Knowledge that Transforms

Research Summary: Low‐price market entries, aiming for rapid sales growth, tend to prompt strong competitive reactions. This research explores whether and how firms using low‐price entry strategies can mitigate retaliatory incumbent reactions. An experiment with 656 managers shows that entrants can attenuate the strength of incumbents’ responses by fostering perceptions of high aggressiveness or low commitment. Entrants may be able to accomplish this by adjusting their entry strategy to embed (subtle) cues of aggressiveness and (lack of) commitment. A replication experiment with university students reinforces our overall theoretical argument. However, the results also indicate that the interpretation of cues embedded in the entry strategy may be affected by the experience of incumbent firm managers. Overall, these results clarify the cognitive foundations of competitive responses to market entry. Managerial Summary: What drives incumbents to respond strongly to market entries, and what can the entrant, if anything, do to mitigate those responses? This research offers empirical evidence and theoretical insights for managers faced with these questions by shedding light on the thinking processes preceding competitive responses. The study shows that while managers are motivated to respond strongly to market entries that appear to be highly consequential to their business, these responses may be mitigated if the entrant manages to foster perceptions of high aggressiveness or low commitment to the market. Managers form these perceptions in part on the basis of the entrant’s behavior, creating an opportunity for entrants to adjust their entry strategies in a manner that demotivates strong competitive responses.

Research Summary This paper develops an inheritance theory explaining the diffusion and persistence of detrimental management practice. Received wisdom, in both management theory and practice, would suggest that a practice that lowers the life expectancy of adopting firms, over time, will vanish because it puts those firms at a competitive disadvantage. In this paper, I challenge this view. I develop a conceptual model that details how a practice that lowers the survival chances of adopting organizations may still spread and continue to exist across a population of firms. I propose that a combination of three basic conditions is sufficient to bring about this phenomenon: if the practice is somehow associated with success, if there exists causal ambiguity, and if the rate of its diffusion is high compared with the rate at which it accelerates firms’ demise, the practice may continue to thrive and become a widespread and persistent feature in an industry. A pivotal conceptual insight is that the endurance of particular management practices and strategies is not merely a corollary of the competitiveness of the organizations that use them but that they have fitness levels of their own. Managerial Summary All organizations have “best practices”: habits that they have picked up in the past or mimicked from others. Managers often believe that these must be the best ways of doing things, because otherwise market forces would have eliminated them. The theory in the paper explains why this belief may be wrong. Some enduring practices may be harmful without managers realizing it because it is not necessarily the most optimal practices that survive (just like harmful viruses persist in nature). As a corollary, the paper discusses how the identification and cessation of detrimental practices can form a new source of and way to understand innovation.

The original article to which this Erratum refers was published in Strategic Management Journal Vol. 38, No. 12, pp. 2390–2423, 2017. DOI: 10.1002/smj.2660 In Table 1, ‘Individuals or firms can set prices by virtue of being a monopoly or through collusion with others’ was cited as (A. Smith, 1904[1904]: I.10.82). It should read (A. Smith, 1904[1776]: I.10.82). We apologize for the error.

Research summary: Based on a detailed database of a beverages producer‐distributor that expanded its product variety by leveraging its logistic network, we show that product diversification generates economies of scope and also higher operational costs. The result is an inverted‐ U relationship between variety and productivity: When the firm offers few additional categories, productivity grows, but as the number of categories rises, the costs of executing the operational routines increase rapidly and productivity falls. The negative effect on productivity increases if the added product category is more dissimilar to previous ones, and decreases with learning from operational experience. Our results highlight how frictions at the operational level can limit the benefits of diversification, even in the absence of other sources of diseconomies, such as increased coordination needs . Managerial summary: One of the prevalent reasons for companies to expand to adjacent product lines is attaining economies of scope. However, such growth strategy also generates operational frictions, even if the day‐to‐day routines do not appear to change at all. Product diversity is disruptive for routine execution, as it requires coordination and exception handling, and may ultimately overcome any efficiency obtained from growth. We estimate the relevance of such operational friction using data from a beverages distribution network. When product variety is low, additional categories do generate efficiency, but after reaching a given threshold, friction prevails. We find that operational friction increases when products are more dissimilar, but is attenuated when workers learn from their own and other's experience .

Research summary : While alliance researchers view prior partner‐specific alliance experience as influencing firms' subsequent alliance or acquisition decisions, empirical evidence on the alliance versus acquisition decision is surprisingly mixed. We offer a reconciliation by proposing and testing an analytical framework that recognizes prior partner‐specific experiences as heterogeneous along three fundamental dimensions: partner‐specific trust, routines, and value certainty. This allows us to use a policy‐capturing methodology to rigorously operationalize and test our mechanism‐level predictions. We find that all three mechanisms can increase the likelihood of a subsequent alliance or acquisition, and in terms of the comparative choice between alliances versus acquisitions, partner‐specific trust pulls towards alliances, and value certainty pulls towards acquisitions. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical and empirical implications of our approach and method . Managerial summary : This study focuses on an important corporate decision: When a firm has had an alliance with another firm, how would that experience affect the likelihood of a future alliance or acquisition with that same firm? We first suggest that it will depend on three factors: the level of trust that existed in that prior alliance, the extent to which specific work routines were developed, and the degree to which the firm was able to confidently assess the value of the partner firm's resources. We then find that trust is a particularly strong predictor of future alliances, while confidence regarding value more strongly predicts future acquisitions. In this way, we demonstrate more precisely how past corporate choices can affect (consciously or unconsciously) future ones . © 2017 The Authors. Strategic Management Journal Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Research summary: Research shows that multimarket contact ( MMC ) reduces rivalry involving downstream activities. Yet, studies showing that MMC can increase the threat of imitation suggest a need to better understand how MMC affects upstream rivalry over knowledge‐based resources. In this study, we argue that MMC increases rivalry over knowledge‐based resources since the deterrent threat of retaliation that typically leads to mutual forbearance in downstream activities will not be sufficient to restrain firms from protecting their knowledge from imitation in upstream activities. In support of these arguments we find that MMC increases the likelihood that a firm initiates patent litigation against a rival. This study suggests the relationship between MMC and rivalry may depend on the competitive domain and the type of resources over which firms are competing . Managerial Summary: How does market overlap or MMC affect rivalry between two competitors? Prior studies have largely found that an increase in market overlap decreases rivalry in less knowledge‐intensive context because of the deterrent threat of retaliation. However, in this paper, we argue that an increase in market overlap may not reduce rivalry in more knowledge‐intensive context because of heterogeneity in capabilities to protect knowledge. We find that a firm is more likely to initiate patent litigation against a rival as market overlap increases. Our findings suggest that the incentive to protect value across multiple product markets may surpass the motivation to cooperate with rivals and that managers should have a more nuanced view of how market overlap with competitors affects rivalry in more knowledge‐intensive contexts .

Research summary : W e develop and apply a new set of empirical tools consistent with the tenets of value‐based business strategies, leveraging the principle that “no good deal comes undone” and the methods of revealed preferences, to empirically estimate drivers of value creation. We demonstrate how to use these tools in an analysis of value creation in buyer–supplier relationships in the UK corporate legal market. We show that our approach can uncover evidence of subtle mechanisms that traditional methods cannot easily distinguish from each other. Furthermore, we show how the estimates can be used as parameters of biform games for out‐of‐sample analyses of strategic decisions. With readily available data on relationships between firms, this approach can be applied to many other contexts of interest to strategy researchers . Managerial summary : M anagers need to understand the drivers of value creation for customers in order to make competitive positioning decisions and understand when they can capture value under competition. However, estimates of the relative importance of each driver are typically difficult to obtain. In this article, we help remedy this problem by demonstrating a novel method that obtains estimates of the contribution of various drivers of value creation from commonly available data of buyer–supplier relationships. These estimates can then be used to inform the strategy‐making process .

Research Summary: It is well known in corporate governance scholarship that independent directors differ in the vigilance with which they monitor corporate insiders. This difference depends largely on whether independent directors are concerned more with their public reputation or with their prospects in the director labor market. The explanation for this difference depends on an assumption of information asymmetry, however. In the present study, we relax the assumption of information asymmetry to examine how boardroom transparency affects directors’ monitoring behavior. Using a randomized experimental study of actual independent directors, we find that boardroom transparency amplifies the effect of directors’ inclinations toward either active or passive monitoring, with directors inclined toward vigilant monitoring becoming even more vigilant, and directors inclined toward passive monitoring becoming even more passive. Managerial Summary: In most advanced economies, the board's internal decision processes are either undisclosed or disclosed only to a very limited extent. It remains unknown, then, whether directors would behave differently if their behaviors were made public. We find that when their actions are disclosed to the public, directors concerned with their public reputations become more vigilant, whereas those concerned with their prospects for additional board seats become more passive in monitoring corporate insiders. Whereas regulatory bodies and corporate governance watchdogs have recently advocated for greater disclosure of the boardroom decision‐making process, our study suggests that such mandatory disclosure requirements can exacerbate, rather than alleviate, the problem of passive director monitoring.