Information technology (IT) services vendors operate in a highly competitive but also institutional environment that render their service-line offerings mutually observable. This suggests that imitation of rivals’ decisions can be an efficient means for IT vendors when reconfiguring their...

Open Source Software communities are exemplars of online and virtual collaboration among software developers. However, such communities are typified by a scarcity of volunteers with the result that OSS projects typically strive to garner necessary expertise. This study attempts to understand how...

As sellers increasingly turn to multi-channel retailing, the opportunity to implement different pricing policies has grown. With the advent of the internet, many traditionally bargained products such as automobiles, jewelry, watches, appliances and furniture are now being offered online at a...

Organizations learn and adapt their aspiration levels based on reference points (prior aspiration, prior performance, and prior performance of reference groups). The relative attention that organizations allocate to these reference points impacts organizational search and strategic decisions....

Behavioral Theory highlights the crucial role of social comparisons in attention allocation in adaptive aspirations. Yet, both the specification of social reference points and the dynamics of attention allocation have received little scholarly examination. We address performance feedback from...

Our paper explores how multiple performances (financial and innovative) and related aspiration levels explain changes in the partnering patterns of 144 pharmaceutical firms during the period 1990 to 2003. Our results confirm the central idea that firms exhibit different risk profiles and related...

Goals or aspirations and their relationships to risk taking and performance are important issues in both psychology and strategic management. The concept of adaptive aspirations, as discussed in Cyert and March's Behavioral Theory of the Firm, has long been a topic of interest in both fields....

Strategic tools are indispensible for business and competitive analysis. Yet we know very little about managers' internal logic as they put these tools into practical use. We situate our study in a business school context using action learning prior to the manifestation of practice to complement...

When managers set aspirations for their firms, they typically compare their own firms’ performance to past aspirations as well as to the performance of social reference groups. We explore how firm generic strategy affects managers’ adaptation of firm aspirations in response to feedback from...