Research Overview

Stefanos Mouzas is a Professor at Lancaster University Management School. His scholarly theme aims to advance our understanding on how the mutuality of advantage is achieved in international networks of exchange relationships. Researching grand challenges, such as tackling sustainability, enhancing resilience, promoting innovation, and dealing with uncertainty, his research work examines how firms overcome contract incompleteness through innovative inter-firm arrangements.

Three analytical pillars underpin his research work:

• Negotiations
• Contracts
• Performance

Professor Mouzas is Associate Editor of the Journal of Business Research.

Research Interests

Research in the field of 'Negotiations, Contracts and Performance' is interdisciplinary cutting across the boundaries of Management (Business-to-Business Research), Economics (Behavioral Economics) and Law (Contract Law). The work is policy-relevant, develops industry-led research perspectives and places emphasis on Interfirm Adaptations, Business Responses to Climate Change, Interactive Decision-making, Innovative Business Models, Innovative Contract Arrangements, Artificial Intelligence and Assessing Business Performance. The research includes UN Climate Negotiations, Interactive Decisionmaking, and Valuation.

Conducting research on Negotiations, Contracts and Performance, Professor Mouzas is involved in the IMP Group which has carried out international studies into the management of large-scale, complex business networks. The group’s interaction approach is based on the importance of understanding the connectivity and interaction between active buyers and sellers in business networks.

Please see papers published in Harvard Business Review, Organization Studies, Cambridge Law Journal, Journal of Contract Law, Journal of Business Research, Industrial Marketing Management, Production Planning & Control, Negotiation Journal, Journal of Customer Behaviour, Journal of Business Market Management, Thexis, Die Betriebswirtschaft - Business Administration Review (BARev)-, Journal of Marketing Management, European Journal of Marketing,Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing.

Current Research

Current research concerns the following contemporary challenges:

Interfirm Adaptation in Business Relationships

Work in this area contributes to the theory of interfirm adaptation in business relationships by developing a unifying conceptual framework that connects 1) the bases of interfirm adaptation, and 2) the processes of interfirm adaptation. This unifying conceptual framework gives researchers a coherent set of analytical tools to assume, champion, and experiment research on interfirm adaptation in business relationships.

See Towards a Theory of Interfirm Adaptation in Business Relationships

Overcoming Contract Incompleness in Supply Relationships

For firms, it is practically impossible to assess all future eventualities, draft complete and fully contingent contracts, observe and verify the agreed performance. Professor Mouzas served as a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University, Department of Economics in 2023. Based on an empirical investigation of long-term supply relationships between agribusiness and farms in India, his research demonstrates that under certain conditions overcoming contractual incompleteness is possible. Firms are better able to deal with contract incompleteness when they specify contract clauses that regulate (1) recurrent interaction, (2) relational frame and (3) nonlegal enforceability. These three mechanisms of contract clauses enable firms to preserve the substance of how they wish to relate to each other and simultaneously allow them to remain sufficiently flexible to embrace new opportunities.

See Overcoming Contract Incompleteness

How Firms Innovate and Tranform their Business

While it is well established that firms innovate and transform themselves in the face of discontinuous change, our knowledge of what drives business transformation remains limited. How and why are firms able to transform themselves? To understand what drives business transformation, we need to look into firms’ abilities to reconfigure resources in order to innovate. Business transformation appears to be a contingent phenomenon that requires the efficacy of interactions between firms within a multiplicity of entitlements. Interactions explain how firms pursue business transformation. Entitlements explain why firms are able to pursue business transformation. A recent work published in the Journal of Business Research offers new insights into the transformative potential of entitlements as a bundle of rights, duties and capabilities that firms possess, acquire, and transfer to other business actors in order to transform their businesses.See What Drives Business Transformation?

Rethinking Business Performance

Business performance can be synthesized into three potentially reinforcing but also conflicting performance systems: 1) operational efficiency, 2) market effectiveness and 3) financial resilience. These three performance systems enable us to examine the effect on a) profitability, b) growth and c) solvency. While some specific measures of business performance will suffice in times of stability and growth, they could make firms operating in global value chains vulnerable in times of adversity. See recent work (with Florian Bauer) Rethinking Business Performance in Global Value Chains.

UN Climate Change Negotiations

Building on cutting edge knowledge gained in Behavioural Science, Professor Mouzas examines the dynamic process of UN climate negotiations. Specificallly, he examines key obstacles that hinder negotiations at the UN, and offers insights into why it is so challenging to achieve progress on a global agreement to reduce greenhouse gases. Professor Mouzas worked on research related to UN climate change negotiations as a Visiting Scholar at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.

Business Responses to Climate Change

Our research highlights significant discrepancies between the way that CO2 markets are designed and the way that markets actually operate. See the study on "Market-based Responses to Climate Change" published in Organization Studies (with Gareth Veal). Underpinning research demonstrates that organisations and individuals typicaly focus upon specific, local rules of the game, in terms of remit and time, and tend to elaborate responses to climate change which impact on the creastion of new rules. See Changing the rules of the game. Our research indicates that companies fail to respond to climate change due to the multiplicity of different interests which is aggravated by 1) economic reasoning; 2) weak actor bonds; and 3) differing perceptions of the rules of the game. See Why Companies fail to Respond to Climate Change published in Industrial Marketing Management

Negotiating Deals that Foster Innovation

Empirical research has been conducted on how companies negotiate deals in global business networks. This includes achieving innovation as a process of leveraging resources within international business relationships to achieve differentiation and create sustainable value. See recent study on Innovation in Business Networks:The Role of Leveraging Resources. Business contracts are a critical part in the innovation process; contracts may enable or prevent companies from moving quickly to leveraging their resources.

Research work on contracts is related to 'A Proposed Taxonomy of Contracts' (with Michael Furmston) published in the Journal of Contract Law and a review of 'Contract Research Today: Where do we Stand?' (with Keith Blois) published in Industrial Marketing Management. The need to secure contracts with other firms may lead many companies to dysfunctional deals which limit their ability to differentiate and innovate in the future. This empirical observation prompted me to investigate a range of international deals, often called umbrella agreements, that foster innovation, see Harvard Business Review. International organizations recognize the importance of umbrella agreements because they optimize the required level of reliance and flexibility in complex business networks. For more details of this work, see 'From Contract to Umbrella Agreement' published in the Cambridge Law Journal (with Michael Furmston). See also ‘Negotiating Umbrella Agreements’ published in the Negotiation Journal. Empirical findings about the role of Umbrella Agreements in negotiation and dealmaking appear in the Journal of Business Research (with David Ford, at Euromed School of Management, Marseille France).

Furthermore, see commentary on Hugh Collins' article 'Legal Aspects of Network Architecture of Supply Chains'. Both commentary and article appear in a recent volume on "Networks: Legal Issues of Multilateral Cooperation", edited by G. Teubner and M. Amstutz, Hart Publications.

The Mediating Role of Consent

Understanding today's business landscape requires us to look beyond the individual choices of organisations and examine the role of consent between interacting organisations. Based on an empirical investigation of manufacturers and retailers and drawing from previous research on business relationships, research in this area detects the mediating role of consent at four levels: 1) as a stratifying process, 2) as recursive practice, 3) as energizing interaction, and 4) as economizing activities, resources and actors. See The Mediating Role of Consent in Business Marketing

Managerial Cognition and Innovation

Based on empirical research in consumer goods companies, pharmaceutical companies, producers of semiconductors and telecommunication and utility service providers, we suggest that managers which develop network insight are able to mobilize their resources in business networks and create a competitive advantage for their organizations that is crucial for innovation and growth (see the article on 'Developing Network Insight' as well as the article on 'Changing Network Pictures: Evidence from Mergers and Acquisitions' both published in the Industrial Marketing Management.

See Special Issue (edited with Pete Naudé and Stephan Henneberg) on ‘Cognition and Management in Networks’ published in Industrial Marketing Management.Moreover, see recent research on 'Inter-cognitive Representations in Business Networks' that aims at conceptualizing different outcomes, such as manifestations of agreements between business actors, legally binding contracts, industry standards, and regulations which are critical in negotiating international trade deals.

Effectiveness versus Efficiency in Business Networks

Empirical research in this area indicates that in periods of low growth, many companies focus on issues of competitive advantage through value appropriation rather than on innovation and the creation of new sustainable growth opportunities. They are solely addressing their operational efficiency and they are neglecting market effectiveness. Research on companies' performance emphasizes the importance of linking efficiency and effectiveness. For details of this work, see the study on Efficiency versus Effectiveness published in the Journal of Business Research.

Trust & Reliance in Business Networks

One of the particularities of trust is its inherent anthropocentricity. As a concept, trust appears to be more applicable at the level of inter-personal relationships than to inter-organizational relationships. As business relationships involve both inter-personal and inter-organizational relationships, our research demonstrates the need to look at reliance as an incremental intellectual lens on business relationships, see the study on Trust and Reliance in Business Relationships.

The Constitution of Networks

The idea of a constitution of networks is a useful addition to our ways of understanding what happens within the business landscape.Research in this area looks at the constitution of networks as a system of values, norms, rules and other conventions that are shared by actors in business networks. Whether by intention or not, the constitution of networks provides a framework within which interaction among actors takes place. See empirical insights on The Constitution of Networks published in the Industrial Marketing Management.

Research involving financial institutions indicates that banks may come to act in a similar way to each other over time without coordination (see, Die Betriebswirtschaft -Business Administration Review (BARev)-. Current research delivers new transformative insights on 1) the connectivity between financial institutions, and 2) the sources of systemic risk by offering accurate knowledge on the nature of exchange between financial institutions.

Ph.D Supervision

PhD applications are welcomed from prospective students interested in the following areas:

-Negotiations & Sustainable Deal-making

-Resources, Innovation and Value Creation

-Innovative Responses to Climate Change

-Resources and Property Rights

-Business Opportunity and Valuation

-Strategy and Business Models

-Assessing Business Performance

Research Grants

2025 Flex MR Fully Funded PhD

Working with Paul Hudson, CEO at Flex MR, Professor Igor Goncharov (LUMS), Dr Helen Bruce (LUMS) and Dr Alan Gilchrist (LUMS), we have successfully created a joint project for a fully funded PhD (2025-2028) for over £134,000 on firms' decision making.

Working collaboratively with the organization Lakeland, we have implemented a fully funded project on how firms may reduce Scope 3 Emissions in their supply chains. This project involved research and consultancy implemented by Sarmistha Padhi (MBA) supervised by Professor Stefanos Mouzas and Dr Dasha Smirnowa.

2022-2024 Global Advancement Fund

Principal Investigator in an engagement programme with world-leading logistic firms through Lancaster University Leipzig Campus in Germany to advance international research collaboration in sustainability.

2020-2022 Covid-19 Response Programme

Covid-19 Response programme, Recovery & Resilience, part funded by the European Regional Development Fund and Lancaster University. In this funded project, Professor Mouzas offered inter-active peer-learning online sessions to Small and Medium Size organizations, that include Blackpool Grand Theatre, to enhance business resilience.

2020-2023 Centre for Global Eco-innovation,

In this fully funded project, we engaged and established relationships with firms to conduct collaborative research, in which postgraduate students and early career scholars worked with innovative organizations and Lancaster University to enable the delivery of sustainable solutions. This project was funded by the Northern Powerhouse and the European Regional Development Fund.

Co-investigator in the Catalyst project (2011-2014); £1.9 Million funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPRSC), and brings together academics and communities to jointly imagine and build the next generation of innovative technologies for social change.

Knowledge Transfer Partnerships

Knowledge Transfer Partnership -Funded by ESRC in 2010- The Knowledge Transfer Partnership involved Energy Efficiency Company and Lancaster University (in cooperation with Lancaster Environment Centre, Professor James Faulconbridge) with the objective to investigate carbon trading, offsetting and verifying (2010).

Knowledge Transfer Partnership between Energy for Sustainable Development Ltd and the University of Bath-(funded by ESRC in 2005-2006)

External Roles

Associate Editor : Journal of Business Research

Editorial Board Member:

-Journal of Business Research

-International Marketing Review

-Industrial Marketing Management

-Journal of Business and Market Management

Visiting Positions:

-Harvard University, Department of Economics, Cambridge, MA, (2023)

-Harvard University, Harvard Law School, Program on Negotiation, Cambridge, MA, (2013-2014)

-Stockholm School of Economics, Stockholm, Sweden (Fellow of the Mistra Center for Sustainable Markets, (2017-2018)

-Vienna University of Economics and Business| WU, Austria (2014-2022)

-Bocconi University, Italy (2009)

-University of Duesseldorf, Germany (2010-2014)

Profile

Before joining the academe in 2002, Professor Mouzas worked at Kellogg as Head of Brand Management for Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

PhD Supervision Interests

PhD applications are welcomed from prospective students interested in the following areas: International Trade Deals, Innovation and Value Creation, Innovative Responses to Climate Change, Resources and Property Rights, Business Opportunity and Valuation, Negotiation and Deal-making, Strategy and Marketing Management, Assessing Business Performance