An appreciation of our referees

Editorial

An appreciation of our referees     

Toward a Typology of Family Firm Corporate Entrepreneurship

Family involvement in business creates idiosyncrasies in firm behavior that promote long‐term, often transgenerational, strategic logics that ostensibly align with the motivations and outcomes of corporate entrepreneurship. Interestingly, extant research provides only minimal insight into the heterogeneous nature of corporate entrepreneurship orientations pursued by family firms. To better understand this heterogeneity, we develop a typology of corporate entrepreneurship in family firms providing a reconciliatory approach to this literary diversity and suggest that the varied corporate entrepreneurship orientations of family firms are impacted by the duality of a family's distinct intention to pursue transgenerational succession and capabilities to acquire external knowledge.     

Regulation, Vertical Integration and Sabotage

We consider the incentive of a dominant firm that supplies a necessary input to a Bertrand-competitive differentiated products downstream industry to: (1) vertically integrate forward, and (2) raise its downstream rivals' costs through non-price activities which we characterize generally as 'sabotage'. We examine these incentives both in the absence and presence of a regulatory constraint on the upstream price. We find that, while an incentive for vertical integration is present regardless of the existence of the regulatory constraint, the incentive for sabotage emerges only in the presence of binding input price regulation. Welfare effects are also explored.     

Click Here for Internet Insight: Advances in Clickstream Data Analysis in Marketing

Clickstream data are defined as the electronic record of Internet usage collected by Web servers or third-party services. The authors discuss the nature of clickstream data, noting key strengths and limitations of these data for research in marketing. The paper reviews major developments from the analysis of these data, covering advances in understanding (1) browsing and site usage behavior on the Internet, (2) the Internet's role and efficacy as a new medium for advertising and persuasion, and (3) shopping behavior on the Internet (i.e., electronic commerce). The authors outline opportunities for new research and highlight several emerging areas likely to grow in future importance. Inherent limitations of clickstream data for understanding and predicting the behavior of Internet users or researching marketing phenomena are also discussed.     

The effect of noise in a performance measure on work motivation: A real effort laboratory experiment

This paper reports the results of an individual real effort laboratory experiment where subjects are paid for measured performance. Measured performance equals actual performance plus noise. We compare a stable environment where the noise is small with a volatile environment where the noise is large. Subjects exert significantly more effort in the volatile environment than in the stable environment. This finding is in line with standard agency theory and contrasts the intuitive idea captured by a distinct element of expectancy theory that noisier performance measures would lower work motivation.     

Choice and the Internet: From Clickstream to Research Stream

The authors discuss research progress and future opportunities for modeling consumer choice on the Internet using clickstream data (the electronic records of Internet usage recorded by company web servers and syndicated data services). The authors compare the nature of Internet choice (as captured by clickstream data) with supermarket choice (as captured by UPC scanner panel data), highlighting the differences relevant to choice modelers. Though the application of choice models to clickstream data is relatively new, the authors review existing early work and provide a two-by-two categorization of the applications studied to date (delineating search versus purchase on the one hand and within-site versus across-site choices on the other). The paper offers directions for further research in these areas and discusses additional opportunities afforded by clickstream information, including personalization, data mining, automation, and customer valuation. Notwithstanding the numerous challenges associated with clickstream data research, the authors conclude that the detailed nature of the information tracked about Internet usage and e-commerce transactions presents an enormous opportunity for empirical modelers to enhance the understanding and prediction of choice behavior.