Browsing by Author "Brahm, Francisco"

Now showing 1 - 17 of 17
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    Boundary choice interdependency : evidence from the construction industry
    (2013) Brahm, Francisco; Tarziján M., Jorge
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    Can Firms Be Both Broad and Deep? Exploring Interdependencies Between Horizontal and Vertical Firm Scope
    (2021) Brahm, Francisco; Parmigiani, Anne; Tarzijan, Jorge
    Firms can be horizontally diversified, with considerable breadth, or vertically integrated, with great depth. This study explores how breadth and depth affect each other as influenced by capability requirements and coordination demands. Using construction industry data, we assess the interdependence between contractors' portfolios of building types (horizontal scope) and the extent of integration of the activities needed to complete each project (vertical scope). We find that vertical and horizontal scope have a negative interdependency only when contractors face managerial constraints due to coordination challenges. Further, we show that this effect can be mitigated through organizational structures that centralize key functions. Our findings highlight the importance of coordination in the theory of the firm, as we link firm boundaries to managerial coordination and internal organization.
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    Cultural Evolution Theory and Organizations
    (2022) Brahm, Francisco; Poblete, Joaquin
    Fully explaining organizational phenomena requires exploring not only "how" a phenomenon works - i.e., the details of its internal structure and mechanisms - but also "why" the phenomenon is present in the first place - i.e., explaining its origins and the ultimate reasons for its existence. The latter is particularly important for central questions in organizational research such as the nature of organizations, the evolution of organizational culture, or the origin of organizational capabilities. In this article, we propose that cultural evolution theory (CET) can be usefully applied to organizational scholarship to pursue such "origin" questions. CET has adapted ideas and methods from evolutionary biology to successfully explain the evolution of culture in human societies, exploring the origins of various social phenomena such as religion, technological progress, large-scale cooperation, and cross-cultural psychological variation. We elaborate how CET can be also applied to understand the evolution and origin of important organizational phenomena. We discuss how CET provides ultimate explanations using micro-evolutionary formal models and deploying macro-evolutionary tools for empirical analysis. We provide a detailed application of these ideas to explain the origin of productive organizations (e.g., firms, partnerships, guilds). We also propose several avenues for future research; in particular, we explore how CET can serve as an overarching theoretical framework that helps integrate the myriad of theories that explain how organizations operate and evolve.
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    Entrepreneurial profitability and persistence: Chile versus the USA
    (2008) Tarzijan, Jorge; Brahm, Francisco; Daiber, Luis Felipe
    This article empirically evaluates the main determinants of business performance, focusing on the emergence and sustainability of profits for an emerging economy such as Chile. Furthermore, the paper compares the results obtained with Chilean data to those for the U.S.A. This comparison is interesting because of the recent emergence of some literature that relates geographic location to performance. The results show that the industry effect is more important in Chile than in the U.S.A., that the persistence of rents in Chile is explained more evenly for reasons associated to business-, industry- and corporate-specific effects, and that the path to lower rents is more difficult to revert in Chile than in the U.S.A. (C) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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    Explicando la rentabilidad de la empresa y su sustentación
    (2005) Tarziján M., Jorge; Brahm, Francisco; Daiber, Luis Felipe
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    Incentives and Ratcheting in a Multiproduct Firm : A Field Experiment
    (2018) Brahm, Francisco; Poblete Lavanchy, Joaquín José
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    Organizational Culture, Adaptation, and Performance
    (2024) Brahm, Francisco; Poblete, Joaquin
    Prior research emphasizes how organizational culture can hinder organizational adaptation. In this study, we investigate how organizational culture can help promote organizational adaptation to environmental changes, using a formal model from cultural evolution theory. In the model, organizational members face a trade-off between innovating versus following tradition (because environmental changes are uncertain). Members can also decide to help others who are following the tradition, thereby improving its diffusion. Organizational leaders shape the culture of their organization, which influences members' decisions to choose innovation or tradition or to help others following tradition. Culture comprises two dimensions: beliefs and prosocial values. We find that increasing the accuracy of beliefs leads to improvements in both innovation and following tradition, thereby mitigating the trade-off between them and boosting adaptation and performance. On prosocial values, we find that increasing their intensity reduces the cost of following tradition but at the expense of reduced adaptation, resulting in an inverted -U relationship between intensity of prosocial values and performance. Overall, we show how leaders can fine-tune the dimensions of organizational culture to foster improvements in adaptation and performance. The formal model we introduce is novel to the literature and offers a way of studying adaptation to a changing environment and to incorporate social learning into models of adaptation under bounded rationality.
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    RELATIONAL CONTRACTS AND COLLABORATION IN THE SUPPLY CHAIN: IMPACT OF EXPECTED FUTURE BUSINESS VOLUME ON THE MAKE-OR-BUY DECISION
    (2016) Brahm, Francisco; Tarzijan, Jorge
    Relational contracts are key to supply chain collaboration. The literature has focused on the role of trust stemming from prior business with current suppliers. However, the role of expected future business volume on the make-or-buy decision has been relatively neglected. This paper contributes to the literature by examining how the level of expected future business volume affects the make-or-buy decision, that is, the choice to produce the product or service internally rather than to outsource it. Using regression analysis of secondary data from 12,272 construction projects and controlling for endogeneity, our results show that expected future business volume promotes outsourcing and that this impact is larger when the level of prior business with external suppliers is stronger and there is more specificity in the relationship. Our results are consistent with a game theoretic logic in which informally promising future interactions to sustain collaboration is more credible to external suppliers than to internal units because the former can use their assets elsewhere. Also, our results suggest that trust stemming from prior business reinforces the calculativeness logic that stems from the expectation of future business.
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    The evolution of productive organizations
    (2020) Brahm, Francisco; Poblete Lavanchy, Joaquín José
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    The impact of complexity and managerial diseconomies on hierarchical governance
    (ELSEVIER, 2012) Brahm, Francisco; Tarzijan, Jorge
    Based on data from Chilean construction projects, we evaluate how the boundary choice of a focal activity is affected by the number of activities integrated elsewhere in a project and by the level of "between complexity" and "within complexity" of those activities. Our results show that managerial diseconomies of scale, which arise when contractors integrate more activities, and the different types of complexity, affect the relative advantages of hierarchical governance. In a novel result, we also show that interactions between the number of integrated activities and the types of complexity affect the relative merits of hierarchical governance to handle an activity, meaning that complexity and the extent of a project's integration are systematically intertwined in the explanation of boundary choices. Our findings indicate a need for research on interdependencies between different boundary choices and suggest that the evaluation of these interdependencies should consider the complexity of activities. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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    The Impact of Frictions in Routine Execution on Economies of Scope
    (2017) Brahm, Francisco; Tarziján M., Jorge; Singer González, Marcos Johanan
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