Research Papers

Strategy

How to Fight in a Free-for-All

Ramón Casadesús-Masanell, Feng Zhu

Imagine you are the publisher of an esteemed local newspaper. Suddenly, Metro is launched in your city, a paper that is free and ad-sponsored. How should you react? When faced with the choice of paying a subscription or getting the same news for free, is it enough to bank on the superior quality of your offer? From media to iTunes to pay TV channels like HBO, ad-sponsored entrants pose unique challenges to high-quality incumbents, who must decide whether – and how – to change their business models to compete in a new ad-sponsored landscape.

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Entrepreneurship

Not Just in It for the Money

Brian T. McCann, Govert Vroom

You would think that the goals of family-owned businesses and other owner-managed enterprises would be perfectly aligned with profit maximization. However, in their paper, Brian T. McCann and Govert Vroom find that the competitive nature of professionally managed firms implies that their interests are better aligned with profit maximization. This, the authors claim, is due to the fact that owner-managers pursue non-pecuniary objectives in addition to profit maximization.

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Service and Operations Management

Offshoring Facts Correct Common Myths

Pablo Agnese, Joan Enric Ricart

Offshoring raises fears of jobs lost to low-wage economies. But the true extent of offshoring is notoriously difficult to measure. In their paper, “Offshoring: Facts and Figures at the Country Level,” Pablo Agnese and Joan Enric Ricart review the most conventional indices the economic literature has produced and employ them to provide an overview of the extent of the phenomenon for a selection of countries.

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Strategy

Offshoring Poses Potential Gains for Japan

Pablo Agnese

Though Japan has lagged behind other countries for the past 20 years when it comes to offshoring practices, the country is now at a major crossroads. IESE’s Pablo Agnese weighs up the pros and cons of Japan following the worldwide trend of offshoring more of its business processes. He suggests that doing so should see a positive effect on employment and the growth rate of productivity in the long term, helping Japan to break out of the bubble that its economy has been stuck in for quite some time.

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Marketing

Salient Advertising Gets Bigger Bang for Buck

Marco A. Haan, José L. Moraga-González

Advertising is a game in which firms spend – some might even say waste – money trying to attract consumer attention away from their rivals. The paper “Advertising for Attention in a Consumer Search Model” presents a model to help firms balance their ad spend and product prices. Advertising that is more salient, and thereby attracts more attention, effectively enables firms to charge less for their products and obtain higher profits.

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