Costello Research Competitive Strategy

Boards with higher social capital enjoy more market freedom to engage in potentially risky strategic alliances — to the ultimate benefit of their firms.

It’s one thing to be a force for good behind the scenes. Having consumers reward you for it, however, depends upon a unique combination of elements.

A Costello College of Business professor’s 2019 academic paper was one of the first to analyze the unique market features of the federal government contracting ecosystem.

To stay competitive in the war for talent, tech companies must weigh secrecy against specificity when crafting job ads. Are they disclosing too much?

A new "mega-study" consisting of dozens of simultaneous, independently designed experiments shows that competitions have no automatic impact on our morality.

Mehmet Altug, an associate professor of operations management, has been researching retail returns policies for a decade. The issue has recently come to prominence, as the lenient policies of online retailers have led to skyrocketing return rates (now exceeding 20 percent in the U.S.). Altug’s various academic papers delve into the difficult trade-offs retailers face when setting returns policies. While there are no easy answers, Altug’s research identifies factors that can help retailers achieve more strategic flexibility.

​​​​​​​A paper co-authored by Jessica Hoppner, associate marketing professor at Mason, has been named a finalist for the American Marketing Association’s prestigious Weitz-Winer-O’Dell Award.

Siddharth Bhattacharya, a professor of information systems at Mason, recently co-conducted the first-ever empirical study on competitive poaching, the strategy of bidding on competitors' keywords.

Cheryl Druehl, an operations management professor at Mason as well as the Mason's School of Business associate dean for faculty, has found that unblind contests can foster contestant behaviors that constrain overall innovativeness.