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- January 2021
- Article
Turbulence, Firm Decentralization and Growth in Bad Times
By: Philippe Aghion, Nicholas Bloom, Brian Lucking, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen
What is the optimal form of firm organization during “bad times”? We present a model of delegation within the firm to show that the effect is ambiguous. The greater turbulence following macro shocks may benefit decentralized firms because the value of local information...
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- May 2020
- Article
Measuring Collaboration in Modern Organizations
By: Stephen Michael Impink, Andrea Prat and Raffaella Sadun
Internal communication has been a central theme in organizational economics, as employee collaboration provides insight into the structure of firms. Use of electronic communications data can be transformational for organizational economics, as these data provide a...
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- Article
Frame Flexibility: The Role of Cognitive and Emotional Framing in Innovation Adoption by Incumbent Firms
By: Ryan Raffaelli, Mary Ann Glynn and Michael Tushman
Why do incumbent firms frequently reject nonincremental innovations? Beyond technical, structural, or economic factors, we propose an additional factor: the degree of the top management team's (TMT) frame flexibility, i.e., their capability to cognitively expand an...
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- 2018
- Article
Cracking the Organizational Challenge of Pursuing Joint Social and Financial Goals: Social Enterprise as a Laboratory to Understand Hybrid Organizing
By: Julie Battilana
While in recent decades the social and business sectors have evolved on fairly separate tracks, today companies are increasingly expected to generate social value in addition to profit. As a result, they also increasingly face the distinct challenge of pursuing social...
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- September 26, 2018
- Article
Ownership and Power Structure: Together at Last
By: Laura Alfaro, Nicholas Bloom, Paola Conconi, Harald Fadinger, Patrick Legros, Andrew Newman, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen
Economists have largely ignored the deep interdependency between integration and delegation. This column describes a new theory of integration and delegation choices aimed at shedding light on how these distinct elements of organizational design interact. Contrary to...
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- 2018
- Chapter
An Integrated Model of Dynamic Problem Solving within Organizational Constraints
By: Johnathan R. Cromwell, Teresa M. Amabile and Jean-François Harvey
Book Abstract: Rapid technological change, global competition, and economic uncertainty have all contributed to organizations seeking to improve creativity and innovation. Researchers and businesses want to know what factors facilitate or inhibit creativity in a...
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- 2018
- Chapter
New Prospects for Organizational Democracy?: How the Joint Pursuit of Social and Financial Goals Challenges Traditional Organizational Designs
By: Julie Battilana, Michael Fuerstein and Michael Lee
For an extended period during the first half of the 20th century, industrial democracy was a vibrant movement, with ideological and organizational ties to a thriving unionism. In 2015, however, things look different. While there are instances of democracy in the...
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- 2018
- Chapter
The United States in Contemporary Perspectives: Evolving Forms, Strategy, and Performance
By: David J. Collis, Bharat Anand and J. Yo-Jud Cheng
BOOK ABSTRACT: In spite of surging interest in the business group organization among business scholars, economists, and historians in recent years, academic research on business groups has, to date, remained within the boundary of emerging markets. The major aim of...
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- 2017
- Working Paper
Explaining the Vertical-to-Horizontal Transition in the Computer Industry
This paper seeks to explain the technological forces that led to the rise of vertically integrated corporations in the late 19th century and the opposing forces that led to a vertical-to-horizontal transition in the computer industry 100 years later. I first model the...
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- 2017
- Book
Geography, Location, and Strategy
By: Juan Alcácer, Bruce Kogut, Catherine Thomas and Bernard Yin Yeung
Changes in both technology and global political economy have vastly accelerated the pace of globalization in the last 40 years, eroding barriers that limited firms' geographic scope and unleashing a seemingly unlimited set of new threats, challenges, and opportunities...
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- 2016
- Working Paper
The Skills Gap and the Near-Far Problem in Executive Education and Leadership Development
By: Mihnea Moldoveanu and Das Narayandas
Executive development programs have entered a period of rapid transformation, driven on one side by the proliferation of a new technological, cultural, and economic landscape commonly referred to as “digital disruption” and on the other by a widening gap between the...
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- August 2016 (Revised August 2017)
- Case
AnswerDash (Abridged)
By: Elie Ofek and Jeffrey D. Shulman
It is 2014 and AnswerDash, a startup backed by venture capital, has not seen the widespread adoption of their online self-service customer support solution that they were expecting based on early success in helping clients save and generate substantial amounts of...
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Keywords:
Pricing;
Economic Value Estimation;
Price Metrics;
Organizational Selling;
Innovation Adoption;
Business To Business;
Marketing;
Customer Lifetime Value;
Venture Capital;
Customer Relationship Management;
Price;
Marketing Strategy;
Entrepreneurship;
Technology Adoption;
Business Startups;
Sales;
Innovation And Invention;
Product Marketing;
Financial Services Industry
- July 2016
- Article
Do Prices Determine Vertical Integration?
By: Laura Alfaro, Paola Conconi, Harald Fadinger and Andrew F. Newman
What is the relationship between product prices and vertical integration? While the literature has focused on how integration affects prices, this paper provides evidence that prices can affect integration. Many theories in organizational economics and industrial...
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- June 2016 (Revised August 2017)
- Case
AnswerDash
By: Elie Ofek and Jeffrey D. Shulman
It is 2014, and AnswerDash, a startup backed by venture capital, has not seen the widespread adoption of their online self-service customer support solution that they were expecting based on early success in helping clients save and generate substantial amounts of...
View Details
Keywords:
Pricing;
Economic Value Estimation;
Price Metrics;
Organizational Selling;
Innovation Adoption;
Business To Business;
Marketing;
Customer Lifetime Value;
Venture Capital;
Customer Relationship Management;
Price;
Marketing Strategy;
Entrepreneurship;
Technology Adoption;
Business Startups;
Sales;
Innovation And Invention;
Product Marketing;
Financial Services Industry
- 2016
- Book
Innovation Policy and the Economy, Volume 17
By: Shane Greenstein, Josh Lerner and Scott Stern
The seventeenth volume of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Innovation Policy and the Economy provides an accessible forum for bringing the work of leading academic researchers to an audience of policymakers and those interested in the interaction...
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- 2016
- Book
Revolutionizing Innovation: Users, Communities, and Open Innovation
By: Dietmar Harhoff and Karim R. Lakhani
The last two decades have witnessed an extraordinary growth of new models of managing and organizing the innovation process, which emphasize users over producers. Large parts of the knowledge economy now routinely rely on users, communities, and open innovation...
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- 2019
- Working Paper
Who Should Select New Employees, Headquarters or the Unit Manager? Consequences of Centralizing Hiring at a Retail Chain
By: Carolyn Deller and Tatiana Sandino
We examine how changing the allocation of hiring decision rights in a multiunit organization affects employee-firm match quality, contingent on a unit’s circumstances. Our research site, a US retail chain, switched from a decentralized hiring model (hiring by business...
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- 2019
- Working Paper
Self-Interest: The Economist's Straitjacket
By: Robert Simons
This paper examines contemporary economic theories that focus on the design and management of business organizations. In the first part of the paper, a taxonomy is presented that describes the different types of economists interested in this subject—market economists,...
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Keywords:
Self-interest;
Economist;
Moral Philosophers;
Regulation;
Capture;
Organization Design;
Economy Theory;
Organization Theory;
Management Theory;
Commitment;
Controls;
Governance;
Customers;
Conflict Of Interests;
Business Or Company Management;
Competition;
organizational Design;
Business Education;
Agency Theory;
economics;
Theory;
Boundaries
- Article
Chris Argyris (1923–2013)
By: Amy C. Edmondson
Chris Argyris, a pioneer in the fields of organization development, organizational learning, and action science, passed away on November 16, 2013. Argyris was born in Newark, New Jersey, on July 16, 1923, to Greek immigrant parents, and grew up in Irvington, New...
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- 2015
- Book
Leading Sustainable Change: An Organizational Perspective
The business case for acting sustainably is becoming increasingly compelling—reducing our global footprint to sustainable levels is the defining issue of our times, and it is one that can only be addressed with the active participation of the private sector. However,...
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