We examine the role of debt as a governance mechanism in balancing exploration and exploitation. We argue that while equity is conducive to uncertain exploration critical for innovation, debt provides countervailing incentives for engaging in exploitation by imposing cash flow obligations and the threat of bankruptcy. As a consequence, debt becomes a vital instrument in directing innovation along the optimal trajectory, while preventing the balance from shifting too far toward suboptimal exploration. To support our arguments, drawing on patent data, we first demonstrate that a firm’s leverage is positively related to knowledge exploitation activity as reflected in its self-citations. Next, we show that firms that have potentially engaged in suboptimal exploration, as manifest in underutilized stocks of proprietary knowledge, are likely to experience leverage increases in the short run, and these leverage increases in turn result in subsequent increases in self-citations. These effects are consistent with firm value indicating that equity holders value the role of debt in stimulating exploitation. Our study draws attention to the complementary roles of equity and debt as governance mechanisms in balancing exploration/exploitation, while outlining the role of debt in innovation in greater depth.

In this paper we study the role of the distribution platform as an important determinant of price of paid apps. We also examine how the distribution platform influences the price implications of important developers' app-level decisions. To these purposes, we construct a hierarchical model of price formation by using an ad-hoc panel dataset consisting of top paid apps from the two major app stores, namely Apple's App Store and Google Play. Our findings show that prices of paid apps strongly depend on the platform where the apps are marketed. Specifically, the App Store is associated with lower prices for paid apps than Google Play. We find evidence that this is because the impact of cross-store differences in developer competition prevails over the impact of cross-store differences in average consumer willingness to pay. We also find that the price premiums as a return to trialability are more likely to emerge in Google Play than in the App Store, and that developers are more likely to adopt a penetration price policy in Google Play, thus implying an influence of the distribution platform on the price implications of these app-level decisions. Finally, our evidence does not confirm the argument that a more marked price reduction for paid apps embedding ads or generating revenues from other interested third parties should be observed in Google Play.

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Building on finance research, we argue that the ex post hazards arising from alliance formation depend upon the firm's financial condition. Financial distress jeopardizes the continuity of an alliance and the value of the investments involved. Thus, firms should reduce leverage to signal continued commitment and to induce investments from alliance partners. Accordingly, we find that a firm's current alliance propensity predicts its subsequent capital structure decisions and that this relationship is most pronounced in the presence of other exchange hazards. Our paper contributes to alliance research and to the growing literature discussing the strategic consequences of capital structure.

Firms operating in the electronic marketplace set and adjust prices to affect demand and profitability. In service markets, such as airline markets, different prices are commonly offered by diverse firms to accommodate to a variety of market segments having particular sets of consumer attitudes. This variation in prices is the price dispersion and is based on market distinctiveness deriving from customer heterogeneity as well as the peculiar competition in the specific market arena. In this paper we use a panel dataset from the Italian airline market to investigate the role of competition and different online channels in the emergence of price dispersion. Specifically, we examine the unclear role of competition in price dispersion with novel data collected from different online channels, namely direct and Online Travel Agency (OTA) channels. We find that price dispersion is higher in routes where competition is higher even in presence of only one segment, namely the business segment. Our results also show that price dispersion significantly differs across different types of online channels.