This paper examines how the target's customer concentration affects merger performance. We find that the acquirer purchasing a customer-concentrated firm experiences significantly lower announcement return and worse long-run stock performance. The effect is more pronounced when the customers...

Using a recently expanded data set on supplier-customer links, we introduce a dynamic relationship life-cycle hypothesis. We hypothesize that the relation between customer-base concentration and profitability is significantly negative in the early years of the relationship, but becomes positive...

We examine how suppliers' relationship-specific cost structure decisions affect future performance. We argue that suppliers can avoid risk by choosing more flexible cost structures (less fixed-to-variable costs) or commit resources by choosing more rigid cost structures (more fixed-to-variable...

Customer concentration affects CEO compensation through two possible channels: first, a more concentrated customer base raises firm risk, for which CEO requires higher compensation; second, CEO is likely to hold customer ties, and a more concentrated customer base enables CEO to have more...

We examine how one industry's productivity is affected by the IT capital of its customers and how this effect depends on industries' relative concentration. These customer-driven IT spillovers result from customers' IT investments in various information systems that reduce transaction costs...