Journal of Management & Governance

, Volume 20, Issue 2, pp 321–362 | Cite as

Boundaries of the business model within business groups

  • Emiliano Di Carlo
  • Fabio Fortuna
  • Silvia Testarmata
Article
First Online:

Abstract

Scholars have sought various ways to find out how financial performance of the firm can be affected by its business model (BM). However, to date academic literature has focused attention on the “firm” as a unit of analysis without clearly defining the boundaries of the reporting entity to which the BMs refer. The aim of this paper is to investigate what are the boundaries of the BM of the affiliated-group companies and how the degree of independence of BMs is measured within the business group. The contribution of the paper is in using the BM concept to expound and criticise the assumptions in economic analysis and accounting standards that groups of companies are economic units that optimise economic income of the group as a whole and that the financial statements of individual subsidiaries, sub-groups and the group as a whole report the value generated by the group.

Keywords

Business group Business model Segment reporting Consolidated financial statements Italy 
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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015

Authors and Affiliations

  • Emiliano Di Carlo
    • 1
  • Fabio Fortuna
    • 2
  • Silvia Testarmata
    • 2
  1. 1.University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’RomeItaly
  2. 2.Unicusano UniversityRomeItaly

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