Although family firms are common around the world, studies on family-controlled business are limited. Prior studies mainly focused on the influences of family ownership on overall firm performance, and the results were mixed. In this study we attempted to explore the impacts of family ownership on innovation by examining the association of family control and stock market reactions to innovation announcements. We found that firms with greater family control experienced significantly more negative stock market reactions to innovation announcements. The results further indicated that divergence of cash flow and voting rights was strongly and negatively correlated with announcementperiod abnormal returns. In addition, the findings suggested a significantly positive moderating effect of institutional ownership. The conclusions were robust under various measures of family control, and remained valid after controlling other influential factors for stock market reactions to innovation announcements.

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While withstanding a highly competitive environment, an increasing number of firms have recognized that intangible assets rather than tangible ones are vital to achieving competitive advantages. Intellectual capital has replaced physical capital as the primary basis of value creation. Although the importance of intellectual capital in ensuring superior competitive advantages is well accepted, exactly how these two constructs are related has seldom been investigated, particularly for the high‐technology industry. Taking a sample of 39 Taiwanese IC design companies, this study adopted data envelopment analysis and the Malmquist productivity index to evaluate the impact of intellectual capital on competitive advantage. The analytical results revealed that approximately one third of the companies sampled had excellent efficiency in intellectual capital management, while the others still had considerable room to improve their intellectual capital management. The results of this study provide a valuable reference for future studies in alternative contexts.

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Chief executives have recently identified knowledge management (KM) as a 'must do' item for their firms. These executives have also contended that social capital is a catalyst in effectively implementing knowledge management. However, the mechanism through which social capital influences knowledge management requires further study. This study examines the influence of social capital and business operation mode on knowledge creating activities, intellectual capital (IC) and knowledge management effectiveness.After a series of interviews with experts and a questionnaire survey, this study reached the following findings:• firms implementing higher levels of authority delegation and social capital tend to engage in more knowledge-creating activities and have more intellectual capital• levels of intellectual capital tend to significantly influence KM effectiveness • social capital and delegation of authority are significant moderators of the relationships between knowledge-creating activities and intellectual capital.

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The main purpose of this paper is to provide an approach for analysing market structure in terms of brand loyalty and brand switching behaviours for the purchase of durable household appliances. A three-choice model provided by McCarthy et al. (1992) is implemented as the main technique in our approach. First, we segment the market by measuring the proportion of brand loyal customers and brand switchers using this three-choice model. Then we employ factor analysis and ANOVA in order to identify the key factors affecting brand loyalty and to understand whether or not differences exist among the factors deemed important by heterogeneous customer segments. Through the application of empirical data, collected on the refrigerator market data in Taiwan, it can be seen that it is helpful to understand the structure and brand switching behaviours of a specific product line.