Research

• with M. Benassi (Palgrave - forthcoming)

Intellectual property literature has identified the detrimental effects of opportunistic litigation on accused companies. However, the extant literature has overlooked the potential negative consequences on other actors not directly involved in litigation. We fill this gap by examining whether the allegations of patent infringement against one party in an alliance triggers negative spillover effects on the non-accused partners. Drawing on unique data on opportunistic litigation, alliances, patents, and financial information, we provide evidence of the heterogeneity of the spillover effects. Our empirical results determine that as technological overlap among partners increases, the non-accused firms experience greater market discounts if the alliance is horizontal. Likewise, R&D alliances and risky lawsuits are also factors that impact negatively on the stockholders' perceptions of the non-accused partner firm.

Despite companies operate in open innovation contexts, how opportunistic litigation affects strategic alliance formation remains unknown. Our focus is on the formation of interorganizational ties as a strategic tool to maintain pre-litigation levels of activity when companies have to divert corporate resources away to deal with opportunistic litigation. Drawing on novel data on litigation activity, alliance formation, patent portfolio, financial indicators, and corporate structure (subsidiaries) in 32 four-digit SIC industries, our findings evidence that opportunistic litigation constitutes a trigger for alliance formation. Further, we find that the positive effect is stronger if the accused company is facing complex cases or liquidity constraints. Simultaneously, we find that firms with greater levels of profitability and operating efficiency are involved in more strategic alliances due to opportunistic litigation. Taken together, these results underscore the irony of alliances: firms must possess resources to obtain resources.

Using novel data on American firms, this paper investigates the relationship between business groups and opportunistic litigation. Drawing on signaling theory, we find that business group affiliation stimulates opportunistic litigation. The argument is that the business group affiliation can be interpreted as an informative attribute about the superior value creation capabilities of a firm. Opportunistic litigators, as rent-seeker, could leverage this information to identify opportunities to extract rents. As group-affiliated companies have superior value creation capabilities compared to standalone firms, the former ones are more exposed to higher opportunistic litigation risk. Conditional on the choice of litigating a group-affiliated company, we also propose that an opportunistic litigator has to evaluate which target to sue from the pool of firms with business affiliations. Our results show that technological overlap among affiliates is a first-order factor to be involved in opportunistic litigation. However, there is not robust evidence that the probability of being sued is related to the organizational distance within the business groups. Finally, the risk of being sued is more pronounced in big business groups than in small ones.

• with P.M. Infantes

Drawing on the Total Quality Management approach, this study proposes the existence of a relationship between leadership profile and employee fulfilment mediated by the organizational learning. After applying a mediated regression analysis using survey information collected from 132 companies in Spain, results show that top managers closer to the visionary leadership obtain greater levels of employee fulfilment. Organizational learning is identified as a partial mediator of this relationship. Thus, this article extends research in understanding top managers as drivers for employee fulfilment and suggests new ways to deal with this issue empirically.