Large and high quality user base is an important determinant of firm performance. Firms spend a great amount of resources in building referral programs to grow user base. Yet, substantial variations exist in the effectiveness of these referral programs with various incentive structures. We argue...

Incumbent firms often reposition themselves in response to entrants, but when doing so they incur repositioning costs. Incumbent repositioning costs and the associated decision biases have been identified in the economics, operations and strategy literatures as critical aspects of the...

We study the effect of coordination between businesses on the adaptation of diversified firms. Using a simulation based approach, we show that coordination between businesses limits adaptation, causing the relative performance of diversified firms to decline relative to their focused...

Strategic imitation occurs when a firm purposefully attempts to reproduce, in whole or part, other firms’ products, processes, capabilities, technologies, structures, and/or decisions in its pursuit of competitive advantage. Imitation is a pervasive firm behavior, and the literature relating...

A long-standing interest in the technology strategy domain has been the question of the failure of incumbent firms in the face of radical technical change. We add to these prior contributions by highlighting the role a firm’s existing set of complementary assets have in influencing its...

A market entrant often challenges the incumbent using creative imitation: The entrant creatively combines imitated aspects of the original with its own innovative characteristics to create a distinct offering. Using lab and field experiments to examine creative imitation in China, we find the...

Research on flat firms has many dimensions. To introduce this special issue, we start our essay with a thought experiment. In his novella Flatland (1884), Edwin A. Abbott describes life in a “flat,” two-dimensional world that is populated by geometric shapes—squares, lines, triangles, and...

Two of the founding pillars of corporate strategy research are Penrose’s (1959) development of the critical role of firm resources and their accumulation for the scope of the firm and Chandler’s (1962) examination of the relationship between a firm’s organizational structure and its scope...