Strategy

The cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings ratio is now elevated. But should that lead you to exit the stock market? Perhaps not. The predictive power of CAPE has waned meaningfully in recent years.

We leverage Lachmann’s insight on elite conflict to explain the politics surrounding industry regulation in contemporary America and argue that conflicts between political elites create both constraints on industry players and opportunities for them to shape regulation. The widening urban-rural polarization of American society, in particular, has made urban political elites more liberal than those in state politics. The greater the political polarization of a state,  the more local restrictions the nascent U.S.

Firms with political connections to a regime with an authoritarian history face a dilemma when the regime undergoes a democratic transition. Such connections provide an essential competitive advantage when the regime is in power but become a liability when an institutional transition brings democratic change. This study theorizes that when mass protests expose a regime’s distorted policies favoring elites over others and signal a high probability of regime turnover, firms may hedge against the risks associated with their political connections by engaging in philanthropy.

With multinational corporations (MNCs) increasingly taking public stances on sociopolitical issues such as immigration, LGBTQ+ rights, and racism, it is imperative that International Business (IB) research keeps pace with normative societal debates. In this paper, we introduce the concept of corporate sociopolitical activism (SPA) to the IB literature and develop theory on why MNCs consistently or inconsistently engage in SPA in response to the same issue in their home country and a host country.

What is the impact of communicating strategy to employees in scaling ventures? As entrepreneurial ventures grow and add headcount, misalignment among employees can emerge, leading to inefficient and potentially detrimental decisions. Communicating strategy can realign employees' ideas to the firm's core framework but divert them from more distant and potentially optimal possibilities, constraining flexibility. Through a pre-registered field experiment involving 480 employees across 25 companies in 14 countries, we analyze the effects of a simple strategy communication intervention.

Non-informational cues, such as facial expressions, can significantly influence judgments and interpersonal impressions. While past research has explored how smiling affects business outcomes in offline or in-store contexts, relatively less is known about how smiling influences consumer choice in e-commerce settings even when there is no face-to-face interaction.

Prior work highlights the importance of cognitive approaches to strategy formation for startup growth. They enable entrepreneurs to strategically reason—logically and convincingly formulate their strategic choices before executing them. However, whether the value of strategic reasoning generalizes across contexts, particularly different financing environments, remains unclear.

How does international exposure shape entrepreneurial pivots? Through a field study of 84 startups across 27 countries, we develop a model that uncovers how international exposure not only spurs ventures to update their understandings of the international market but also generates pivots in the addressed market. Structural differences between markets and entrepreneurs' cognitive openness makes new information about the international market more salient. This new information opens ventures' eyes to novel opportunities.

Acquisitions can shift the market structure of a digital platform in ways that affect subsequent entries and hence the platform’s base of complementors. Synergies that complementor acquirers accrue can be entry-deterring. We develop a two-by-two typology of acquisition synergies in a multisided platform based on the two sides of a platform market (user side or complementary-technology side) and two sources of synergies (scale or scope economies).