This paper is concerned with the ability of marketing investments to convey information from the “black box” of the firm to participants in the financial markets. We focus on the context of sales force resizing announcements in the pharmaceutical industry because the sales force comprises...

In this research, we investigate the behavior of Cronbach's coefficient alpha and its new standard error. We systematically analyze the effects of sample size, scale length, strength of item intercorrelations, and scale dimensionality. We demonstrate the beneficial effects of sample size on...

Two key issues in business-to-business (B2B) sales force management are (1) how much a given sales job should be compensated (pay level) and (2) how much of the compensation should be fixed versus variable (pay structure). The authors examine the paychecks drawn by people in more than 14,000...

The paper investigates whether equity markets incorporate the value of an important category of intangible assets, namely, brand value of a firm. Using a novel dataset of trademark infringement lawsuits filed in US district courts from 2000-2012, this paper analyzes whether shocks to a firm's...

Price-matching guarantees (PMGs) are offers to match or beat a competitor's price on a specific item. Such guarantees are extremely common in U.S. retail practice, and appear on their face to be very beneficial to consumers because they make an implicit promise to the consumer that she "won't...

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...

The primary contribution from this research lies in the uncovering of the factors that predict the formation of horizontal distribution alliances (HDAs) as well as their success. HDAs are characterized by the joining of two firms??from the same industry??to distribute a product owned by one of...