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- 2021
- Article
The Virtues and Limitations of Dynamic Capabilities
By: Bharat Anand and David J. Collis
Dynamic capabilities have been identified as a key determinant of competitive advantage. This paper explores the foundations of dynamic capabilities, and the limits to their effectiveness, first theoretically and then through the case of Danaher, the most successful...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Dynamic Competition for Customer Memberships
By: Jorge Tamayo and Christian Chica
A competitive two-period membership (subscription) market is analyzed. Two
symmetric firms charge a “membership” fee that allows consumers to buy products or services
at a given unit price for both periods. Firms can choose between long- or short-term
memberships. When...
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- Article
Soul and Machine (Learning)
By: Davide Proserpio, John R. Hauser, Xiao Liu, Tomomichi Amano, Burnap Alex, Tong Guo, Dokyun (DK) Lee, Randall Lewis, Kanishka Misra, Eric Schwarz, Artem Timoshenko, Lilei Xu and Hema Yoganarasimhan
Machine learning is bringing us self-driving cars, medical diagnoses, and language translation, but how can machine learning help marketers improve marketing decisions? Machine learning models predict extremely well, are scalable to “big data,” and are a natural fit to...
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- June 2020 (Revised October 2020)
- Case
What Went Wrong with Boeing's 737 Max?
By: William W. George and Amram Migdal
This case describes the development of the Boeing 737 Max airplane model and the events leading up to two tragic plane crashes, in which a total of 346 people died: the crash of Lion Air flight 610 on October 29, 2018, in Indonesia, and the crash of Ethiopian Airlines...
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Keywords:
Communication;
Communication Intention And Meaning;
Communication Strategy;
Forms Of Communication;
Announcements;
Decision Making;
Decision Choices And Conditions;
Judgments;
Ethics;
Moral Sensibility;
Values And Beliefs;
Globalization;
Global Strategy;
Governance;
Corporate Accountability;
Governance Controls;
Human Resources;
Resignation And Termination;
Leadership;
Leadership Style;
Management;
Business Or Company Management;
Crisis Management;
Management Practices And Processes;
Management Skills;
Management Style;
Management Systems;
Risk Management;
Time Management;
Markets;
Demand And Consumers;
Market Platforms;
Supply And Industry;
Duopoly And Oligopoly;
Industry Structures;
Operations;
Product Development;
Organizations;
Organizational Change And Adaptation;
Organizational Culture;
Outcome Or Result;
Failure;
Success;
Planning;
Strategic Planning;
Problems And Challenges;
Relationships;
Business And Community Relations;
Business And Government Relations;
Business And Stakeholder Relations;
Risk And Uncertainty;
Safety;
Strategy;
Transportation;
Air Transportation;
Aerospace Industry;
Air Transportation Industry;
Africa;
Ethiopia;
Asia;
Indonesia;
North And Central America;
United States;
Seattle;
Chicago
- Spring 2020
- Article
From Disruption to Collision: The New Competitive Dynamics
By: Marco Iansiti and Karim R. Lakhani
- April 2020
- Article
Long-term Firm Growth: An Empirical Analysis of U.S. Manufacturers 1959–2015
By: Giovanni Dosi, Marco Grazzi, Daniele Moschella, Gary P. Pisano and Federico Tamagni
Firm growth is an essential feature of market economies, shaping together macroeconomic performance and the evolution of industry structures. As a potential indicator of organizational “fitness” within a competitive environment, firm growth is also a central concern to...
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Keywords:
Firm Growth;
Organizations;
Growth And Development;
Theory;
Analysis;
Production;
Data And Data Sets
- March 2020
- Case
Sizmek Chapter 11: Surviving Walled Gardens in Their Ad Tech Empire
By: Ayelet Israeli, Danilo Tauro and Sarah Gulick
This case provides a post-mortem of the advertising technology (adtech) company Sizmek. Sizmek grew via multiple acquisitions, with the vision of becoming an integrated adtech company that could leverage AI to buy digital media, while creating and serving display and...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Corporate Environmental Impact: Measurement, Data and Information
By: David Freiberg, DG Park, George Serafeim and T. Robert Zochowski
As an organization’s environmental impact has become a central societal consideration, thereby affecting industry and organizational competitiveness, interest in measuring and analyzing environmental impact has increased. We develop a methodology to derive comparable...
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- December 2019
- Case
CME Group in 2019
By: José B. Alvarez, Forest Reinhardt and Natalie Kindred
Chicago-based CME Group is the world’s largest futures and options marketplace, with annual trading volume of over 4.8 billion contracts in 2018. This case is set in late 2019, as heightened perceptions of risk stemming from the U.S.-China trade war are driving record...
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- Article
Economic Principles for Medicare Reform
By: Amitabh Chandra and Craig Garthwaite
In this article, we develop an economic framework for Medicare reform that highlights trade-offs that reform proposals should grapple with but often ignore. Central to our argument is a tension in administratively set prices, which may improve short-term efficiency but...
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- 2018
- Working Paper
The Limitations of Dynamic Capabilities
By: David J. Collis and Bharat Anand
The concept of dynamic capabilities draws its theoretical basis from two classic traditions within the strategy field—the resource-based view of the firm (RBV) (Wernerfelt, 1984) and market positioning (Porter, 1996). A dynamic capability qualifies as a source of...
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- 2019
- Article
More Amazon Effects: Online Competition and Pricing Behaviors
By: Alberto Cavallo
I study how online competition, with its shrinking margins, algorithmic pricing technologies, and the transparency of the web, can change the pricing behavior of large retailers in the U.S. and affect aggregate inflation dynamics. In particular, I show that in the past...
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- May 2019
- Technical Note
Nascent Platform Strategy: Overcoming the Chicken-or-Egg Dilemma
By: Andy Wu, David R. Clough and Sasha Kaletsky
This note provides a framework for addressing the classic chicken-or-egg dilemma facing entrepreneurs launching nascent multi-sided platforms. There are several conditions that lead to a difficult chicken-or-egg problem: strong network effects, high multi-homing costs,...
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- 2019
- Working Paper
Consumer Inertia and Market Power
By: Alexander MacKay and Marc Remer
We study the pricing decision of firms in the presence of consumer inertia. Inertia can arise from habit formation, brand loyalty, switching costs, or search, and it has important implications for the interpretation of equilibrium outcomes and counterfactual analysis....
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- January 2019 (Revised February 2020)
- Case
Jay Gould, 'The Most Hated Man in America'
By: Tom Nicholas, John Masko and Matthew G. Preble
Railroad magnate Jay Gould, a controversial figure in the history of U.S. capitalism, was a disruptive influence on an industry that had previously relied on formal and informal agreements to move traffic long distances across lines operated by different companies....
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- October 2017
- Article
Elevating Repositioning Costs: Strategy Dynamics and Competitive Interactions
By: Anoop R. Menon and Dennis Yao
This paper proposes an approach for modeling competitive interactions that incorporates the costs to firms of changing strategy. The costs associated with strategy modifications, which we term “repositioning costs,” are particularly relevant to competitive interactions...
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- October 2017
- Article
Toward a Prescriptive Theory of Dynamic Capabilities: Connecting Strategic Choice, Learning, and Competition
By: Gary P. Pisano
The field of strategy has mounted an enormous effort to understand, define, predict, and measure how organizational capabilities shape competitive advantage. While the notion that capabilities influence strategy dates back to the work of Andrews (1971, The Concept...
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- 2017
- Other Article
Designing an Agile Software Portfolio Architecture: The Impact of Coupling on Performance
By: Alan MacCormack and Robert Lagerstrom
The modern industrial corporation encompasses a myriad of different software applications, each of which must work in concert to deliver functionality to end-users. However, the increasingly complex and dynamic nature of competition in today’s product-markets dictates...
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- 2018
- Chapter
Technology Adoption
By: Chris Forman, Avi Goldfarb and Shane Greenstein
Using examples from information technology adoption, we emphasize the role of costs, benefits, communications channels and dynamic considerations in the decision to adopt new technology. We discuss differences between adoption by consumers and adoption by firms. We...
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Keywords:
Technology Adoption
- 2017
- Working Paper
Digital Agility: The Impact of Software Portfolio Architecture on IT System Evolution
By: Alan MacCormack, Robert Lagerström, Martin Mocker and Carliss Y. Baldwin
The modern industrial firm increasingly relies on software to support its competitive position. However, the uncertain and dynamic nature of today’s global marketplace dictates that this software be continually evolved and adapted to meet new business challenges. This...
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Keywords:
Information Systems;
Software;
Architecture;
Modularity;
Agility;
Coupling;
Software;
Design;
Decisions;
Performance