We compare the strategic behavior of cooperatives to alternative organizational forms (for-profit and state-owned organizations) in the pursuit of community-based benefits beyond profits. Specifically, we examine credit cooperatives, where clients (borrowers) are owner-members, and analyze their responses to the increased digitalization of the banking sector. We hypothesize that client ownership amplifies the importance of in-person relational channels, prompting cooperatives to retain more physical branches as digitalization accelerates. We also posit that the propensity of cooperatives to keep those branches increases in vulnerable markets and when cooperatives are organized as single vs federated organizations. To test our hypotheses, we track 46,143 Brazilian bank branches between 2012 and 2021 and their reactions to a regulatory change that accelerated digitalization in the financial sector. Consistent with our predictions, credit cooperatives keep a stronger physical presence than other organizational forms following the regulatory change, particularly in vulnerable areas. However, contrary to our expectations, cooperative federations expand more than single ones, benefiting from their improved scale and governance structures designed to support new entries. Overall, this study sheds light on the role of cooperatives as a relevant organizational form in which clients exert pronounced strategic influence, yielding critical implications for organizational strategy and value allocation.

Socially responsible investment (SRI) funds claim to invest in firms with high social performance and engage with them to push them to improve their social performance. However, based on existing empirical evidence, it remains unclear whether they actually do so. Therefore, to assess whether SRI funds attempt to deliver on their promises, we examine how they respond when firms are targeted by activist hedge funds. As activist hedge funds often get firms to redirect their resources and managerial attention toward their priorities (which are often related to short-term financial performance), there is an impending risk that firms' social performance declines. Given this risk, it is important to ask whether SRI funds fight to push firms to prioritize social performance or they avoid investing in such firms to ensure that they have firms with high social performance in their portfolio. Using the difference-in-differences methodology, we analyze panel data on 462 firms from 2010 to 2022 and find evidence suggesting that SRI funds flee rather than fight. This finding illustrates that SRIs prioritize delivering on their promise of investing in socially responsible firms over their promise of engaging in activism to make firms socially responsible.

This study explores the configuration of multi-partner collaborations (MPCs). While the pooling of resources and sharing of risks among multiple partners offer substantial benefits, they also introduce governance complexity and collaboration costs associated. Previous research suggests proposed dominant-partner governance as a solution, where powerful partners act as peacekeepers and coordinators to mitigate collaboration challenges. This solution, however, assumes that the dominant partner possesses both the expertise and objectives aligned with the collective entity. We examine the effects of dominant-partner governance within the context of project-financed infrastructure projects. We investigate the role of government as a dominant partner and find that while such involvement tends to reduce the size and diversity of expertise within the group, these negative impacts are moderated by the government’s collaborative capabilities and its reliance on resources from private partners. Based on an original dataset of more than 1,200 projects across 68 countries and five sectors from 1997 to 2020, our findings contribute to a nuanced understanding of MPC dynamics and configuration.

We develop a conjectural variation model of strategic Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) orchestration in business groups, drawing on characteristics of fungibility and scale-free deployment to derive generalizable insights on the mechanisms of intangible resource allocation. The model shows how structural position and resource characteristics jointly determine optimal distribution patterns, emphasizing how groups balance cooperative value creation against competitive rent extraction when coordinating partially non-rival resources like brands, knowledge, and reputation. Using disaggregated CSR data from Indian firms from 2000-2013, we document two distinct channels of influence. First, through strategic coordination, where core firms lead value-enhancing resource creation with 42.5% higher sensitivity to industry CSR propensity compared to standalone firms. Second, through pyramidal ownership structures that enable tunneling via asymmetric cost allocation, particularly pronounced for high-fungibility activities. These effects are more than twice as large for reputation-enhancing CSR compared to localized community investments, consistent with differential resource transferability. Our findings extend internal markets theory beyond tangible capital allocation by developing micro-foundations for how rational economic agents navigate the tension between value creation and private benefits in coordinating strategic investments in less contractible resources.