This study examines how stakeholder orientation influences a firm’s likelihood of becoming an acquisition target. Firms with high stakeholder orientation foster complex, trust-based relationships with stakeholders, creating resources that are socially embedded and causally ambiguous. This complexity poses two challenges for prospective acquirers. First, the information mechanism highlights difficulties in evaluating stakeholder-oriented firms’ resource configurations due to their intangible and opaque nature, increasing perceived risks of adverse selection. Second, the combination mechanism addresses concerns about integrating relational resources, which are often deeply tied to firm-specific routines and difficult to transfer post-acquisition. Analyzing 3,684 U.S.-listed firms (1991–2012), the study finds a negative association between stakeholder orientation and acquisition likelihood, driven primarily by information asymmetry. These findings provide a nuanced understanding of stakeholder resources in acquisition dynamics.

We investigate why distributors struggle to scale last-mile distribution of durable goods in Base of the Pyramid (BoP) markets, introducing the concept of supply chain relationship resilience—the ability to recover from disruptions, measured as the ratio of post-disruption to pre-disruption revenue. We build a model to demonstrate how supply chain relationship resilience shapes a distributor’s allocation of retailers to sales executives. If resilience levels are uniform across informal and formal retailers, the distributor’s optimal assignment to sales executives is fully unbalanced (i.e., most sales executives handle only one etailer type). We then show how accounting for differences in supply chain relationship resilience can dramatically change the firm’s optimal sales executive assignment strategy.

Using data from 319 formal and 505 informal retailers in India, we employ quasi-experimental methods to examine how supply chain relationship disruptions affect subsequent retailer performance. While formal retailers show no significant effects, informal retailers experience a 43.5% decrease in order value relative to the control group, with no sustained recovery within four 60-day periods post-disruption. These findings highlight the importance of relationship resilience in BoP operations, suggesting that managers should consider informal retailers' lower resilience when allocating resources and designing distribution strategies to improve last-mile delivery performance.

Urban riots, as nascent social movements, create significant challenges for firms by disrupting local communities and impacting firm performance and survival. In this paper, we investigate how community embeddedness—defined as the socio-demographic and cultural alignment between a firm and its local community—moderates the relationship between riot intensity and firm outcomes. Using data from firms in riot-impacted and non-impacted cities following the 2005 urban riots in the Paris area, we find that community embeddedness positively moderates the negative effect of riot intensity on short-term performance. However, in the long term, greater community embeddedness is associated with a higher risk of firm failure in high-intensity riot contexts. Our results, therefore, provide evidence of a paradox of embeddedness for firms deeply impacted by the riots—where deeper integration with the local community provides short-term benefits but leads to long-term vulnerabilities— which highlights the complexities firms face when balancing local ties and adaptability in volatile environments.