The research is a 13-months ethnographic field work on the early operations of a Multi-party alliance active in the global field of indoor positioning. The study aims to understand and investigate empirically the challenges that at the individual and group level influence the organizing principle guiding the alliance operations and evolution. Its contribution rests on the dynamics affecting ecosystems of innovation and collaborative spaces of value co-creation in inter-organizational projects.

In this research project, I have integrated two research streams on international strategic decisions making in international firms: upper echelons or top management teams (TMT) internationalization research and international strategic decision making process research. Both research streams in international business literature have evolved independently, but there is a potential in combining these two streams of research. The first empirical paper “TMT internationalization and international strategic decision making process: a decision level analysis of rationality, speed, and performance” explores the influence of TMT internationalization on strategic decision rationality and speed and, subsequently, their effect on international strategic decision effectiveness (performance). The results show that the internationalization of TMT is positively related to decision effectiveness and this relationship is mediated by decision rationality while the hypotheses regarding the association between TMT internationalization and decision speed, and the mediating effect of speed were not supported. The second paper “TMT internationalization and international strategic decision rationality: the mediating role of international information” of my thesis is a simple but logical extension of first paper. The first paper showed that TMT Internationalization has a significant positive effect on international strategic decision rationality. The second paper explicitly showed that TMT internationalization affect on international strategic decision rationality comes from two sources: international experience (personal international knowledge and information) and international information collected from managerial international contacts. For this research project, I have collected data from international software firms in Pakistan. My research contributes to the literature on upper echelons theory and strategic decision making in context of international business and international firms by explicitly examining the link between TMT internationalization and characteristics of strategic decisions making process (i.e. rationality and speed) in international firms and their possible mediating effect on performance.

Studies have depicted that the rate of unused patents comprises a high portion of patents in North America, Europe and Japan. Particularly, studies have identified a considerable share of strategic patents which are left unused due to pure strategic reasons. While such patents might generate strategic rents to their owner, they may have harmful consequences for the society if by blocking alternative solutions that other inventions provide they hamper the possibility of better solutions. Accordingly, the importance of the issue of nonuse is highlighted within the literature on strategic patenting, IPR policy and innovation economics. Moreover, the current literature has emphasized on the role of patent pools in dealing with potential issues such as excessive transaction cost caused by patent thickets and blocking patents. In fact, patent pools have emerged as policy tools facilitating technology commercialization and alleviating patent litigation among rivals holding overlapping IPRs. In this dissertation I provide a critical literature review on strategic patenting, identify present gaps and discuss some future research paths. Moreover, I investigate the drivers of strategic non-use of patents with particular focus on unused strategic play patents. Finally, I examine if participation intensity in patent pools by pool members explains their willingness to use their non-pooled patents. I also investigate which characteristics of the patent pools are associated to the willingness to use non-pooled patents through pool participation. I show that technological uncertainty and technological complexity are two technology environment factors that drive unused play patents. I also show that pool members participating more intensively in patent pools are more likely to be willing to use their non-pooled patents through pool participation. I further depict that pool licensors are more likely to be willing to use their non-pooled patents by participating in pools with higher level of technological complementarity to their own technology.

This research aims at investigating the impact of the identity change on consumption. An identity change is defined as the acquisition of a new identity after a life change event. For instance after the birth of the first child the new identity as parent is acquired and a woman can define herself as a mother. Despite marketing research recognizes that individuals’ identity is unstable and susceptible to change, the investigation of the identity change is still in its infancy. Furthermore, marketing research did not investigate the contextual effect of the new as well as the old identity on individuals’ reaction toward identity-marketing. In order words, whether people show a more favorable reaction toward product related to their new or their old identities after an identity change is still unclear. In order to answer this question, five studies are conducted. Results show that when the new identity substitutes the old one, people show a more positive reaction toward new-identity related products, while when the new identity is added to the old ones, people show a more positive reaction toward old-identity related products. This is the case also when the new identity accounts for high levels of identification (study three) and when the old identity is squeezed by the new one (studies four and five). A new concept, the identity strain, is then introduced and discussed.

My Ph.D. thesis consists of three research papers focused on actors’ identity as social outcome, its intrinsic multidimensionality raised by multiple identity-shaping sources, and the relationship between identity dimensions and market performance. The first paper offers an overview of the literature on identity, social identity, and two identity-determining tools – social categories and network relations. It discusses how identity emerges from multiple identifying social forces that determines its multidimensionality. The second paper qualitatively explores the idea of multidimensionality in Electronic Dance Music (EDM). Through interviews with New York-based artists and producers, and secondary data analysis, EDM is unveiled as a field in which complex interrelations and exchanges occur among its actors. This complexity is then transferred to identity, and the word Sound emerges as vernacular term to refer to that multi-sided element that allows mutual recognition and collaboration – EDM actors’ socially constructed, multidimensional identity. Finally, the third paper tests four hypotheses relating EDM releases’ performance to external categorization, alliance portfolio, and their interaction. Regression models test: 1) the relationship between EDM releases’ Grade of Generalism (the weighted number of spanned styles) and commercial performance, 2) the relationship between releasing artists’ Relational Pluralism (the number of commercial partners) and releases’ performance, and 3) the combined effect of Generalism and Pluralism on releases’ performance. Results show a curvilinear relationship between both Generalism and Relational Pluralism and releases’ performance, and statistically confirm the existence and relevance of identity multidimensionality, especially from an inter-temporal perspective. Overall, my Ph.D. dissertation introduces the idea of multidimensional identity, and explores it in qualitative and quantitative terms. Moreover, the dissertation presents and unveils Electronic Dance Music as novel and relevant context for organization research.

Over the past decade, the world of social media is evolving at warp speed. In light of this rapid evolution, investigating social media users behaviour is top of the agenda for many managers and marketing researchers today (Kaplanand Haenlein, 2010). Indeed, still there are several areas in which we believe social media channels such as social networking, e-commerce, s-commerce, and blogs will make the most trivial evolution in years to come. Given the background provided about social media platforms adoption and strategic usage, there are some interesting and relevant topics that are particularly relevant in research on consumer behaviour towards these geo-information platforms and await further empirical exploration. Firstly, considering the cross-cultural aspects in studying the LBSN adoption on mobile phones, in a relationship social context, is a key driver of the growth and success of mobile LBSN and is even crucial to telecommunication operators to implement these services. Secondly, recently s-commerce is considered as a new form of social media that has arisen which due to its social features seem to have a great power of influence on consumers’ purchasing decision-making process. The marketing area has thus evolved from a time where marketers had the power of influence to today where consumers have a greater power of influence on their peers (Jaffe, 2010). Finally, with the advent of 4G mobile devices and the mobile location based advertising, consumers’ preferences can be pre-identified and advertising content can therefore be delivered to consumers at the right time and at the right place with the right message (Chen and Hsieh, 2012). Therefore, it becomes necessary and reasonable to enhance our understanding about the role of mobile advertising in mediating consumers shopping experience, since we begin to find ourselves bringing our mobile devices everywhere we go.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

This research has been triggered by an emergent trend in customer behavior: customers have rapidly expanded their channel experiences and preferences beyond traditional channels (such as stores) and they expect the company with which they do business to have a presence on all these channels. This evidence has produced an increasing interest in multichannel customer behavior and it has motivated several researchers to study the customers’ channel choices dynamics in multichannel environment. We study how the consumer decision process for channel choice and response to marketing communications evolves for a cohort of new customers. We assume a newly acquired customer’s decisions are described by a “trial” model, but the customer’s choice process evolves to a “post-trial” model as the customer learns his or her preferences and becomes familiar with the firm’s marketing efforts. The trial and post-trial decision processes are each described by different multinomial logit choice models, and the evolution from the trial to post-trial model is determined by a customer-level geometric distribution that captures the time it takes for the customer to make the transition. We utilize data for a major retailer who sells in three channels – retail store, the Internet, and via catalog. The model is estimated using Bayesian methods that allow for cross-customer heterogeneity. This allows us to have distinct parameters estimates for a trial and an after trial stages and to estimate the quickness of this transit at the individual level. The results show for example that the customer decision process indeed does evolve over time. Customers differ in the duration of the trial period and marketing has a different impact on channel choice in the trial and post-trial stages. Furthermore, we show that some people switch channel decision processes while others don’t and we found that several factors have an impact on the probability to switch decision process. Insights from this study can help managers tailor their marketing communication strategy as customers gain channel choice experience. Managers may also have insights on the timing of the direct marketing communications. They can predict the duration of the trial phase at individual level detecting the customers with a quick, long or even absent trial phase. They can even predict if the customer will change or not his decision process over time, and they can influence the switching process using specific marketing tools