In this article, we lay out the challenges and research opportunities associated with business-to-business (B2B) buying. These challenges and opportunities reflect four aspects of B2B buying that the Institute for the Study of Business Markets (ISBM: www.isbm.org) has identified through a Delphi-like process: (1) the changing landscape of B2B buying, (2) the increasing sophistication of sellers, (3) the impact of technological changes, and (4) the increasing importance and growth of emerging markets. For each of these four areas, we identify the relevant background, key issues, and pertinent research agendas.
The image of the ‘home’ is central to family businesses, beyond its obvious role as the mooring ground for generations of entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs often find it difficult to keep home and business apart—which is why the story of a home that is itself the business can offer many fascinating lessons. The Biltmore Estate, America’s largest private home and a National Historic Landmark, is today an 8,000-acre, 1,800-employee enterprise, run by a fourth-generation family hand. The estate defies an old myth—that family businesses don’t last beyond three generations. Evolving from just a tourist attraction to a luxury hotel, a winery, a home products line and an equestrian center, Biltmore has been a celebrated model of sustainable growth held together by a strong family anchor over nearly twelve decades. This article explores Biltmore’s mix of family-led and professional management, and how the grand estate is gearing up for the future.
In this article, we develop a novel theoretical framework detailing what collective action problems and solutions arise in market formation and under what conditions. Our framework centers on the development of market infrastructure with three key factors that influence the nature and extent of collective action problems: perceived returns to contributions, excludability, and contribution substitutability. We apply our framework to diverse market formation contexts and derive a set of attendant propositions. Finally, we show how collective action problems and solutions evolve during market formation efforts and discuss how our framework contributes to strategic management, entrepreneurship, and organization literatures.
Workplace relationships are a cornerstone of management research. At the same time, there remain pressing calls for work relationships to be front and center in management literature, demanding an organizationally specific “relationship science.” This article addresses these calls by unifying multiple scholarly fields of interest to develop a comprehensive understanding of interpersonal workplace relationships.
Markets today are flooded with an increasing number of products and brands, making it difficult for companies to track how their products compete in the market. In this article, the authors describe how they used clickstream data to visualize competition in product categories containing more than 1,000 products.
This article integrates relevant literature to develop a conceptual model on the potential avenues to achieve service excellence at low unit costs, which we term cost-effective service excellence (CESE). To gain a deeper understanding of these strategies, their applicability and interrelatedness, we analyze how 10 organizations have achieved CESE. Our findings show that CESE can be achieved through three core strategies.
This article investigates patent citations made to published patent applications. Although citations to patent publications are conceptually indistinguishable from citations to granted patents, they are omitted from all standard measures. We find that publication citations are a large and growing portion of patent citations, and that they differ statistically from citations to granted patents on several important dimensions. We conclude that omitting publication citations is likely to generate biased measures, and that standard measures of patent citations should be corrected. We release our computer code and corrections for future use.
Competition between firms to invent and patent an idea, or “patent racing,” has been much discussed in theory, but seldom analyzed empirically. This article introduces an empirical way to identify patent races, and provides the first broad-based view of them in the real world.
Speed is often critical for successful commercialization of a new technology, and patents help entrepreneurs secure funding, enter the market, and avoid expropriation of their ideas. In this article, we employ a recent change to U.S. patent law—the introduction of an elective program accelerating patent examination—to investigate the role of patent examination speed in strategic entrepreneurship.
This article examines at‐the‐market (ATM) equity programs as an additional source of financial flexibility. We find that firms with higher market‐to‐book ratios and greater institutional ownership are more likely to announce an ATM program. Firms using ATM programs are also more likely to issue shares when they have exhausted other viable financing alternatives, have timely investment opportunities and when market conditions are favorable. Finally, we document a significant negative announcement effect around the establishment of an ATM program, though the magnitude of this effect is significantly less negative than that of a comparable SEO.
This Article examines a previously unstudied aspect of short selling: the risk that the shares a short seller has borrowed will be delisted and deregistered. We label such shares “zombie stocks” or “zombies,” because they appear to be “dead,” but nevertheless create financial horror for short sellers, exposing them to significant risks and costs even when the short seller has speculated correctly against a company’s shares.
We study price optimization under the mixture of boundary logit (MBL) model, which was recently introduced in Jagabathula et al. (2020) and Jagabathula and Venkataraman (2022). We show that the pricing problem under the MBL model is hard to solve in the most general case. However, we prove structural results for the general pricing problem and characterize the optimal solution for several special cases, including a setting in which all products are charged the same price, and a setting with two products.
We look into how local consumers receive foreign cultures embedded in imported movies against customized local cultures in domestic movies in the Korean movie market. We theorize that imported movies (mostly, American movies), which often have bigger budgets and superior moviemaking techniques, suffer from cultural discount in appealing to local (Korean) viewers.
We document what fraction of the housing stock in US cities is affordable to different family types. Rather than looking at what fraction of their income people actually pay in rent in each city, which reflects a mix of households’ ability to pay and supply conditions, we look at the extent to which the housing stock is affordable using discrete housing expenditure share cutoffs and the distribution of rents in the American Community Survey from each city.
We document what fraction of the housing stock in US cities is affordable to different family types. Rather than looking at what fraction of their income people actually pay in rent in each city, which reflects a mix of households’ ability to pay and supply conditions, we look at the extent to which the housing stock is affordable using discrete housing expenditure share cutoffs and the distribution of rents in the American Community Survey from each city.
In its Changing America section, The Hill explored the institute’s American Growth Project and the variables driving the rankings of the fastest-growing U.S. cities, as well as the outlook for the future.
The institute’s first American Growth Project report suggests that downtown San Francisco had to take a major hit from the shift to working from home so that its surrounding metro area could thrive, Fortune's Prarthana Prakash writes.
The United States may be a highly productive society as a whole, but regionally results vary widely. Institute Chief Economist Gerald Cohen discusses the success stories and trends identified from our American Growth Project study of the top producing cities.
Soon after releasing the American Growth Project’s February report on projected economic growth for U.S. midsize cities, we realized several places near the top of our rankings featured prominently in songs. Naturally, a playlist was born.
Join us for a virtual discussion between Kenan Institute Chief Economist Gerald Cohen and Political Quotient Advisors CEO Mary Moore Hamrick on Jan. 5, 2022. Cohen and Hamrick will discuss the political gamesmanship behind the $1.2 trillion U.S. infrastructure bill, drivers influencing national budget and debt ceiling debates, and the potential impact on U.S. and global economies.