Why do some articles become building blocks for future scholars, whereas others remain unnoticed? The authors aim to answer this question by contrasting, synthesizing, and simultaneously testing three scientometric perspectives—universalism, social constructivism, and presentation—on the influence of article and author characteristics on article citations. They study all articles published in a sample of five major journals in marketing from 1990 to 2002 that are central to the discipline. They count the number of citations each of these articles has received and regress this count on an extensive set of characteristics of the article (i.e., article quality, article domain, title length, the use of attention grabbers, and expositional clarity) and the author (i.e., author visibility and author personal promotion). They find that the number of citations an article in the marketing discipline receives depends more on “what is said” (quality and domain) and “who says it” (author visibility and personal promotion) than on “how it is said” (title length, the use of attention grabbers, and expositional clarity). The insights gleaned from this analysis contribute to the marketing literature and are relevant to scientific stakeholders, such as the management of scientific journals and individual academic scholars, as they strive to maximize citations. They are also relevant to marketing practitioners; they inform practitioners on characteristics of the academic journals in marketing and their relevance to decisions they face. Conversely, the insights also raise challenges regarding how to make journals accessible and relevant to marketing practitioners: (1) Authors visible to academics are not necessarily visible to practitioners; (2) the readability of an article may hurt academic credibility and impact, but it may be instrumental in influencing practitioners; and (3) it remains questionable whether articles that academics assess to be of high quality are also managerially relevant.

The central premise of upper echelons theory is that executives' experiences, values, and personalities greatly influence their interpretations of the situations they face and, in turn, affect their choices. At the invitation of the editor, I recap the AMR article in which the theory was originally presented (Hambrick & Mason, 1984), discuss subsequent refinements of the theory, and lay out several promising avenues for future upper echelons research.

We endogenize preferences using the “indirect evolutionary approach”. Individuals are randomly matched to play a two-person game. Individual (subjective) preferences determine their behaviour and may differ from the actual (objective) pay-offs that determine fitness. Matched individuals may observe the opponents’ preferences perfectly, not at all, or with some in-between probability. When preferences are observable, a stable outcome must be efficient. When they are not observable, a stable outcome must be a Nash equilibrium and all strict equilibria are stable. We show that, for pure-strategy outcomes, these conclusions are robust to allowing almost perfect, and almost no, observability, with the notable exception that inefficient strict equilibria may fail to be stable with any arbitrarily small degree of observability (despite being stable with no observability).

When offering a novel product, the entrepreneur desires the customer to choose to “buy” (from the entrepreneur) rather than to “make.” Transaction cost economics provides guidance to firms considering a make-versus-buy decision. In this paper we extend transaction cost economics to examine the novel transactions proposed by the entrepreneur. Application of the theory identifies three crucial considerations for the transaction: the cost of quality measurement, the risk of overconfidence by the entrepreneur (here termed identity risk), and the required cost of necessary transaction specific assets. By extending transaction cost analysis to cover novel transactions across customers, entrepreneurship can be analyzed using established theories and measures to generate novel propositions.

In this paper, I examine the impact of partner technological diversity and alliance organizational form on firm innovative performance. Using a sample of 463 R&D alliances in the telecommunications equipment industry, I find that alliances contribute far more to firm innovation when technological diversity is moderate, rather than low or high. Although this relationship holds irrespective of alliance organization, I find that hierarchical organization, such as an equity joint venture, improves firm benefits from alliances with high levels of technological diversity. Thus, alliance organizational form likely influences partner ability and incentives to share information, which affects performance.

The article examines whether the discipline of management science has placed an undue emphasis on the development of theory at the expense of research which observes and reports actual facts. It is well known that the leading scholarly periodicals in the field require articles to contribute to management science theory to be accepted for publication. This unnecessarily limits research, since the collection of previously unknown facts by itself will contribute to the development of theory. The bad effect forced theoretical discussion has on the comprehensibility and readability of academic writing is noted. Articles in scholarly periodicals in related fields such as marketing research and finance which introduce previously unknown facts are presented as a comparison. There is said to be an inherent contradiction in the emphasis of pure theory in a field devoted to the study of real world decision making.

Municipal bonds trade in decentralized broker-dealer markets, and are underpriced when issued, but unlike equities the average price rises slowly over several days. Newly issued municipal bonds have high levels of price dispersion and the average price rises because the mix of trade sizes changes over time. While large trades occur close to the reoffering price, small trades occur between the reoffering price to as much as 5% above the reoffering price. Using a mixed-distribution model we quantify the losses uninformed traders or issuers give up to broker-dealers.

Discovering entrepreneurial opportunities requires that individuals not only possess some form of prior knowledge, but that they also have the cognitive abilities that allow them to value and exploit that knowledge. This article builds upon and extends this line of inquiry by examining the relationship between opportunity identification and learning. Based upon an experimental task and other data collected from 380 technology professionals, the article defines a relationship between how individuals acquire and transform information and experience (i.e., learning) in order to identify opportunities. After analyzing the empirical data, the article develops the concept of learning asymmetries and explains how the manner in which people learn may affect their ability to identify entrepreneurial opportunities.