Title: Essays on strategy and industrial organization
Description: This dissertation consists of three essays in the fields of Strategy (Essay One) and Industrial Organization (Essays Two and Three). The first essay investigates the impact that different types of spinoff activity - the exit of incumbent firm employees to intra-industry entrepreneurship - have on the survival probability of the incumbent organization. I propose a theoretical model based on corporate coherence, organizational learning and agency theory, for understanding the spinoff impact. I test the model empirically on a dataset from the US automobile industry and I identify specific types of spinoffs that may be beneficial for the parent by enhancing its survival probability. My results set the foundations for a strategic management theory of spinoff activity. The second essay, coauthored with Julie Holland Mortimer, and Richard Mortimer, investigates empirically the impact that retailer capacity choices have on realized sales in the US video rental industry. We provide estimates of this impact under alternative vertical contracts, and we show that, on average, an additional unit of capacity has a positive impact on sales, with titles taken on the contracts with the highest up-front cost typically having the strongest impact on sales from increased capacity. The third essay, written jointly with Christos Cabolis, Sofronis Clerides and Daniel Senft, addresses the issue of international price discrimination in the book industry. We use data from three countries, the US, the UK and Canada, and we find that general audience books are similarly priced internationally, but textbooks are substantially more expensive in the United States; a disparity that is much more pronounced for commercial publishers than for university presses. We argue that higher US textbook prices reflect the unique status of the textbook as a centerpiece of US college instruction.