An important reason people join communities is to satisfy their identity needs. Firms might exploit this societal tendency to gain competitive advantages and thus stronger economic profits than rivals. By reviewing the strategic approach adopted by Kiehl's, a U.S. cosmetic producer and retailer,...

Licensing a cost-reducing innovation through a royalty has been shown to be superior to licensing by means of a fixed fee for an incumbent licensor. This note shows that this result relies crucially on the assumption that the incumbent licensor can sell its cost-reducing inno-vation to all...

We investigate the impact of rivals' product innovation and new advertising on a firm's financial market value in mature product markets. Our test bed is the carbonated soft drink market between 1999 and 2003, a period characterized by a near duopoly between Coca-Cola and Pespi. Empirically, we...