This paper examines how IT influences global sourcing decisions. It develops a theoretical model to study how IT determines the decisions of firms located in the high-wage North whether to offshore production to a low-wage country in the South. Offshoring to South however is subject to costly...

Since several decades, information and communication technologies (ICT) as well as new organizational designs change the working life in firms. Using nationally representative Swiss firm-level panel data, the present paper analyzes the relationship between these developments and examines,...

A fundamental question in corporate strategy is how headquarters in multibusiness firms can create value above and beyond the burden of its own overhead. The leading theories from Chandler and Williamson hold this is possible through resource allocation across businesses. Yet there are...

This paper develops a framework to analyze the relationship between the diffusion of new technologies and the decentralization decisions of firms. Centralized control relies on the information of the principal, which we equate with publicly available information. Decentralized control, on the...

This paper utilizes a data set of over 208,000 U.S. patents applied for between 1975 and 2010 to study development of strategic patenting over time and across industries. With received citations as a measure of patent social value, we use data envelopment analysis to estimate firm-level relative...

This paper delves into the effects that strategic representations have on firm performance. It does so in four ways. First, it describes different types of representations—internal, external, and distributed—and it points to their pervasiveness in strategy. Second, it presents a framework to...

Senior leadership has two primary levers to influence a direct report: incentives and communication. Financial incentives are credible and precisely specified but offer limited flexibility. In contrast, communication is flexible but lacks precision, and must be deemed credible to affect a direct...

Stakeholder metrics translate strategic objectives into actionable targets. We analyze this dual role of performance metrics: they communicate the target outcomes (i.e., which project outcomes are considered "successful"), and they incentivize the organizational impetus (i.e., stakeholder effort...