This paper tests several predictions from the literature on firm reputation, and confirms a main result: poor performance leads a firm to conceal its reputation. A residential plumbing firm with a record of complaints one standard deviation above the mean is 133.2 percent more likely to change...

The freedom to make contracts is a liberating feature of commercial life, yet too often contracts turn into tyranny, when haggling over fine print makes two sides mis-trust each other. This problem, and some solutions, are explored in this chapter from Margin of Trust: The Berkshire Business...

We are witnessing a quiet but quick transformation of corporate governance. The rise of digital technologies and social media are forcing companies to reconsider how they organize themselves and structure firm governance. What is interesting is that the corporate governance discussions haven't...

We investigate the relevance of relationship-specificity in explaining firm performance and firm value. First, we use an incomplete contracts model to derive hypotheses on how relationship-specificity interacts with bargaining power and growth. And, second, we test these hypotheses on US data...

Increasingly, the Holy Grail in manufacturing is the ability to combine the flexibility of customized production with the efficiency of mass production to achieve “mass customization.” Our research has identified an innovative method of customized manufacturing in an unlikely place –...

This paper sheds new light on the assessment of firm networks via multiple directorships in terms of corporate firm performance. Using a large sample of European listed firms in the period from 2003 to 2011 and system GMM we find a significant compensation effect on corporate firm performance...

A substantial fraction of international trade is facilitated by wholesalers, who enable manufacturers to indirectly export their products to foreign markets. Using large-scale Japanese interfirm transaction network data, this paper add empirical findings on the difference in the features between...

In this paper we analyze the innovative performance of alliance networks as a function of the technological distance between partners, a firm's network position (centrality) and total network density. We study how these three elements of an alliance network, apart and in combination, affect the...

This study examines the impact of entrepreneurs' network structure and knowledge homogeneity/heterogeneity of their network members on product development, and revenue growth of software ventures in China and Russia. The empirical data are composed of structured interviews with 159 software...

This article examines the contingent value of entrepreneurs' networks to survival likelihood of Internet ventures, and the dynamics of entrepreneurs' networks over time. The empirical data are composed of the longitudinal surveys of 94 Internet ventures in Beijing, China. The study found the...