BIRGER WERNERFELT
J. C. Penney
Professor of Management and Chair of PhD Committee
MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
E40-181,
(617) 253-7192
bwerner@mit.edu
EDUCATION:
PREVIOUS POSITIONS:
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY
Associate Professor of Strategy (with tenure)
Graduate
Assistant Professor of Policy and Control
Department of Economics
Research Fellow in Mathematical Economics
A/S CREOLE
Vice President, Strategic Planning
HONORS AND AWARDS:
Highly Cited Author, Economics/Business, ISI
Fellow of the
Fellow of the World Innovation Foundation
Who’s Who in
Who’s Who in American Education, first listing in 7th Ed, 2006
Who’s Who in Science and Engineering, first listing in 8th Ed, 2005
Who’s Who in Economics, first listing in 4th Ed, 2003
Pashigian
Lecturer,
Hightower
Distinguished Lecturer,
Finalist, J.D.C. Little Best Paper
Award, INFORMS
Winner, Strategic Management Society/Wiley Prize, 1994.
Finalist, J.D.C. Little Best Paper
Award, INFORMS
Honorable Mention, O’Dell Award, Journal of Marketing Research, 1992.
Finalist, J.D.C. Little Best Paper
Award,
Best paper, Business Policy and
Planning,
Note: All articles are the sole copyright of the respective publishers. Materials are provided for educational use only.
PUBLICATIONS (Economics, Marketing, Mathematics, Strategic Management, Reviews):
ECONOMICS
“Bargaining Before or After Communication?", Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics, 164, forthcoming, 2008.
“Renegotiation Facilitates Contractual Incompleteness”, Journal of Economics and Management Strategy, Vol. 16, no. 4, Winter, pp. 893-910, 2007.
“Delegation, Committees, and Managers”, Journal of Economics and Management Strategy, 16, No. 1, Spring, pp. 35-51, 2007.
“Determinants of Asset Ownership: A Study of the Carpentry Trade” (with Duncan I. Simester), Review of Economics and Statistics, 87, no. 1, February, pp. 50-58, 2005.
“Robust Incentive Contracts”, Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics, 160, no. 4, December, pp. 545-54, 2004.
“Organizational Languages”, Journal of Economics and Management Strategy, 13, no. 3, Fall, pp. 461-72, 2004.
“Governance of Adjustments”, Journal of Business, 77, no. 2, Part 2, April, pp. S3-S24, 2004.
“Why Should the Boss Own the Assets?”, Journal of Economics and Management Strategy, 11, no. 3, Fall, pp. 473-85, 2002.
“On the Nature and Scope of the Firm: An
Adjustment-Cost Theory”, Journal of
Business, 70, no. 4, October, pp. 489-514, 1997. Reprinted in The Theory of The Firm: Critical Perspectives, ed. Nicolai Foss,
“Comment on ‘Monitoring Agents with Other Agents’ by Hal R. Varian”, Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics, 146, no. 1, March, pp. 177-79, 1990.
“Tacit Collusion in Differentiated Cournot Games”, Economics Letters, 29, no. 4, April, pp. 303-06, 1989.
“Reputation, Monitoring and Effort”, Information Economics and Policy, 3, no. 3, September, pp. 207-18, 1988.
“Diversification, Ricardian Rents,
and Tobin’s q”, (with Cynthia A.
Montgomery), RAND Journal of Economics,
19, no. 4, Winter, pp. 623-32, 1988.
Reprinted in Resources, Firms, and
Strategies: A Reader, ed. Nicolai Foss,
“Umbrella Branding as a Signal of New Product Quality: An Example of Signalling by Posting a Bond”, RAND Journal of Economics, 19, no. 3, Autumn, pp. 458-66, 1988.
“General Equilibrium with Real Time Search in Labor and Product Markets”, Journal of Political Economy, 96, no. 3, August, pp. 821-31, 1988.
“Tobin’s q and the Importance of Focus in Firm Performance”, (with Cynthia A. Montgomery), American Economic Review, 78, no. 1, March, pp. 246-50, 1988.
“Product Line Rivalry: Note”, American Economic Review, 76, no. 4, September, pp. 842-44, 1986.
“Brand Loyalty and User Skills”, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 6, no. 4, December, pp. 381-85, 1985.
“Stagflation, New Products and Speculation”, Journal of Macroeconomics, 6, no. 3, Summer, pp. 295-309, 1984.
“Consumers with Differing Reaction Speeds, Scale Advantages and Industry Structure”, European Economic Review, 24, no. 2, March, pp. 257-70, 1984.
MARKETING
“Product Development Resources and the Scope of the Firm”, Journal of Marketing, 69, no. 2, April, pp. 15-23, 2005.
“Implementing Quality Improvement
Programs Designed to Enhance Customer Satisfaction: Quasi-Experiments in the
“Bounded Rationality Modeling”, (with Bertrand Munier, Reinhard Selten et al), Marketing Letters 10, no. 3, August, pp. 233-48, 1999.
“Sidepayments in Marketing” (with John R.
Hauser and Duncan I. Simester). Marketing Science, 16, no. 3, Summer,
pp. 246-55, 1997. Finalist, 1997 J.D.C.
Little Best Paper Award, INFORMS
“The Role of Inference in Context Effects: Inferring What You Want from What is Available” (with Drazen Prelec and Florian Zettelmeyer), Journal of Consumer Research, 23, no. 1, June, pp.118-25, 1997.
“Internal Customers and Internal Suppliers” (with John R. Hauser and Duncan I. Simester), Journal of Marketing Research, 33, no. 3, August, pp. 268-80, 1996.
“Efficient Marketing Communication: Helping the Customer Learn”. Journal of Marketing Research, 33, no. 2, May, pp. 239-46, 1996.
“A Rational Reconstruction of the Compromise Effect”, Journal of Consumer Research, 21, no. 4, March, pp. 627-33, 1995.
“Customer Satisfaction Based
Incentive Systems” (with John R. Hauser and Duncan I. Simester), Marketing Science, 13, no. 4, Winter,
pp. 327-50, 1994. Finalist, 1994 J.D.C.
Little Best Paper Award, INFORMS
“An Efficiency Criterion for Marketing Design”, Journal of Marketing Research, 31, no. 4, November, pp. 462-70, 1994.
“Selling Formats for Search Goods”, Marketing Science, 13, no. 3, Summer, pp. 298-309, 1994.
“On the Function of Sales Assistance”, Marketing Science, 13, no. 1, Winter, pp. 68-82, 1994.
“Risk Reduction and Umbrella Branding” (with Cynthia A. Montgomery), Journal of Business, 65, no. 1, January, pp. 31-50, 1992.
“Sources of Superior Performance:
Market Share vs. Industry Effects in the
“Brand Loyalty and Market
Equilibrium”, Marketing Science, 10,
no. 3, Summer, pp. 229-45, 1991.
Finalist, 1991 J.D.C. Little Best Paper Award,
“An Evaluation Cost Model of Consideration Sets” (with John R. Hauser), Journal of Consumer Research, 16, no. 4, March, pp. 393-408, 1990.
“Advertising Content When Brand Choice is a Signal”, Journal of Business, 63, no. 1, January, pp. 91-98, 1990.
“The Competitive Implications of Relevant-Set/Response Analysis”, (with John R. Hauser), Journal of Marketing Research, 26, no. 4, November, pp. 391-405, 1989.
“Credible Delegation by Oligopolists: An Example from Distribution Channel Management” (with Anne T. Coughlan), Management Science, 35, no. 2, February, pp. 226-39, 1989.
“A Model for Customer Complaint Management”, (with Claes Fornell), Marketing Science, 7, no. 3, Summer, pp. 287-98, 1988. Abbreviated version in Incentive, September 1988.
“Existence and Uniqueness of Price Equilibrium in ‘Defender”’ (with John R. Hauser), Marketing Science 7, no. 1, Winter, pp. 92-93, 1988.
“Defensive Marketing Strategy by Customer Complaint Management: A Theoretical Analysis”, (with Claes Fornell), Journal of Marketing Research 24, no. 4, November, pp. 337-46, 1987. Honorable mention, 1992 O’Dell Award, Journal of Marketing Research.
“Competitive Price and Quality Under Asymmetric Information”, (with Gerard J. Tellis), Marketing Science 6, no. 3, Summer, pp. 240-53, 1987.
“A Special Case of Dynamic Pricing Policy”, Management Science 32, no. 12, December, pp. 1562-66, 1986.
“Consumption Experience and Sales Promotion Expenditure” (with Claes Fornell and William T. Robinson) Management Science 31, no. 9, September, pp. 1089-1105, 1985.
“The Dynamics of Prices and Market Shares Over the Product Life Cycle”, Management Science 31, no. 8, August, pp. 928-39, 1985.
“To Brand or Not to Brand? A Theoretical and Empirical Question” (with David E.M. Sappington), Journal of Business 58, no. 3, July, pp. 279-93, 1985.
MATHEMATICS
“On the Existence of a Nash Equilibrium Point in N-Person Nonzero Sum Stochastic Jump Differential Games”, Optimal Control Applications and Methods, 9, no. 4, October-December, pp. 449-56, 1988.
“Uniqueness of Nash Equilibrium for Linear-Convex Stochastic Differential Games”, Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications, 53, no. 1, April, pp. 133-38, 1987.
“Semifuzzy Games”, International Journal for Fuzzy Sets and Systems, 19, no. 1, May, pp. 21-28, 1986.
STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT
“Why do Firms Tend to Become Different?”, in
Constance Helfat (ed.), Handbook of
Organizational Capabilities,
“Foreword”, in Nicolai Foss (ed.), Resources, Firms, and Strategies: A Reader,
“Resource-Based Strategy in a
Stochastic Model”, in Cynthia A. Montgomery (ed.), Resource-Based and Evolutionary Theories of the Firm,
“The Resource-based View of the Firm: Ten Years After”, Strategic Management Journal, 16, no. 3, March, pp. 171-75, 1995.
“Strategy and the Research Process: Reply” (with Cynthia A. Montgomery and Srinivasan Balakrishnan), Strategic Management Journal, 12, no. 1, January, pp. 83-84, 1991.
“Why Do Firms Reduce Business Risk?”
(with Raphael H. Amit),
“From Critical Resources to Corporate Strategy”, Journal of General Management, 14, no. 3, Spring, pp 4-12, 1989. Chosen as one of five articles to be reprinted in Journal of General Management: Through the Years, 2008.
“Determinants of Firm Performance: The Relative Importance of Economic and Organizational Factors” (with Gary S. Hansen), Strategic Management Journal 10, no. 5, September-October, pp. 399-411, 1989.
“Strategy Content and the Research Process: A Critique and Commentary”, (with Cynthia A. Montgomery and Srinivasan Balakrishnan), Strategic Management Journal, 10, no. 2, March-April, pp. 189-97, 1989.
“The Link Between Resources and Types of Diversification: Theory and Evidence”, (with Sayan Chatterjee), Strategic Management Journal, 12, no. 1, January, pp.33-48, 1991. A substantially different version entitled, “Related or Unrelated Diversification: A Resource-based Approach”, is in Proceedings of the Academy of Management, 1988, pp. 7-11. Best Paper, Business Policy and Planning, Academy of Management National Meeting, 1988.
“What is an Attractive Industry?” (with Cynthia A. Montgomery) Management Science, 32, no. 10, October, pp. 1223-30, 1986.
“Technical Change, Competition and
Vertical Integration” (with
“The Relation Between Market Share and Profitability”, Journal of Business Strategy, 6, no. 4, Spring, pp. 67-74, 1986.
“The Capital Asset Pricing Model and Strategic Planning”, Management Science, 31, no. 4, April, pp. 510, 1985.
“Competitive Strategy Under Uncertainty” (with Aneel Karnani) Strategic Management Journal, 8, no. 2, March-April, pp. 187-194, 1987. Another version with the same title is in Proceedings of the Academy of Management, 1984, pp. 42-46 and in Administrative World, no. 5, pp. 137-41, 1988 (in Chinese).
“Multiple Point Competition” (with Aneel Karnani), Strategic Management Journal, 6, no. 1, January-March, pp. 87-96, 1985. Another version with the same title is in Proceedings of the Academy of Management, 1983, pp. 27-31.
“A Resource-based View of the Firm”, Strategic Management Journal 5, no. 2, April-June, pp. 171-80, 1984. Winner, 1994 Strategic Management Society/Wiley Best Paper Prize. Reprinted in Resources, Firms, and Strategies: A Reader, ed. Nicolai Foss, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997; in Alternative Theories of the Firm, ed. Richard N. Langlois, Tony Fu-Lai Yu, and Paul L. Robertson, Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2001; in The Economics of Business Strategy, ed. John Kay, Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2002; and in Strategic Management, ed. J. Birkinshaw, Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2004.
REVIEWS:
Review of R. K. Morck, Concentrated Corporate Ownership in Journal of Economic Literature, 40, no. 1, March, pp. 181-82, 2002.
Review of R. Selten, Models of Strategic Rationality in Managerial and Decision Economics, 11, no. 1, February, pp. 69-70, 1990.
MANUSCRIPTS:
“On the Grouping of Tasks into
Firms: Make-or-Buy with Interdependent Parts”, (with Sharon Novak), Working
Paper,
“Class Pricing”, Working Paper,
“Costs of Implementation: Concave Bargaining Costs”, (with Boris Maciejovsky), Working Paper, M.I.T. Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES:
Coeditor, Journal of Economics and Management Strategy, 2007-
Advisory Board, Quantitative Marketing and Economics, 2003-
Area Editor, Marketing Science, 1995-97
Associate Editor, Management Science, 1987-94, 1997-00
Editorial Board, Marketing Science, 1990-01
Editorial Board, Strategic Management Journal, 1986-
Editorial Board, Journal of Marketing Research, 1996-98
Ad hoc referee for:
Economics
American
Economic Review
Canadian
Journal of Economics
Eastern
Economic Journal
Econometrica
Economic
Inquiry
International
Economic Review
International
Journal of Industrial Organization
Journal
of Development Economics
Journal
of Economic Behavior and Organization
Journal
of Economic Theory
Journal
of Economics (Zeitschrift fur Nationalokonomie)
Journal
of Economics & Management Strategy
Journal
of the European Economic Association
Journal
of Industrial Economics
Journal
of Institutional and Theoretical Economics
Journal
of Law, Economics, and Organization
Journal
of Macroeconomics
Journal
of Political Economy
Journal
of Public Economics
Managerial
and Decision Economics
National Science Foundation
Quarterly Journal of Economics
Quarterly
Review of Economics and Business
RAND
Journal of Economics
Review
of Economic Studies
Review
of Economics and Statistics
Review
of Industrial Organization
Scandinavian
Journal of Economics
Marketing
International
Journal of Research in Marketing
Journal
of Business
Journal
of Consumer Research
Journal
of Marketing
Journal
of Marketing Research
Journal
of Public Policy and Marketing
Management
Science
Marketing
Science
Sloan
Management Review
Strategic Management
Industrial
and Corporate Change
Journal
of Management
Journal
of Management Studies
Management
Science
Organization
Science
Research
Policy
Strategic
Management Journal
Miscellaneous
Information
Systems Research
Mathematics
of Operations Research
Operations
Research
Optimal
Control Applications and Methods
Member of:
American Economic Association
Econometric Society
INFORMS
Strategic Management Society
DISSERTATION COMMITTEES: MARKETING
Robert Zeithammer (Member), “Forward-Looking Bidders in Sequential Auctions”, 2003; first job at The University of Chicago.
Dina Maizlin (Chair), “Word of Mouth
as a Marketing Tool: Influencing and Learning from Consumer Conversations”,
2002; first job at
David Godes (Chair), “Essays on
Marketing and the Organization”, 2000; first job at
Florian Zettelmeyer (Co-chair),
"Three Essays on Strategic and Organizational Uses of Information in
Marketing", 1996; first job at the
Eric T. Anderson (Co-chair), “Essays
in Pricing and Advertising”, 1995; first job at The University of Rochester;
now tenured at
Duncan I. Simester (Chair),
“Analytical Essays on Marketing”, 1993; first job at the
Miguel Villas-Boas (Chair), “On
Promotions and Advertising Policies: A Strategic Approach”, 1991; first job at
the
DISSERTATIONS COMMITTEES CHAIRED: STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT
Gary
S. Hansen, “Determinants of Firm Performance: An Integration of Economic and
Organizational Factors”, 1987; first job at the
Sayan
Chatterjee, “The Diversification Decision: The Economics of the Manager’s
Perspective”, 1985; first job at
Srinivasan
Balakrishnan, “A Dynamic Analysis of the Vertical Integration Strategy”, 1983;
first job at UCLA; now tenured at the
DISSERTATIONS CHAIRED: ACCOUNTING
John Cheh, “Incentive Effects of
Inter-Agent Monitoring: Implications for Responsibility Accounting and
Auditor-Consultant Interaction”, 1986; first job at
CURRENT RESEARCH INTERESTS:
Theory of the Firm
Selling Formats
Marketing Design
Marketing Implementation
Organizational Information Processing