The adoption and use of a professional social media network by franchise chains is the focus of this paper. We draw on resource-based theory, institutional economic theories of incentives and externalities and multidisciplinary literatures on franchising, innovation adoption and...

Purpose: The purpose is to investigate how a retailer identifies critical network actors and gains their support when entering an emerging market. and to examine the role of a firm's relationships with different types of actors on the new market.Design/methodology/approach: The study is of an...

On December 2nd 2009, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) announced its intention to oppose the acquisition of Mobil's retail assets by Caltex, based in part on an assessment of adverse competition effects in some local markets. Their assessment was based upon the...

The structure of a gasoline market can be an important element in the pricing choices of its participants. However, structure is often measured only indirectly by, for example, the number of independent sellers, or by seller density. Here we present a more direct and literal way of exploring...

How do firms' partnering strategies impact the size of their partner-based retail networks? We draw on agency theory to address this question in the context of franchising. Our econometric analyses, (based on nine years of longitudinal balanced panel data), include assessment of data...

This paper is interested in the analysis of Blockchains and Smart-contracts applied to inter-firms relationships, in particular the franchise networks. After defining the Blockchain technology and the Smart-contract as a particular type of contract stored in blockchains, we question the theory...

Spatial competition among multi-store firms is ubiquitous in a wide range of retail industries. However, little is known about how those firms optimize their networks of stores after a merger due to the computational burden of solving for an equilibrium in store networks. This paper proposes an...

We empirically investigate the importance of centrality (holding a central position in a spatial network) for strategic interaction in pricing for the Austrian retail gasoline market. Results from spatial autoregressive models suggest that the gasoline station located most closely to the market...

This paper examines intermediation in production networks to unpack the firm attributes and matching costs that govern firm-to-firm networks and the gains from trade. Exploiting rich customs data for Chile, we show that exporters of all sizes use intermediaries, mix trade modes across buyers,...

Background: Performance frameworks are common ways to guarantee the success of a collaboration by assessment/improvement of the organisations. However, collaborative performance in recurring collaborations (RC) and temporary ones (TC) are being measured differently due to their inherent...