Firms often lose their competitive advantage when a technological change renders their existing capabilities obsolete. An important question that has received little or no attention is, what happens to these firms’ competitive advantage when the technological change instead renders obsolete...

One of the main reasons that firms participate in alliances is to learn know-how and capabilities from their alliance partners. At the same time firms want to protect themselves from the opportunistic behavior of their partner to retain their own core proprietary assets. Most research has...

Although it is established that firms sometimes expand abroad to augment their capabilities, previous studies have generally focused on technological determinants of foreign expansion. We analyze capability-seeking aspects of foreign direct investment by examining the relationship between...

This study combines elements of the upper echelons and agency perspectives to resolve some of the ambiguity surrounding how corporate elites affect corporate strategy. We propose and test the notion that while differences in individual characteristics of corporate elites may imply different...

Participants in research and development alliances face a difficult challenge: how to maintain sufficiently open knowledge exchange to achieve alliance objectives while controlling knowledge flows to avoid unintended leakage of valuable technology. Prior research suggests that choosing an...

Recent years have witnessed a surge of interest in the notion of capabilities as an important source of competitive advantage. This recognition has, in turn, placed emphasis on the question of where and how these capabilities emerge and how they influence firm performance. The present paper is...

It is well known that many of the manufacturing practices advanced in Japan in the 1970s and 1980s emphasize bottom-up decision processes characterized by teams, the empowerment of multi-skilled workers on the shopfloor, demand-pull and horizontal decision mechanisms. These practices include...

This paper studies acquisitions of nursing home facilities by chains. We first test alternative ‘cream-skimming’ and ‘turn-around’ arguments concerning nursing home acquisitions. We then consider post-acquisition changes in nursing home health performance, differentiating effects of the...

My dissertation is about joint optimization of firms' operations and marketing decisions with explicit modelling of customer behavior. It includes three essays:The first essay, ``Advance Selling -- The Effect of Capacity andConsumer Valuation Interdependence,'' considers a seller who canoffer a...