Show Summary Details

Page of

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 22 February 2020

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter reviews the main theories in strategic management that seek to explain persistent differences in profitability across companies. We argue that these differences are ultimately explained by market imperfections. Studying differences in financial performance through the lens of market imperfections provides several advantages. The framework allows executives to better understand the circumstances under which common strategic advice will in fact create a sustainable competitive advantage for their company. From a scholarly perspective, market imperfections help link seemingly disparate theories of strategic management to industrial organization and economics.

Keywords: strategic management, market imperfections, competitive advantage, five forces, resource-based theory, industrial organization

Felix Oberholzer-Gee

Felix Oberholzer-Gee is the Andreas Andresen Professor of Business Administration at Harvard University.

Dennis Yao

Dennis A. Yao is the Lawrence E. Fouraker Professor of Business Administration at Harvard University.

Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.

Please subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.

For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.