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...

Thus most early American manufacturing firms existed as a partnership (formal or informal) between technically knowledgeable factory owners or managers on the one hand, and mercantile capitalists on the other. Sometimes (as in the rail and textile mills) these alliances developed when merchants,...

The ability of households to insure consumption from adverse shocks is an important aspect of vulnerability to poverty. How is consumption insurance achieved in a low-income setting where formal credit and insurance markets have been observed to be imperfect or missing? Using 2003 data from the...

This dissertation shows how the transformation of social ownership to private ownership affected the behavior of firms and entrepreneurship in selected former Yugoslav countries. The goal was to determine whether firms’ objective remains the maximization of income per worker and, on the other...

Technological developments have been reshaping existing markets and giving rise to new ones. In my dissertation, I address several questions that emerged as a result of these changes. In the first two chapters, I study strategies in two different markets: a simultaneous ascending auction (SAA)...