The impact of industry-wide and target market environmental hostility on entrepreneurial leadership in mergers and acquisitions

Based on survey data from 115 acquisitions completed between 2008 and 2011 by European acquirers from German-speaking countries, we find evidence that entrepreneurial leadership is a strong predictor of exploration and a weaker but significant driver of exploitation outcomes following M&A. Industry-wide environmental hostility negatively impacts the influence of entrepreneurial leadership on exploitation. Target market environmental hostility negatively impacts the influence of entrepreneurial leadership on exploration. Thus, while entrepreneurial leadership is a key success factor of M&A performance by increasing both, post-merger exploration and exploitation, acquirers need to take environmental conditions at the industry and market level into account

Perspiration and inspiration:Grit and innovativeness as antecedents of entrepreneurial success

Venture success has been related to numerous characteristics of entrepreneurs including their enduring personality traits. Separately, recent scholarship has elucidated trait “Grit” comprising two dimensions, “Consistency of Interests” (or “Passion”) and “Perseverance of Effort”, and validated Grit as a predictor of success in areas such as education, military training, and income. We report a study with a sample of Austrian entrepreneurs relating Grit as well as firm-level Innovativeness to entrepreneurial success. We show that both Grit and Innovativeness predict success; Grit affects success directly and in effects that are mediated by Innovativeness

The Impact of Dynamic Two-Sided Platform Pricing on Fairness Perception in the Sharing Economy

From an economic perspective, dynamic pricing seems to be the profit maximizing pricing strategy for consumer-to-consumer (C2C) sharing platforms because it allows balancing supply and demand over time. Based on distributive justice and equity theory we investigate how two characteristics of dynamic pricing, namely -˜fee changes over time’ and -˜fee differences across consumer groups’, influence fairness perception and intention to share of consumers. Using a laboratory experiment, we find that fee differences between lenders and borrowers is the dominant source of negative fairness perception, which in turn results in a lower intention to share, especially for the consumer group that is charged with a higher fee. Consequently, C2C sharing platforms have to be aware of this negative effect from fairness perception when they implement a dynamic two-sided platform pricing strategy to maximize profits

Absorptive capacity, strategic flexibility, and business model innovation:Empirical evidence from Italian SMEs

Recognizing that business model innovation (BMI) is a constant source of value creation in the digital economy, we examine the nexus between absorptive capacity and strategic flexibility, and their effects on BMI. We argue that to increase strategic flexibility and innovate their business model, firms need to develop their potential absorptive capacity (acquisition and assimilation of knowledge) as well as their realized absorptive capacity (transformation and exploitation of knowledge). While potential absorptive capacity drives both BMI and strategic flexibility, realized absorptive capacity increases a firm’s strategic flexibility. Our analysis of 282 Italian small- and medium-sized firms also shows a relationship between realized absorptive capacity and BMI, but only under conditions of environmental uncertainty