My research program examines how firms and institutions create and sustain competitive advantage through strategic resource allocation and analytical decision-making. Grounded in Resource-Advantage (R-A) theory, my work investigates how organizations compete in environments characterized by imperfect information, resource heterogeneity, and indirect competitive influences, including public policy. This research contributes to marketing strategy and public policy scholarship by demonstrating that competitive advantage emerges from deploying analytical capabilities that reveal marketplace dynamics invisible to competitors operating with inferior information or analytical frameworks.
Theoretical Foundation: Resource-Advantage Theory My scholarship builds on Resource-Advantage theory, which posits that firms compete for comparative advantages in resources that enable superior marketplace positions. I established this theoretical commitment early in my career with "R-A Theory as a Post-Chicago Argument for Legal Co-opetition" (Marketing Management Journal, 2006), arguing that competition law should focus on customer value creation rather than price effects alone. This work demonstrated how R-A theory's emphasis on resource heterogeneity and imperfect information provides richer insights into competitive dynamics than traditional equilibrium-based economic models.
This theoretical grounding continues to inform my entire research agenda. In "Teaching R-A Theory to Develop Future Business Practitioners' Decision Making Skills" (Journal of Marketing Theory & Practice, 2022), Yiyuan and I demonstrated how R-A theory provides a unifying framework for cross-functional business education, explicitly connecting my research contributions to pedagogical practice. This integration of research and teaching reflects my conviction that theoretical frameworks should illuminate both scholarly understanding and managerial practice.
Research Stream 1: Technology Adoption and Organizational Knowledge Resources My initial research stream examined how sales organizations leverage marketing-related technologies as strategic resources to create competitive advantage. In "Toward Understanding New Sales Employees' Participation in Marketing-Related Technology" (Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, 2012), we demonstrated that motivational structures and past performance interact to predict technology adoption patterns, with implications for how firms develop knowledge management capabilities among new employees.
Extending this work, we identified apathetic motivation, which is defined as employees' indifference toward technology, as an independent predictor of usage intentions in "The Effect of Apathetic Motivation on Employees' Intentions to Use Social Media for Businesses" (Journal of Business Research, 2016). This finding challenged prevailing technology acceptance models by demonstrating that the absence of motivation, rather than merely its presence, shapes how organizations deploy technological resources.
Most recently, we published "Aligning the Philosophical Foundations of Behavioral Intention to Use Scholarly Research and Managerial Practice" (Journal of Marketing Theory & Practice, 2025), which reconciles divergent perspectives about research between academic researchers and business practitioners. This work demonstrates how philosophical assumptions about human behavior shape both research design and managerial interpretation—a form of information asymmetry that affects how organizations understand and deploy technological resources.
Research Stream 2: Resource-Advantage Theory Applications to Institutional Competition My current research agenda applies R-A theory to competitive dynamics in contexts where traditional market-based competition intersects with public policy, institutional structures, and government funding. This work examines three distinct institutional contexts:
Public Transit Systems and Performance Incentives: I am investigating how federal, state, and local funding mechanisms reward efficiency versus effectiveness in mass transit systems. R-A theory suggests that funding formulas function as indirect competitive influences that shape resource allocation decisions across transit authorities. The central research question examines whether current funding structures reward operational efficiency (cost minimization), service effectiveness (ridership and coverage), or some optimal balance. Preliminary findings suggest that funding asymmetries create resource heterogeneity among transit systems that affects their competitive positioning for federal grants and local political support. This research has implications for public service delivery and performance measurement in government-funded services.
Financial Sustainability in Private Higher Education: In collaboration with colleagues, I am developing a predictive model to identify private higher education institutions at risk of financial failure. Using cluster analysis to segment institutions based on financial and operational characteristics, this research applies R-A theory's emphasis on resource heterogeneity to understand why some institutions sustain competitive advantage while others face existential threats.
From an R-A perspective, institutions that fail to develop comparative advantages in key resources (endowment, enrollment, programmatic distinctiveness) cannot maintain marketplace positions against better-resourced competitors. This work extends my earlier publication "Getting Out of the Rankings Game: A Better Way to Evaluate Higher Education Institutions for Best Fit" (Journal of Marketing for Higher Education, 2017), which developed an alternative institutional segmentation framework.
Public Policy as an Indirect Competitive Influence: Examining "cash for clunkers" programs across multiple countries, I investigate how policy interventions affect competitive dynamics among automotive firms. Consistent with R-A theory's emphasis on imperfect information, this research demonstrates that firms respond heterogeneously to policy incentives based on their resource endowments and information asymmetries. Some firms possess superior market intelligence about consumer response to subsidies, enabling them to adjust production and inventory more effectively than competitors. Policy interventions thus create temporary competitive advantages for firms that can interpret and respond to indirect market signals more effectively. This research has implications for understanding how government policy shapes competitive processes in markets where firms differ in their capabilities for environmental scanning and strategic response.
Research Impact and Scholarly Leadership Beyond individual publications, I have contributed to marketing scholarship through sustained editorial and governance service. I currently serve or have served on the editorial review boards of the Journal of Marketing Theory & Practice (2010-2024) and Marketing Education Review (2022-2025). I also served as a Guest Co-Editor for special issues in both journals. This editorial work has provided insight into emerging research trends and methodological developments across the field.
My leadership for the Society for Marketing Advances—serving as Treasurer (2016-2019), President (2020-2021), and currently Chair of the Board of Governors (2024-2025)—has enabled me to support the broader marketing research community through conference organization, doctoral student mentorship, and research dissemination. This governance experience has strengthened my understanding of how to build and sustain research cultures within academic institutions.
Mentoring Undergraduate Research: A High-Impact Practice A distinctive element of my research program has been a sustained commitment to undergraduate research mentorship, consistent with AAC&U's identification of undergraduate research as a high-impact practice that enhances student learning and career preparation. I have chaired thirteen distinction (honors thesis) projects at Otterbein University, many of which resulted in conference presentations and contributed to my collaborative research agenda.
This mentorship extends beyond individual student development to demonstrate how undergraduate research can advance scholarly knowledge. Several student-led projects evolved into publications or conference presentations (Elam et al., 2016; Elaides & Levin, 2019; McKnight & Levin, 2021), demonstrating that well-designed undergraduate research experiences can produce methodologically rigorous scholarship while developing students' analytical capabilities. As department head at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, I currently serve on the Louisiana Undergraduate Research Association, working to expand undergraduate research opportunities across the institution. This commitment reflects my conviction that research mentorship develops both student capabilities and an institutional research culture, particularly important for comprehensive universities seeking to enhance research productivity while maintaining the centrality of the teaching mission.
Emerging Research: Generative AI and Academic Integrity My most recent work examines how generative AI technologies are reshaping knowledge creation and academic integrity. In "Pandora's Box Reopened: Can Generative AI Restore Hope or Result in a Decline in the Quest for Academic Integrity" (Journal of Macromarketing, 2025), which received Best Paper in Track at the 2024 Society for Marketing Advances conference, we analyze how AI-generated content affects scholarly knowledge production. From an R-A perspective, generative AI represents a potentially disruptive resource that could either democratize research capabilities or undermine the comparative advantages that institutions and scholars have built through sustained investment in analytical capabilities. This work connects technology adoption research with broader questions about competitive dynamics in knowledge-intensive industries.
Future Directions My research agenda continues to explore how R-A theory illuminates competitive dynamics in contexts characterized by information asymmetry, indirect competitive influences, and institutional complexity. I am particularly interested in how analytical capabilities function as operant resources—resources that act upon other resources to create competitive advantage. As organizations gain access to increasingly granular data, competitive advantage depends less on data possession than on analytical capabilities that transform data into strategic insights.
This research trajectory positions me to contribute to both marketing scholarship and institutional leadership. Understanding how organizations create competitive advantage through superior knowledge resources and analytical capabilities directly informs how academic departments and colleges can build sustainable research programs, develop faculty capabilities, and position themselves competitively in higher education's evolving landscape.