsourcing decisions involving core resources and...

Recent studies of the relative size of corporate and industry effects have used ANOVA, Variance Components Analysis and Simultaneous Equations (Roquebert, Philips and Westfall 1996; McGahan and Porter, 1997a; 1997b, Brush, Bromiley and Hendrikx, forthcoming). This paper provides a comprehensive...

The paper investigates the agency argument that sales growth in firms with free cash flow (and without strong governance) is less profitable than sales growth for firms without free cash flow. It also tests whether strong governance conditions improve the performance of firms with free cash flow...

This paper examines the competitive advantage enjoyed by established firms over start-up firms in their choice of plant scale when entering industries. We hypothesize that established firms will enter at smaller scale because they have the opportunity to substitute other resources and advantages...