This paper examines in detail the meaning of two frequently used—and misused—terms, namely, “business model” and “strategy”. It is argued that as used by leading thinkers these two terms might reasonably be interpreted as having roughly equivalent meanings. However, we argue that there is another distinct and potentially useful role for the term “business model”. In this role, strategies would ...

We examine how universal service provisions and price restrictions across markets impact strategic entry and pricing. We develop a simple multi-market model with an oligopolistic (profitable) urban market and entry auctions for (unprofitable) rural service. Cross-market price restrictions induce a firm operating in both markets to become a ‘softer’ competitor, thus placing the firm at a strateg...

An influential thesis, dubbed “Doing Well by Doing Good”, argues that corporate social responsibility is profitable. We establish that, if anything, the reverse is true: firms do good only when they do well in the sense of having financial slack. We model a firm’s optimal choices of capital and goodness subject to financial constraints. Lessconstrained firms spend more on goodness. We verify th...

This study aims to answer to three different questions. First, whether we could observe the short-term abnormal return anomaly or the long-term underperformance in the IPOs of a small economy. Second, if these anomalies exist, whether they are distinct when ownership categories (private versus state owned) are compared. And third, if these categories show different patterns, i. e., whether priv...

The paper adopts the methodology of the empirical finance literature to analyze a common question that liability maturity structure has an impact on firm performance. A comparison is made between two countries, the US and Germany, with different types of financial systems. We find that German firms that rely more heavily on short-term liabilities are likely to be more profitable. The link betwe...

I integrate under firm-specific benefit functions to estimate that the capitalized tax benefit of debt equals 9.7 percent of firm value (or as low as 4.3 percent, net of personal taxes). The typical firm could double tax benefits by issuing debt until the marginal tax benefit begins to decline. I infer how aggressively a firm uses debt by observing the shape of its tax benefit function. Paradox...

The theory of cost shifting posits that nonprofit firms “share the pain” of negative financial shocks with their stakeholders, for example, by raising prices. We examine how nonprofit hospitals responded to the sharp reductions in their assets caused by the 2008 stock market collapse. The average hospital did not raise prices, but hospitals with substantial market power did cost shift in this w...

As Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. [4, 5] and others have shown, the scale of manufacturing was transformed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The enormous increases in manufacturing throughput also motivated many firms to internalize the marketing function in order to effect comparable increases in sales. These developments would not have been profitable, however, without corresponding changes...

This study investigates how personal values may affect strategic decisions of board members in dilemmas involving shareholders and other stakeholders. In a survey of the entire population of directors and CEOs in all public corporations in one country, we use vignettes that are based on seminal court cases to identify a general factor of shareholderism (vs. stakeholderism). Directors and CEOs e...

To distribute software, commercial firms have the opportunity to use some dual licensing strategy i.e. to provide their software under two different licensing terms (proprietary and open source). In this paper, we investigate the relevance and impacts of such distribution strategy in the presence of an already existing open source software. In this competitive setting, we determine in which con...