Jeffrey T. Macher

Georgetown University | GU · McDonough School of Business

A popular narrative suggests that, in the wake of the rise of the Chicago School, the judiciary has grown increasingly lax, making it difficult for antitrust agencies to successfully challenge mergers in court. We develop a theoretical framework to yield propositions regarding merger challenges, settlements, and outcomes under varying judicial stan...

The introduction of a new good (or service) often creates situations in which consumers may choose to consume an extant good, a new good, both goods, or neither. Understanding the evolution and determinants of consumer demand in these situations can be quite important to economic policy formation, and especially so in network industries experiencin...

Although they lie at the very foundation of economic exchange, the primal questions of whether and when economic actors employ contracts and how the propensity to contract evolves over time have received relatively little empirical attention. We address these lacunas using an extensive database of spot market and contract shipments in the US freigh...

Despite tremendous growth in the volume of new scientific and technological knowledge, the popular press has recently raised concerns that disruptive innovative activity is slowing. These dire prognoses were mainly driven by Park et al. (2023), a Nature publication that uses decades of data and millions of observations coupled with a novel quantita...

We study a novel, low-cost approach to aggregating judgment from a large number of industry experts on ideas that they encounter in their normal course of business. Our context is the movie industry, in which customer appeal is difficult to predict and investment costs are high. The Black List, an annual publication, ranks unproduced scripts based...

We examine the adoption of fuel‐efficient precalciner kilns in the cement industry using the universe of adoption decisions in the United States over 1973–2013. We find that cement plants are more likely to adopt the technology if fuel costs are high, nearby competitors are few, and local demand conditions are favorable. We relate the findings to t...

A growing narrative has arisen that antitrust regulators have systematically relaxed enforcement over time. This narrative has led to calls for reinvigorated enforcement and the passage of new tougher antitrust legislation. In this paper, we employ data drawn directly from the antitrust agencies to examine this claim. Data collected from 1979 to 20...

Two features of the century-old policy goal of promoting universal telephone service in the United States have been enduring. Policymakers have focused on (1) wireline telephone (and more recently, fixed-line broadband) services and (2) households. The widespread adoption of mobile telephones compels a fresh examination of this focus. We construct...

In the railroad industry, there have been proposals for carriers to open their networks to competitors at regulated prices in markets that lack competition. Such rail “unbundling” is intended to reduce rates by facilitating competition when the underlying economics of the network makes facilities entry infeasible. These proposals mirror arguments m...

Competition works only if poorly performing vendors can be punished. The principal vehicle for consumers to discipline ill-performing firms is to switch to alternative providers. But switching is not the only mechanism consumers have to express disapproval. While some unhappy consumers may choose to no longer buy the good or service, other consumer...

This paper examines how the knowledge-based view (KBV) can be applied to firm boundary decisions and the performance implications of those decisions. At the center of the paper is a theoretical and empirical examination of how firms efficiently organize manufacturing in a regulated industry. We find that distinct organizational approaches are advan...

This paper examines the determinants of firms’ public policymaking influence. Using a novel and global database that measures firms’ perceived influence over the executive and legislative branches of government, a systematic analysis of the firm-, industry-, and country-level determinants and interrelationships among these determinants of firms’ pu...

This paper examines the concept of revenue adequacy, a benchmark of United States railroad firms' financial performance calculated annually by regulatory oversight bodies. The paper addresses questions around the origins, measurement, informational provisions, value and policy benefits and costs of revenue adequacy. An examination of the historical...

This paper examines how the knowledge-based view (KBV) can be applied to firm boundary decisions and the performance implications of those decisions. At the center of the paper is a theoretical and empirical examination of how firms most efficiently organize for technological development. We find that distinct organization approaches are advantaged...

We explore the pattern and evolution of the rapidly changing landscape of consumers' wired and wireless telecommunications choices with a model that extends the traditional (node-to-node) demand structure. We then empirically estimate a consumer choice model using household-level observations from 2003-2010. Households that are more affiliated with...

Models of firms’ influence over the regulatory agencies that oversee them have traditionally been constrained by several factors, including a lack of direct measures of “influence,” an inability to account for variations in the institutional environment within which firms operate, and a nearly singular focus on industry-level measures of interest g...

Rooted in 20th century legislation, telecommunications policy has historically been conducted in separate wired and wireless silos. The explosion of wireless voice, data and video communications, however, has largely overtaken wired communications, yet these silos persist. This article evaluates the economic foundation for unifying telecommunicatio...

The now standard principal-agent model of regulator-firm interactions typically assumes the presence of a single regulator and an exogenously determined information asymmetry between the principal and the agent. In this paper we draw upon a unique data set of regulatory inspections conducted by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to explore...

We augment transaction cost economics with social cognitive psychology to show that contract framing is an important element in minimizing issues in focal exchanges and managing buyer-supplier relationships. We find that exchange partners use promotion-framed extendibility clauses to address contract duration in the presence of greater physical dis...

While interest group explanations have considerably advanced our understanding of governmental outcomes, much remains to be understood about the specific country-level, industry-level and firm-level characteristics that underlie the influence firms have on the establishment of governmental rules, laws and regulations. In this study, we draw upon a...

Because firm conduct in Aspen Skiing stands at the outer boundaries of monopolization, it has received considerable scrutiny from antitrust scholars. The critical and somewhat puzzling determination of the relevant geographic market in this case—"the Aspen area"—however has received essentially no attention. In this paper, we report the results of...

An important question facing business scholars is whether and how organizations may best adapt their investments, resource profiles, and strategies to the demands of their particular environments. While a broad literature describes organizational design principles that may assist in this regard, more recent work builds on Kauffman's (1993) NK model...

Research on dynamic capabilities emphasizes the importance and role of organizational routines in explaining interfirm differences in performance. While performance differences are well documented, few empirical analyses explore the processes inside organizations that lead to dynamic capabilities or attempt to define and measure their performance e...

A fundamental question in strategic management is how organization affects firms' abilities to develop capabilities important to performance. Especially in knowledge-intensive environments, collaborative alliances are an important organizational approach that many firms utilize toward this objective. While alliances provide many notable benefits, t...

The global semiconductor industry is undergoing several forms of structural change simultaneously. The structure of market demand is shifting from one dominated by personal computers to a more diverse array of heterogeneous niches, largely resulting from global diffusion of the Internet and wireless communications applications. The structure of man...

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the empirical literature in transaction cost economics (TCE) across multiple social science disciplines and business fields. We show how TCE has branched out from its economic roots to examine empirical phenomena in several other areas. We find TCE is increasingly being applied not only to business-rela...

In this study, we draw upon data from the low-income Lifeline Assistance Program (Lifeline) for telephone service to examine the participation of eligible households in social programs designed to alleviate financial hardship. Utilizing panel data on participation levels in 1997 and 2003 and the associated variation in state-level policies, we are...

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 technolo...

This paper examines how the knowledge-based view (KBV) can be applied to firm boundary decisions and the performance implications of those decisions. At the center of the paper is a theoretical and empirical examination of how firms most efficiently organize to solve different types of problems related to technological development, using the semico...

Utilizing the comparative approach of transaction cost economics (TCE), this paper contributes to the developing knowledge-based theory (KBV) of governance choice. We provide justification for the importance of organizational alignment in the development of knowledge-based assets. We argue that particular knowledge-based competencies and modes of o...

We examine the evolution of vertical specialization in three industries: chemicals, computers, and semiconductors. Vertical specialization is the restructuring of industry-wide value chains, such that different stages are controlled by different firms, rather than being vertically integrated within the boundaries of individual firms. In some cases,...

T his paper examines the joint impact of firm-and country-level factors on the international plant location decisions of semiconductor firms from 1994–2002. We find that these factors interact to influence the location decisions of firms investing abroad in a given host country. Firms with more advanced technological capabilities are more likely to...

Research that examines entrant-incumbent dynamics often points to the organisational limitations that constrain incumbents from successfully pursuing new technologies or fending off new entrants. Some incumbents are nevertheless able to successfully implement organisational structures and develop routines that overcome these institutional constrain...

This article examines the contributions of human resource and organizational practices to the development and supply chain management interface. It addresses this issue in the context of the semiconductor industry by highlighting the importance of these practices for learning-based improvement in manufacturing. One of the most important factors for...

This paper examines the influence of Internet-based e-Business applications on the vertical separation of design, manufacture, equipment production and process development in the global semiconductor industry. Vertical specialization has contributed to the rapid growth of semiconductor manufacturing capacity in Southeast Asia and the creation of ne...

Firms operating in competitive environments that require rapid and repeated innovation often face a trade-off between the market requirements for time-to-market and the protabil- ity constraints of cost-effective manufacturing performance. When the immaturity of process technologies increases manufacturing costs, the benets of early entry may be di...

In an era of far-reaching changes, issues of Organizational Learning are high on the agenda of social scientists, managers and consultants worldwide as they seek to adapt to new environments. The Handbook of Organizational Learning and Knowledge provides a comprehensive overview of how the concept of Organizational Learning emerged, how it has been...

For most of the semiconductor industry's history, U.S. producers were undisputed leaders in market share, product introduction, and process technology advance. After losing this dominant position and enduring significant market share losses during the early 1980s, U.S. semiconductor firms and the federal government took corrective actions on severa...

Modern economic models of the relationship between regulators and the firms they regulate are often built upon a principal-agent framework, most often with the assumption of an exogenously given information asymmetry gap between the principal (the regulator) and the agents (firms). Given this information asymmetry gap, considerable effort has gone...

A good deal of academic and practitioner research argues that small, entrepreneurial firms are disadvantaged in strategic alliances. Despite this attention, little empirical work documents the factors that make collaboration difficult, whether specific organizational decisions may mitigate these reported disadvantages, or whether these consideratio...

This paper examines whether and how the organization of collaborative alliances affects technological performance. Building on concepts from transaction cost economics (TCE) and the knowledge-based view (KBV) of the firm, the paper conceptualizes collaborative alliance arrangements along two dimensions that summarize their coordination and control...