Bharat N. Anand

DO FIRMS LEARN TO CREATE VALUE? THE CASE OF ALLIANCES

We investigate whether firms learn to manage interfirm alliances as experience accumulates. We use contract-specific experience measures in a data set of over 2000 joint ventures and licensing agreements, and value creation measures derived from the abnormal stock returns surrounding alliance announcements. Learning effects are identified from the effects of unobserved heterogeneity in alliance capabilities. We find evidence of large learning effects in managing joint ventures, but no such evidence for licensing contracts. The effects of learning on value creation are strongest for research joint ventures, and weakest for marketing joint ventures. These results are consistent with the view that learning effects are more important in situations characterized by greater contractual ambiguity.Copyright

The effectiveness of pre-release advertising for motion pictures: An empirical investigation using a simulated market

Abstract We use data on a movie’s stock price as it trades on the Hollywood Stock Exchange, a popular online market simulation, to study the impact of movie advertising. We find that advertising has a positive and statistically significant effect on expected revenues, but that the effect varies strongly across movies of different “quality”. The point estimate implies that the returns to advertising for the average movie are negative.

Information, Non-Excludability, and Financial Market Structure

We study the determinants of market structure in financial intermediation markets when property rights over information are weak. We show that incentives to gather information to screen firms can be preserved in decentralized markets with more than one intermediary. Local monopoly power is sustained by an aggregate oligopolistic market structure, where intermediaries voluntarily refrain from free riding. We find that this market structure is robust to entry and does not change with market size. We apply our theory to two markets--investment banking and venture capital--and use it to organize and interpret the evidence. Copyright 2000 by University of Chicago Press.

Brands as Beacons: A New Source of Loyalty to Multiproduct Firms

This study provides evidence that a multiproduct firms portfolio of products affects consumer purchase decisions about each of the firms products. The authors present a theory that explains this empirical regularity. The theory involves revising the information set of consumers to include the profile of multiproduct firms. The authors show that revision of the information set in this way introduces a new source of consumer loyalty and explains interesting empirical regularities in consumer behavior. For example, consumers are loyal to a multiproduct firm even when it does not offer a product that matches their preferences better than a product of competing firms. The authors estimate the model and test its implications using panel data on television viewing choices. The estimated model also allows for state-dependence parameters and unobserved heterogeneity. The empirical results support the model and its implications. The model offers a parsimonious framework for brand-extension strategies and maps new channels of spillovers in a multiproduct firm.

Strategies That Work When Property Rights Don't

In many sectors property rights over knowledge and information are weak as they are embodied in employees, competitors can copy or customers can pirate. Yet comprehensive studies show that firms systematically invest in these assets. We offer a simple taxonomy of strategies that firms use to cope with weak property rights. We classify these strategies in three groups: (i) Some firms threaten offenders with strong competition. (ii) Other firms exploit complementarities and offer potential offenders a better deal than they can get elsewhere. (iii) And yet other firms exploit weak property rights and make profits on complementary assets or products that they can own. We go beyond taxonomy by showing when a particular strategy works. It depends systematically on the characteristics of both the asset and the investing firm.

Incentives Versus Synergies in Markets for Talent

We study what type of organization will host projects where talented individuals are pivotal. A cash-constrained and talented individual must invest in acquiring a skill essential to execute a project. Skill acquisition may be financed by either a corporation, which inserts the project into its pre-existing organization; or a specialist that finances single-project firms. The specialist can make talent the residual claimant. The corporation can exploit cross-project synergies by centralizing operations, which weakens incentives. Property rights may be weak: talent may leave and develop the project elsewhere after acquiring the skill. We find that weak property rights help corporations: for a given level of centralization, both effort and profits increase as property rights weaken. When the corporation can freely choose the strength of property rights and centralization, we find that, first, weak property rights are preferred; and, second, the corporation always chooses some centralization, eschewing first-best effort incentives. Moreover, whenever the corporation finances, it is socially deficient. We apply the model to examine several apparently puzzling phenomena in markets for talent. These include dominance by large firms despite severe conflicts of interest and high effort exertion by talent within large firms.

Investment Banking and Security Market Development: Does Finance Follow Industry?

Long-term relationships between business firms and investment banks are pervasive in developed security markets and there is evidence that better monitoring and information result from these relationships. Therefore, security markets should allocate resources better when an investment banking industry exists. We study the necessary conditions for the emergence of sustainable relationships and explore whether policy can foster them. We show that policy can help alleviate the costs of relationships, but an investment banking industry will not emerge with only a small number of large firms.