Nandini Rajagopalan

Chief executive officers (CEOs) often make internal attributions of positive firm performance outcomes by highlighting their strategic choices as the cause of favorable performance results. We investigate the dynamic consequences of CEO internal performance attributions along a CEO's tenure. CEO internal attributions create an expectation that favorable firm performance will continue under the CEO's leadership. When firm performance turns negative, however, financial analysts also make internal attributions, pointing to the strategies highlighted by the CEO as the cause of performance downfall. Analysts' internal attributions provide a board with a legitimate account casting doubt on the CEO's leadership efficacy, increasing the likelihood of dismissal. We find strong empirical support for our hypotheses in a panel dataset that tracks CEO and analyst interviews in news media around quarterly earnings announcements.

In this essay, I discuss a few characteristics of research that is rigorous, resilient, and impactful and identify some research topics that share these characteristics. I then share some observations on trends in the broader research environment that pose opportunities and threats for our continued ability to conduct research that is both rigorous and relevant. Finally, I offer some strategies to enhance our ability to continue to produce management knowledge that remains impactful over time.

The surpassing of a competing platform over the focal platform in installed bases creates uncertainty surrounding the emergence of a dominant platform. This in turn triggers complementors’ anxiety and thus increases their migration to the competing platform. However, as platform competition evolves and demonstrates that multiple platforms with strategic differentiation (e.g., quality- versus quantity-driven) could coexist, the migration tendency recedes. Consistent with our argument, we find that the increasing gap between installed bases of Android and iOS has an inverted-U effect on iOS developers’ likelihood of moving to Android, and that low performers and free-app developers have been the primary contributors to the inverted-U shaped pattern. App developers that migrate to Android at a highly uncertain time also experience a high rate of product failure.

There is an ongoing debate in the mergers and acquisitions literature centered on whether mergers and acquisitions (M&As) have positive or negative effects on competition and market entry outcomes. While the dominant view suggests that mergers and acquisitions exert positive influence on the merging firms and their rivals (for instance, in terms of positive abnormal returns), an opposing view grounded in the anti-trust perspective argues that M&As deter competition and future market entry. However, empirical evidence on whether M&As facilitate or deter competition within an industry is very limited. In this research, we attempt to provide empirical evidence to inform this debate by studying the impact of M&As on a specific competitive outcome - app developers’ segment-entry decisions in the mobile app market. Based on data covering the entire population of iOS developers during the period between 2008 and 2015, we find that the number of M&As in a specific segment has negative impact on app developers’ subsequent segment entries. Further, the entry-deterring effect of M&As is (a) stronger for iOS-platform incumbents than for iOS-platform new entrants, and (b) stronger for the deals conducted by large acquirers. These empirical findings are aligned with an anti-trust perspective in that the competition-deterring effects of M&As indicate their “dark side.”

In this study we provide evidence that firms considering entering new markets are more likely to appoint directors with experience in those markets; and subsequently, we show that directors' market experience increases the likelihood of new‐market entry. Moreover, we explore the presence of constraints in both, acquiring experienced directors and utilizing their experience. Specifically, we find that experienced directors are less likely to join firms with financial restatements in the recent past as well as firms with a lower status than the firms where they currently serve. In addition, we find that interlocking directors' experience is less likely to lead to new‐market entry for firms that lack new‐product development experience and that exhibit a high level of market overlap with interlocked firms. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.