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This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of online price dispersion in Europe, across a broad range of product categories and countries. Using the dominant European price comparison site we collected firm specific prices, weekly, from seven European countries (Denmark, France, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom) for 31 unique products, falling into five distinct product categories (printers, PDAs, scanners, games consoles, computer games and music), over the nine-month period October 2001 to June 2002. The resulting data set comprises over 17,000 individual price observations.

Using a number of alternative measures of price dispersion we find significant differences in the degree of price dispersion observed in online markets, both between countries and across product categories. We consider alternative explanations for online price dispersion and analyze their significance in explaining the observed differences.

The purpose of this paper is to explore and compare causal recipes for high performance among young Indian and UK firms in high-tech industries.

The traditional configuration approach suggests using the leadership, strategy, structure, and environment domains to identify configurations. In response to calls to improve causal linkages, and drawing on work on start-ups’ configurations, entrepreneurial orientation is used with these four domains to identify configurations. Fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis is used to analyze data collected via questionnaires from 70 Indian and 21 UK young firms.

In all five configurations identified in UK context, firms adopt high external integration, and employ inorganic development strategies, exhibit high internal integration, or do not operate in a highly competitive industry. These firms carve out niches, enjoy strong linkages with supply chain partners, and have strong enough reputations that their environment is not highly competitive. Although employees are told what to do, autonomy is provided on how to do it. Among the nine Indian configurations, a large number of managers with high-growth experience is absent in eight, high internal integration is lacking in six, and high external integration is missing in five. These firms employ alternative recipes for success, as discussed in the paper.

Comparing configurations in the Indian and UK contexts, the paper highlights similarities and differences across configurations, and that founders devise alternate pathways to achieve high performance. It also notes changes in relationships among variables across configurations.

Extant literature highlights the inadequacy of using just four domains – leadership, strategy, structure, and environment – for identifying firms’ configurations. The purpose of this paper is to answer the questions – what firm-level and external elements should be used to identify young firms’ configurations? Which among these is the core element?

This paper relies on literatures on configuration approach and entrepreneurial orientation (EO) to build the assertions concerning the issue of theoretical specification used for generating young firms’ configurations, and its core element. Crisp-set qualitative comparative analysis (CS-QCA) of the data collected from 70 young firms supports the arguments. Various robustness analyses reaffirm these assertions.

Literature review reveals that EO represents a firm’s decision-making proclivity concerning new entry and proactive risk-taking. CS-QCA supports the assertions that: inclusion of EO improves the configurational explanation of young firms’ performance; EO is the core element of young firms’ configurations; and market orientation or social capital cannot substitute EO in configurational studies of young firms’ performance. CS-QCA serves as a tool to support an alternative theoretical stance that questions the adequacy of extant domains used to identify configurations.

This paper theorizes for inclusion of EO as an additional domain for identifying young firms’ configurations, and exploits novel capability of set theoretic methods of CS-QCA to explore the issues of model specification and conjunctural causation, and ascertain the core element of configurations.

This study aims to explore the intention–action relationship of small and medium-sized (SMEs) firms with knowledge capital that declare their intention to internationalize from their inception.

The authors apply the theory of planned behavior and hand-collect a database of Chinese born globals, purely domestic firms and traditional exporting firms. The authors’ hypothesis is that Chinese born globals [or young aspiring globals (YAGs)] will strive to acquire domestic and international patents at an early stage to institutionally protect their knowledge-capital via intellectual property rights as they enter the competitive global marketplace.

The results confirm that knowledge-focused YAGs apply for patents at an earlier stage than purely domestic and traditional exporting firms. However, in the long run, these firms are neither demonstrating increased knowledge capital by being more innovative nor producing more valuable innovations than their counterparts.

This study tests the intention–action relationship in the context of SMEs internationalization. It contributes to the internationalization literature by identifying the internationalization pattern of born globals (YAGs) from emerging markets and providing an explanation for what happens to these firms as they mature.

The success or failure of a new business is often dependent on overcoming a series of potential barriers, eg securing sufficient financial backing, adequate and appropriate guidance and training etc. Yet, in light of the substantial growth rate of micro and small businesses, there has been little research into the experiences of potential and new business owners during the start‐up of such enterprises. To date there has been no systematic study of this group in the UK, and many questions remain unanswered. This study of micro and small business during the initialisation and formation of new venture creation (eg pre‐start‐up, 0‐6 months and 6‐12 months∥ sought to answer some of those questions. It identifies the needs of new business owners, the barriers they encounter, and the strategies they use to overcome those obstacles. The findings indicate that financial difficulties and the attitudes of banks towards new business owners are the main barriers to successful enterprise creation, with mentors and more specific advice cited as the assistance regarded as affording the greatest benefit to potential and new business owners. In addition, small and micro business owners are going out of business, or are unable to fulfil their potential, because they are denied access to those factors that promote success.

This study aims to identify some of the major barriers that may hinder potential small to medium‐sized enterprise (SME) exporters and non‐exporters from exporting their operations in the international market.

Based on the aim of this study, a questionnaire based survey method was conducted among 250 Jordanian manufacturing SMEs using random sampling with usable response rate of 54 per cent. Data were analysed using relevant statistical methods ranging from factor analysis to regression analysis.

The results show that economic/political‐legal and governmental barriers, financial and information barriers have a significant negative relationship with the export performance of SMEs in Jordan. Also, the results show that exporters and non‐exporters significantly agree in their views of the various barriers.

The study was carried out on SMEs operating in Jordan. Hence, caution should be taken when generalisation across cultures is considered. However, the findings of the study provide public and company policy makers with valuable guidelines for the formulation of suitable export marketing strategies and national export assistance programs.

This is ascribed to the relatively small local market size and to the country's gradual shift from heavy reliance on import substitution strategies in the last two decades to contemporary export orientation. Also, there is now a need for an urgent action plan to correct the deficit in the trade balance in the Jordanian economy. This action plan needs to include what causes Jordanian SMEs to export or prevents them from doing so. Once the relative importance of these barriers is detected, their validity in predicting the probability of a SME firm being an exporter can be tested.

The size, characteristics and structure of boards of directors have been claimed to be an important influence on the performance of large firms, but have been less examined in small firms. For larger firms the role of boards acts more as a substitute for the development of internal staff and management skills, indicating that for large firms directors chiefly support the control role of CEOs. The importance of seeing boards, external consultants and internal management skills as substitutes is demonstrated, and is shown to have a non‐linear relation with firm size. However, a key finding of the paper is that there is little evidence of a strong association of board size, board qualifications, or board structure with firm performance, measured by profitability, employment growth or propensity to innovate.

Literature, spanning industrial organization and strategic management disciplines, uses variance decomposition to understand the relative importance of firm, industry and business group effects in shaping profitability variations. Some literature analyzes firm profitability under transition to liberalization. Previous research has taken a static before-and-after view on institutional change. This paper aims to focus on the dynamic process of liberalization in India, analyzing how different institutional regime changes alter firm behavior leading to changes in profitability patterns.

Based on a panel data set of several thousand Indian firms, spanning the 26-year period between 1980-1981 and 2005-2006, the authors determine the relative importance of firm, industry and business group effects in explaining manufacturing firms’ profitability variances across different institutional phases. The authors evaluate three propositions that help assess transition dynamics between phases. They determine the quantum of catch-up or falling behind by firms.

Different industries emerge as profitability leaders, as the economy progresses through different liberalization phases. Business groups that have been more effective in resource appropriation, rent-seeking, politician management and non-market activities in a controlled regime are replaced as profit leaders by those that, in a free-market economy, can be capable of intra-business resource allocation tasks and leveraging corporate capabilities.

The approach demonstrates how to analyze the underlying detailed structure of firm-level data, and performance outcomes, to derive nuanced interpretation of factors giving rise to the effects that explain profitability variances, and how to assess the way these effects behave over time. The dynamic evidence-based approach highlights what factors matter, where, when and why, in influencing profitability variances, which are a key dimension of industrial and economic performance.