Cooperative Strategy

The firm as an architect of polycentric governance

Emerging markets typically present additional obstacles for business operations because they lack the necessary underlying institutional infrastructure such as access to capital and labor markets. We introduce a new way…

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Gambardella, Panico, and Valentini on “Strategic Incentives to Human Capital”

Motivating human capital in knowledge-intensive activities is a serious managerial challenge because it is difficult to link rewards to actions or performance. Firms instead might motivate knowledge workers by offering…

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Formal contracts and relational governance as substitutes or complements

Relational exchange arrangements supported by trust are commonly viewed as substitutes for complex contracts in interorganizational exchanges. Many argue that formal contracts actually undermine trust and thereby encourage the opportunistic…

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Kim Boal on emerging from bankruptcy

Applications of signaling theory to predict reorganization outcomes are in their infancy. The dynamic integrative framework developed in this study is useful in identifying different types of signals and predicting…

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The Evolution of Cooperation in the Face of Conflict

Firms in innovation-driven industries cooperate to develop interoperability standards and compatible technologies. Yet, cooperative firms may disagree about what constitutes fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms for licensing intellectual property. Thus,…

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Aaron Chatterji & Kira Fabrizio – User innovation (SMJ 2013 & 2014)

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Surrendering Control to Gain Advantage

Conventional wisdom holds that firms must control scarce and valuable resources to obtain competitive advantage. That being said, over the past decade, many firms—among them Computer Associates, IBM, and Nokia—embarked…

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Competing/Complementary Labels? Estimating Spillovers in Chinese Grn Bldg Cert

Many markets have several voluntary certification programs that sellers can use to signal product or organizational quality. Although many scholars emphasize the potential for competition between labels, we argue that…

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From proprietary to collective governance

As firms consider transitioning proprietary products to more open platforms to grow market share and relevance, we suggest that managers consider the concerns of external participants when designing a system…

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When the weak are mighty: A twosided matching approach to alliance performance

Alliance partners often struggle with identifying what their contributions and their partner’s contribution are to the alliance performance. We use a new method to identify each side’s contribution to their…

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