While customer acquisition is clearly important for new brands, mature brands are often said to rely on defection management for maintenance and growth. Yet the theory to support this approach has been subject to very little empirical investigation. How do brands actually increase the size of...

Patent expiration represents a turning point for the brand losing patent protection as bioequivalent generic versions of the drug quickly enter the market at reduced prices. In this paper, we study how physician characteristics and their prescribing decisions impact the competition among...

Little is known about customer loyalty to brands over many dozens or even hundreds of purchases. In this paper we describe, and seek to explain, such patterns of loyalty in two very different markets: a consumer market (laundry detergents), and a more frequently used service (physicians'...

Motivated by the medical literature findings that physicians are inertial, we seek to understand (1) whether physicians exhibit structural persistence in drug choice (structural persistence occurs when the drug chosen for a patient depends structurally on the drug previously prescribed by the...

The study of transformation and change is one of the most important areas of social science research. This paper synthesizes and critically reviews the emerging traditions in the study of change dynamics. Three mainstream theories of evolution are introduced to explain change: the Darwinian...

Recent comments on the national competitive model based on links between organizational skills and value added have recognized that individual firm performance can be significantly moderated by either or both marketing expertise and differentiating skills within the organization with an emphasis...

Strategic management is well developed in its understanding of both strategic thinking and the strategic decision-making process. But the precise role of behaviours within strategy-making teams and the influence of these behavioural patterns is less well understood. This paper is based on...

This article looks at a selection of significant episodes in the history of organizational and management research, and the policies in this field of the UK Social Science Research Council. The episodes begin in the Council's early days in the mid-1960s, and run through its high-profile efforts...

In response to recent terror attacks, Western governments now involve private sector organizations in national security regimes in key strategic areas such as travel, communication and financial services. The UK’s e-Borders programme is one such regime. Its goal is to collect and analyse...