Strategic orientation studies often provide ‘best practice prescriptions’ for firms in a given context—matching orientations to environmental conditions. While this perspective has value, empirical results are equivocal and an important reality has been overlooked: the fact that a firm’s...

Professional services firms (e.g., consultants, accounting firms, or advertising agencies) generate and sell business solutions to their customers. In doing so, they can leverage the cumulative experience gained from serving their customer base to either reduce their variable costs or increase...

In this paper, we ask when will a firm earn more profits from selling the attention of its customers to advertisers than from selling the underlying product itself. In other words, when will a firm become an advertising "medium"? We investigate this decision as a function of the intensity and...