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The value-based approach to strategy argues that a firm's ability to capture value depends on the extent of its added value. In this paper, I empirically test the link between added value and value capture using a longitudinal dataset of United Kingdom law firm performance, capabilities, and client relationships. In this setting, competitors relevant for defining a firm's added value are those that share a client with the firm. Further, within a client relationship, value creation, and hence added value, can be decomposed in two parts: product-line capability and client-specific scope economies. I find that added value, measured at the level of each buyer-supplier relationship, is a driver of relationship stability and supplier profitability. This suggests that suppliers with similar capabilities might enjoy different economic returns depending on the composition of their set of relevant competitors. These findings shed light on the conditions under which firms can appropriate returns from their capabilities. They indicate that concepts from cooperative games can be fruitfully applied to empirical studies of firm performance and to the elaboration of insights from the resource-based view of the firm.

Research summary: We develop and apply a new set of empirical tools consistent with the tenets of value‐based business strategies, leveraging the principle that “no good deal comes undone” and the methods of revealed preferences, to empirically estimate drivers of value creation. We demonstrate how to use these tools in an analysis of value creation in buyer–supplier relationships in the UK corporate legal market. We show that our approach can uncover evidence of subtle mechanisms that traditional methods cannot easily distinguish from each other. Furthermore, we show how the estimates can be used as parameters of biform games for out‐of‐sample analyses of strategic decisions. With readily available data on relationships between firms, this approach can be applied to many other contexts of interest to strategy researchers. Managerial summary: Managers need to understand the drivers of value creation for customers in order to make competitive positioning decisions and understand when they can capture value under competition. However, estimates of the relative importance of each driver are typically difficult to obtain. In this article, we help remedy this problem by demonstrating a novel method that obtains estimates of the contribution of various drivers of value creation from commonly available data of buyer–supplier relationships. These estimates can then be used to inform the strategy‐making process. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper examines how knowledge created by firm experience (learning economies) and scale and scope economies affect performance in firms' development activities. The empirical results suggest that each factor has a significant effect on development performance. Moreover, knowledge that results from greater experience within a particular technological area, when combined with knowledge spillovers from greater scope in other technological areas, significantly improves development performance. The results suggest that experience shapes and facilitates firms' abilities to absorb knowledge spillovers. Our empirical findings thus provide a more nuanced examination of the drivers of performance and have implications for the management of firms' development activities.

In 2016, the Norwegian Parliament amended the Energy Act, with changes taking effect from 2021. The amended legislation will introduce strict separation of all generation and distribution companies within the electricity industry in Norway. Economies of scope studies from Norway show evidence of large economies of scope. Further, the companies in the industry could utilize the economies of scale potential if they merged. In this paper, we perform merger analysis to investigate potential merger gains in the Norwegian electricity distribution industry. By providing a method of testing for optimal mergers, we can present the best merger combination to the Norwegian electricity industry.

The purpose of the paper is to discuss the issue of economies of scope in platform research and to attract attention to the importance of scope economies for the strength and growth of Big Tech corporations. Hitherto, most attention has been on network effects and demand-side economies of scale, on the role of platforms in lowering transaction costs, and on the importance of big data. More specifically, the research question addressed in this paper is how economies of scope, driven by the demand side, contribute to the strength of successful Big Tech corporations. The answer is related to two aspects: one is concerned with bundling of services and products, and the other with the acquisition and processing of data on users and their activities using digital services and applications.

We extend a recently developed generalized local polynomial estimator into a semiparametric smooth coefficient framework to estimate a generalized cost function. The advantage of the generalized local polynomial approach is that we can simultaneously choose the degree of polynomial for each continuous nonparametric regressor and the bandwidths via data-driven methods. We provide estimates of scope economies from the joint production of microloans and microdeposits for a dataset of Microfinance Institutions from over 50 countries. Our approach allows analysis on all Microfinance Institutions rather than only those offering just microloans. Moreover, the smooth coefficient estimator provides a general interface in which to account for both direct and indirect environmental factors. We find substantial scope economies in general, of about 10 % at the median, as well as evidence that economies of scope vary across the type of services and country in which the MFIs operate, suggesting key insights into policy prescriptions.

Horizontal scope—the set of products and services offered—is an important dimension of firm strategy and a potentially significant source of competitive advantage. On one hand, the ability to build close buyer-supplier relationships over multiple transactions can give an advantage to broad firms that offer buyers \"one-stop shopping.\" On the other hand, the existence of organizational tradeoffs can give an advantage to firms that specialize in a narrower range of products or services. We develop a biform game that incorporates this tension and show how the use of three generic scope strategies—specialist, generalist, and hybrid—depends on organizational tradeoffs, client-specific scope economies, barriers to entry, heterogeneity in buyer task requirements, and the bargaining power of suppliers relative to buyers. We then use the model to study a variety of issues in supply chain management, including the gains to coordinating suppliers, the optimal level of buyer power, and the desirability of subsidizing suppliers. One of our objectives is to show how biform games, which introduce unstructured negotiations into game theory analysis, can be used to develop applied theory relevant to strategy. Generalizing from our stylized model, we identify a class of biform games involving buyers and suppliers that is useful for strategy analysis. Games in this class have the attractive property of each supplier’s share of industry total surplus being the product of its added value and its relative bargaining power.

We investigate operating costs at 682 public community colleges in the United States over a 15-year period (2004–2018). The results reveal that costs are spatially correlated across neighboring institutions, indicating the need for a spatial analysis. An institution’s actions are associated with changes in costs for that particular institution (direct-effects), but neighboring institutions’ actions also impact that institution (indirect/neighbor-effect) via labor market channels and local market conditions. The current research found that the neighbor-effects are economically significant at 9%. The spatial analysis further reveals a quadratic relationship between costs and the “production” of associate degrees and certificates granted, as well as a positive relationship between costs and human resources, some specific student demographics and institution characteristics. Overall, the community college sector exhibits economies of scale with respect to associate degrees, but with great variation in how many more degrees these institutions can award before becoming cost inefficient or before impacting access to enrollees with other educational goals. This sector faces diseconomies of scale in relation to certificates granted and Ray diseconomies of scale overall. This suggests room for restructuring and resizing. Community colleges are achieving economies of scope by offering both types of degrees. Moving forward, policymakers and campus leaders should account for unexpected shocks in operating costs due to neighbor-effects when developing policies, planning and budgeting. Funding should be done with the understanding that community colleges do not have full ex-ante knowledge of their costs or their neighbor’s future actions, nor perfect forecasting abilities, no matter how well managed they.

This paper examines the scale and scope economies of higher education institutions in Japan assuming the presence of productive inefficiency. The standard approach to testing the scope economies is to apply the cost function. However, the cost function approach often entails the difficulty of obtaining reliable data on input prices, especially the input prices of capital for higher education institutions. This paper proposes a duality approach based on the input distance function. The scope economies are tested under a necessary and sufficient condition by retrieving the costs of joint and separate production from the input distance function. We apply the testing procedure to data pertaining to 218 Japanese private universities in 1999 and 2004. The results indicate the scale economies and the scope diseconomies.

Due to network effects and switching costs in platform markets, entrants generally must offer revolutionary functionality to win substantial market share. We explore a second entry path that does not rely upon Schumpeterian innovation: platform envelopment. Through envelopment, a provider in one platform market can enter another platform market, and combine its own functionality with that of the target in a multi-platform bundle that leverages shared user relationships. Envelopers capture market share by foreclosing an incumbent's access to users; in doing so, they harness the network effects that previously had protected the incumbent. We present a typology of envelopment attacks based on whether platform pairs are complements, weak substitutes, or functionally unrelated and we analyze conditions under which these attack types are likely to succeed.