Estimating Value Creation from Revealed Preferences: Application to Value-Based Strategies

We develop and apply a new set of empirical tools consistent with the tenets of value-based business strategies, leveraging the principle that “no good deal comes undone” and the methods of revealed preferences to empirically estimate drivers of value creation. We demonstrate how to use these tools in an analysis of value creation in buyer-supplier relationships in the UK corporate legal market. We show how the method can uncover evidence of subtle mechanisms that traditional methods cannot easily distinguish from each other. Furthermore, we show how these estimates can be used as parameters of biform games for out-of-sample analyses of strategic decisions. With readily available data on relationships between firms, this approach can be applied to many other contexts of interest to strategy researchers.