AbstractExtant research in operations management has revealed divergent insights into the value potential of resource efficiency. While one view relates efficiency with good operations management and asserts that slack resources are a form of waste that should be minimized, the other view suggests that limited resource slack can impose heavy costs on firms by making them brittle. In this research, the authors build on these views to investigate the relationship of inventory, production, and marketing resource efficiency of firms with three metrics of financial performance (i.e., Stock‐Returns, Tobin's Q, and Returns‐on‐Assets). The authors evaluate the theoretical framework using secondary information on all U.S. based publicly‐owned manufacturing firms across the 16‐year time period of 1991–2006. Analysis utilizing a mixed‐model approach reveals that a focus on resource efficiency is positively associated with firm financial performance. However, findings also support the arguments favoring slack, indicating that the financial gains from resource efficiency exhibit diminishing returns.

Focal firms are struggling to improve their environmental performance for several reasons, including a scarcity of internal and external environmental resources. This study suggests that coopetition provides a boost to a focal firm’s environmental performance. In particular, this research theorizes that a coopetitor firm’s environmental performance has a spillover effect on a focal firm’s environmental performance. This study also investigates the moderating role of a focal firm’s financial slack, financial leverage, and inventory leanness on this relationship. The empirical analysis indicates that coopetitor firms’ environmental performance significantly influences a focal firm’s environmental performance. This relationship is weaker for firms with higher financial slack, and stronger for firms that have lower financial leverage and higher leanness. Collectively, these findings provide important managerial and research implications regarding the consequences of coopetition on a focal firm’s environmental performance.

AbstractInventories represent an important strategic resource for firms, with implications for shareholder wealth. As such, firms expend considerable effort in managing their inventories efficiently. Among other factors, information technology (IT) capability can play an important role in enabling inventory efficiency and financial performance. However, insight into the chain‐of‐effects linking IT capability, inventory efficiency, and stock market returns and risk remains limited. In this paper, we provide a conceptual model outlining the relationships between these constructs. Next, we evaluate the model using secondary information on firms from multiple industries across the 10‐year time period of 2000–2009. Our analysis confirms that firms’ IT capability plays a significant role in enhancing their inventory efficiency, which, in turn, is observed to increase stock market returns. Our results also reveal that firms’ IT capability directly reduces their stock market risk and enhances their stock market returns. Taken together, these findings, along with the conceptual model that we advance, have important research and managerial implications.

AbstractThe rise in front‐end service outsourcing in recent years, despite its advantages, has also exposed buyer firms to unique challenges. One of the most salient risks for buyer firms in service triads is service failure due to the service provider. Indeed such service failures may be more costly for firms due to the greater relational and operational costs that may arise from the presence of the third‐party provider. Yet, neither the services literature nor extant operations literature on service triads has paid much attention to the financial consequences to the buyer firm – i.e., service risks – of such service failures in triads. To fill this gap, we investigate the financial penalty of service failures due to the service provider using the event study methodology and a sample of 146 customer information security breaches as our empirical context. Analysis of the abnormal returns reveals that service failures due to the front‐end service provider lead to greater shareholder losses than such failures due to the buyer firm. This provides important new insight into the financial risks arising from outsourcing front‐end services. Further, we investigate the ability of the buyer firm's employee and financial resources to temper these shareholder losses. We find that buyer firm employee productivity can moderate the greater financial penalty associated with such triadic service failures but that buyer firm leverage tends to not have such a mitigating effect. This provides new guidance for theory and practice regarding how buyer firms can position themselves to buffer the financial risks arising from service failures due to front‐end service providers.