Purpose The purpose of this paper is to focus on two internal organizational factors in college football teams (team powerfulness and team reputation) and their combined relationship on game attendance. Authors aim to validate new data published by Wall Street Journal (WSJ) and NCAA websites; and to develop a new conceptual model to examine the interaction effect of team powerfulness and team reputation on game attendance. Design/methodology/approach This study relies on secondary data collected from the WSJ’s “College Football’s Grid of Shame” publication and the NCAA official website. Data for 123 US college football teams are collected representing 13 conferences for seasons 2010–2014. Multi-level regressions are utilized for statistical analyses. Findings Results reveal that not only team’s powerfulness is required for more public attendance to games, but also team reputation strengthens this relationship. In other words, team reputation plays an important role in increasing games’ attendance. Team reputation alone does not bring more attendees to games. Originality/value This paper studies the relevance of team reputation in the field of sports management. This paper argues that in order to achieve superior financial benefits in college football games, it is important to properly manage team powerfulness and its legal and ethical behavior. In this way, a positive reputation can leverage game attendance to a larger extent.

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PurposeFirms often struggle with opportunistic behavior from supply chain partners. Relying on Transaction Cost Economics and its extensions, this study developed a conceptual model theorizing the antecedence, consequences and conditional factors of opportunism within a buyer–supplier–supplier triadic relationship.Design/methodology/approachThis study employed a cross-sectional survey data collected from 200 U.S. firms. The collected data were analyzed with SPSS and AMOS, the two statistical software, for reliability, validity, confirmatory factor analyses and structural equation modeling.FindingsFirst, opportunism negatively influences operational performance and business performance, and such an effect is fully mediated by relationship stability. Second, this study classified power asymmetry as asymmetrical power discrepancy and asymmetrical power advantage with these two forms playing different roles in influencing opportunism. Results indicate that asymmetrical power discrepancy induces opportunism while asymmetrical power advantage strengthens the negative influence that opportunism has on relationship stability. Additionally, the mediated moderating effect of asymmetrical power advantage by relationship stability is confirmed.Originality/valueThe results provide significant academic and managerial insights that can guide managerial efforts in distinguishing types of power asymmetry, controlling opportunism and further mitigating the consequences of opportunism within a triadic relationship.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of the number of lawsuits on firm performance and in-house legal department size. More importantly, this paper also aims to explore the interaction effect of in-house legal department size on the aforementioned lawsuit-performance relationship. Design/methodology/approach The empirical analyses are performed by using secondary data. Structural equation modeling is employed in order to examine multiple structural relationships between the number of lawsuits, size of in-house legal department, and firm performance. Findings Three key findings were generated: number of lawsuits has a significant detrimental effect on firm performance; number of lawsuits is positively associated with size of in-house legal departments; and size of in-house legal departments negatively moderates the relationship between number of lawsuits and firm performance. Practical implications The results corroborate the harmfulness of lawsuits. On the one hand, a large number of lawsuits damage the firm’s financial performance directly; on the other hand, more lawsuits lead to enlarged in-house legal departments which further aggravate the negative effects of lawsuits on firm performance. These results suggest that firms should spend more effort in properly managing legal departments. Originality/value This paper contributes to the literature by empirically examining the economic impacts of lawsuits on firm performance. Moreover, it also explored the notion that having a large size of in-house legal department does not mitigate, but aggravates the harmfulness of lawsuits on firm performance.

Recognizing the importance of involving suppliers in the new product development (NPD) process, extensive studies have examined this issue at a buyer-supplier dyadic level. However, how supplier involvement leads to better NPD performance is not clearly explained. Additionally, extending the dyadic relationships to triadic relationships and addressing how to manage the two competing suppliers with fair conduct remains unexplored. To answer these questions, this study developed a conceptual model theorizing the role of supplier involvement, information sharing, and justice in the NPD process within a buyer-supplier-supplier triadic relationship. Based on survey data collected from 200 U.S. firms, Structural Equation Modeling is used to test the hypothesis. The results first confirmed the criticality of involving both primary and secondary suppliers during NPD. Second, the positive effect of triadic supplier involvement on innovation performance is fully mediated by information sharing.Finally, this study explored the different roles of procedural justice and distributive justice; the results confirmed that procedural justice acts as a moderator for the relationship between triadic supplier involvement and information sharing, whereas distributive justice moderates the effect between information sharing and innovation performance. Our findings contribute to the literature of triadic supplier involvementnew product development and relationship management. Accordingly, these findings highlight key implications for managers and policymakers.