Just as bread and milk are often found at far-away ends of the supermarket, Web sites that match consumers with certain products have an incentive to steer users to products that yield the highest margins. The result: a compromise between what users want and what produces the most revenues, say HBS professor Andrei Hagiu and Toulouse School of Economics researcher Bruno Jullien. A look inside the world of search.
Culture clash is often considered a major cause for the failing of mergers and acquisitions, and for this reason it is an important consideration for corporate strategy. Although less publicized, culture clash has also plagued alliances and long-term market relationships. It provides a unique lens on the performance effects of corporate culture itself, and thus culture's potential to generate a competitive advantage. This paper develops an economic theory of the costs and benefits of corporate culture—in the sense of shared beliefs and values—in order to study the effects of culture clash in mergers and acquisitions.
Financial turmoil is not a reason to scale back on CSR programs—quite the opposite, says HBS professor V. Kasturi "Kash" Rangan. As a marketing scholar Rangan is optimistic about strategic CSR efforts that provide value in communities and society. Q&A
For decades, General Motors reigned as the king of automakers. What went wrong? We asked HBS faculty to reflect on the wrong turns and missed opportunities of the former industry leader, and to suggest ideas for recovery.
How can Japan create a better business environment for innovation? Japan presents a unique case of industrial structures that have produced remarkable developments in certain sectors but seem increasingly inadequate to do the same in modern technology industries, which rely on ecosystems of firms producing complementary products. Robert Dujarric and HBS professor Andrei Hagiu present three case studies of software, animation, and mobile telephony to illustrate potential sources of inefficiencies. Like all advanced economies, Japan faces two interconnected challenges. The first challenge is rising competition from lower-cost countries with the capacity to manufacture midrange and in some cases advanced industrial products. At the same time, Japan confronts changes in the relative weights of manufacturing and services, including soft goods, which go against the country's long-standing competitive advantage and emphasis on manufacturing. If Japan is to continue to prosper in a world where its ability to rely principally on manufacturing will diminish, its policymakers will need to capitalize on its untapped innovative power.
The era of paternalistic medicine has passed, but the notion that patients can act as consumers and make appropriate decisions concerning medical treatment poses countervailing risks of its own. A better accommodation among key players needs to be struck to foster the safe use of pharmaceuticals, according to HBS professor Arthur Daemmrich. The "pharmacy to the world," once located at the intersection of Germany, Switzerland, and France, today is found in the United States. Studies of the industry have attributed this sustained competitive advantage to a variety of factors, including U.S. intellectual property policies, funding for biomedical research through the National Institutes of Health, the absence of government controls on drug prices, and the availability of venture capital and other factors that fostered the growth of the biotechnology industry. The data and analysis presented in this working paper, however speculative, are an initial step toward deepening the understanding of interrelationships between government regulation, patients' mobilization both as regulators and as consumers, and the functioning of the pharmaceutical industry.
Corporate hierarchies are becoming flatter: Spans of control have broadened, and the number of levels within firms has declined. But why? Maria Guadalupe of Columbia University and HBS professor Julie M. Wulf investigate how increased competition in product markets—and, in particular, product market competition resulting from trade liberalization—may be fundamentally altering how decisions are being made. Guadalupe and Wulf also shed light on the possible reasons behind certain organizational choices and on the importance of communication and decision-making processes inside firms.
The last three decades have witnessed unprecedented growth in network industries such as video games, computers, credit cards, media, and telecommunications. These industries are often organized around physical or virtual platforms that enable distinct groups of agents to interact with one another, and are commonly referred to as two-sided markets or markets with two-sided platforms. An operating systems developer such as Microsoft, for example, provides a software platform that makes possible the completion of value-creating transactions between independent software vendors and users. A key attribute of the market that determines the intensity and scope of network effects is whether or not competing platforms are compatible. The effects of platform (in)compatibility on market outcomes, however, have largely been ignored by the literature on markets with two-sided platforms. This paper develops an explanation of why markets with two-sided platforms are often characterized by incompatibility with one dominant player that may choose to subsidize access to one side of the market.
Hiring policy is one of the most important determinants of a firm's success. The hiring process calls for collecting information in order to choose the best individual from among the candidates. In certain markets, however, firms hire workers long before all the pertinent information is available. Those early matches often turn out to be inefficient when the job starts. This phenomenon of contracting long before the job begins, and before relevant information is available, is called unravelling. Unravelling has been recognized as a serious problem in numerous markets, and measures designed to preclude it (such as centralized clearinghouses and enforcement of uniform hiring) have not always been successful. In order to provide insights for designing better measures to prevent unravelling in markets prone to it, this paper examines a two-sided matching market populated by firms on one side and workers on the other.
Published in 2008
The ready availability of patent citation data has been a tremendous boon to applied research on knowledge and innovation. The role of examiners in the generation of patent citations has been thought to potentially complicate these analyses, but has been difficult to study. Taking advantage of a change in the way patent citation data has been reported starting in 2001, this paper summarizes basic facts on examiner citations, and provides a descriptive analysis of factors associated with citations in a patent.
Product and system designers have long exploited opportunities to create families of complex artifacts by developing and recombining modular components. An especially common design pattern is associated with the concept of a platform, which Baldwin and Woodard define as a set of stable components that supports variety and evolvability in a system by constraining linkages among the other components. In this paper, the authors shed light on the relationships between platforms and the systems in which they are embedded to better understand and explain firms and industries where platforms play an important role.
When economists watch football games they see more than flying pigskin and stadiums overflowing with fans. In the case of U.S. college football, Harvard Business School professor Alvin E. Roth along with Guillaume R. Fréchette and M. Utku Ünver studied the timing of team selection for championship bowls. What they found: Good teams are much better matched up than they used to be, and there are implications beyond sports. Q&A with Al Roth.
Products are often said to "mirror" the architectures of the organization from which they come. Is there really a link between a product's architecture and the characteristics of the organization behind it? The coauthors of this working paper chose to analyze software products because of a unique opportunity to examine two different organizational modes for development, comparing open-source with proprietary "closed-source" software. The results have important implications for development organizations given the recent trend toward "open" approaches to innovation and the increased use of partnering in research and development projects.
Entrepreneurship in both China and India is rising dramatically and thriving under quite different conditions. HBS professor Tarun Khanna explains what it all means in this Q&A about his new book, Billions of Entrepreneurs: How China and India Are Reshaping Their Futures and Yours. Plus: book excerpt.
What factors should influence the design of a complex system? And what is the impact of choices on both product and organizational performance? These issues are of particular importance in the field of software given how software is developed: Rarely do software projects start from scratch. The authors analyzed the evolution of a commercial software product from first release to its current design, looking specifically at 6 major versions released at varying periods over a 15-year period. These results have important implications for managers, highlighting the impact of design decisions made today on both the evolution and the maintainability of a design in subsequent years.
The last 20 years have witnessed the rise of disaggregated "clusters," "networks," or "ecosystems" of firms in a number of industries, including computers, telecommunications, and pharmaceuticals. In these clusters, different firms design and produce the various components of a complex artifact (such as the processor, peripherals, and software of a computer system), and different firms specialize in the various stages of a complex production process. This paper considers the pricing behavior and profitability of these so-called modular clusters. Baldwin and Woodard isolate the offsetting price effects in a model, and show how they might operate in large as well as in small clusters.
Published in 2007
Firms must discover and pursue viable strategic positions particularly during times of change, in the early phases of a new industry, or after a discontinuity of some sort. At these times, the context of choice is typically hard to interpret: Among other reasons, knowledge of cause-and-effect relationships is unavailable or difficult to obtain, the nature of industry participants is ambiguous, and opportunities are ill-defined. What underlies the intelligence of strategic choice in these settings? This paper argues that recognition is essential to such choices for both individuals and groups. Recognition refers to a class of cognitive processes through which a problem or situation is interpreted associatively in terms of something that has been experienced before. The paper models recognition processes in groups of decision-makers and shows how a few select group-level characteristics might improve recognition outcomes.
Ready or not, companies are being swept up in the increasing public debate over global climate change. How should firms respond? A case study exploring how financial service giant UBS thinks through the issues has students coming down on different sides.
"Negotiators who are quick to label the other party 'irrational' do so at great potential cost to themselves," say HBS professors Deepak Malhotra and Max H. Bazerman. Their new book, Negotiation Genius, combines expertise in psychology with practical examples to show how anyone can improve dealmaking skills. In this excerpt, Malhotra and Bazerman describe what to do when the other party's behavior does not make sense.
For the last 30 years economists have used the concepts of "transaction," "transaction cost," and "contract" to illuminate a wide range of phenomena, including vertical integration; the design of employment, debt, and equity contracts; and the structure of industries. These concepts are now deeply embedded in the fields of economics, sociology, business, and law. Theories explain how to choose between different forms of transactional governance. But why does a transaction occur where it does? Without this answer, the forces driving the location of transactions in a system of production remain largely unexplored. This paper explains the location of transactions (and contracts) in a system of production. It also presents a theory of technological change that predicts changes in the location of transactions and therefore in the structure of industries.
Music, television shows, movies, Internet and mobile content, computer software, and other forms of media often require a consumer to join a platform in order to access or utilize the media. This affiliation may take the form of a subscription to a distribution channel or purchase of a hardware device. One of the primary means of differentiation and competition between platforms for consumer adoption is the acquisition of premium or quality content. However, whether or not certain content is exclusive to one platform or is present on multiple platforms varies significantly from industry to industry. One can even view Apple's exclusive U.S. provision of the iPhone to AT&T as even more variation in the degree of exclusivity across industries. Why is it that some forms of content are available only on one platform, while others are distributed through several or all platforms available—that is, they "multihome"? This paper analyzes industry propensity for exclusivity and presents a model of platform competition. The key driving force is the nature of the relationship between the content and the platforms: outright sale (all control rights, particularly over content pricing, are transferred from the content provider to the platform) or affiliation (the content provider maintains control rights over pricing).
The challenges facing platform managers vary systematically depending on (1) whether the platform is proprietary or shared and (2) the stage of platform development. This article summarizes the results of a multiyear research project on platform strategies, including interviews with 30 companies. It describes 3 stages of the platform life cycle—platform design, network mobilization, and platform maturity—and reviews in depth the strategic decisions and management issues for each stage.
With ever more sophisticated logistics and the rise of information technologies, intermediaries and market platforms have become increasingly ubiquitous and important agents in the digital economy. While market intermediation is not a new phenomenon, the digital economy has revealed that there can be two polar types of intermediaries: "merchants," which acquire goods from sellers and resell them to buyers, and "two-sided platforms," which allow affiliated sellers to sell directly to affiliated buyers. As examples, retailers like Walmart.com and Amazon.com are (mostly) merchants; eBay is a pure two-sided platform; and Apple's iTunes digital music store exhibits both merchant and platform features. This research is a first pass at delineating the economic tradeoffs between the merchant and two-sided platform modes.
Most industries exhibit some degree of geographic concentration. Although many theories attempt to explain this agglomeration, empirical tests of these theories are difficult as they all predict similar outcomes within individual industries. This study considers how industries coagglomerate—that is, which industry pairs locate together—to form a tractable analysis. The authors specifically study the relative importance of proximity to suppliers and customers, to firms using similar labor, and the sharing of ideas for explaining agglomeration.
Published in 2006
How and why do organizations respond differently to pressures from different stakeholders? This question is central to organizational theory and feeds into strategic management research as well. Delmas and Toffel develop and test a model that describes why organizations respond differently to similar stakeholder pressures. They suggest that differences in how organizations distribute power across their internal corporate departments lead their facilities to prioritize different institutional pressures and thus adopt different management practices.
To study dynamic competition, Baldwin and Clark build upon a design principle in computer architecture known as Amdahl's Law. The authors show that firms can study the underlying cause-and-effect relationships in a complex architecture in order to identify "bottlenecks." Firms may then redesign the interfaces of key components to make them more modular. They can then outsource more activities without sacrificing performance or cost. As a result, firms can offer competitive products or services, while investing less, and so enjoy an "invested capital advantage" over competitors. Baldwin and Clark explain how the strategy works and then model its impact on competition through successive stages of industry evolution.
Long-term investors look for portfolio strategies that optimally trade off risk and reward, not in the immediate future, but over the long term. It is unrealistic to expect long-term investors to adopt an "invest and forget" strategy, but creating a portfolio strategy that adjusts asset allocations in response to changing risk premia, interest rates, and expected inflation remains a challenge in finance. Jurek and Viceira have devised a solution method that aims at a practical implementation of dynamic portfolio choice models with realistically complex investment opportunity sets. They have applied their method to study the role of value stocks and growth stocks in the portfolios of long-term investors, and have found that long-term investors might want to tilt their portfolios away from value stocks despite the fact that the average return on value stocks is larger than the average return on growth stocks (the so-called "value premium"). Their findings provide support for the idea that the superior performance of value stocks might reflect simply that they are riskier than growth stocks at long horizons.
Published in 2001
A bungled corporate restructuring can turn a good idea into disaster. In an excerpt from his new book, HBS professor Stuart Gilson outlines the keys for a successful corporate makeover. Plus: Gilson Q&A.
Published in 2000
On the Internet Express, getting big fast is the strategy of choice. But is it right for everyone? HBS Professor Thomas R. Eisenmann looks at key factors that can help a company decide.
