The research activities conducted by Dr. Michael Kleinaltenkamp, Professor, focus on the following areas: business-to-business (B2B) marketing, marketing of company-related services, and business relationship management. The theoretical approach underlying Dr. Kleinaltenkamp’s research is new institutional economics, which he also applies in conjunction with other theories, such as market process theory, where circumstances warrant.

New institutional economics represents a specific direction in the study of economics, with its roots in neoclassicism. The market models applied in the neoclassical school of thought assume that economic entities possess full information, and thus have full market transparency at their disposal; that they do not have any personal, factual, spatial, or time-related preferences with respect to specific providers (condition of homogeneity); that they act in a completely rational manner; and that they pursue the aim of maximizing utility (consumers) or profit (providers). Without giving up the advantages this approach offers in terms of analyzing the behavior of market players, new institutional economics comes closer to real-life scenarios by abandoning at least one, but in most cases several, of these assumptions.

New institutional economics is generally divided into four areas of research: economics of information, property rights theory, principal-agent theory, and transaction cost economics.

Dr. Michael Kleinaltenkamp’s research activities follow the tradition of the “Engelhardt School,” a name chosen by the students of Dr. Werner H. Engelhardt, Professor Emeritus, themselves. Engelhardt was one of the first German academics to examine marketing of capital goods, also termed marketing of industrial goods or business-to-business (B2B) marketing. He was also one of the first to study the field of service marketing, where he highlighted the integration of the customer as a particularly important feature.

 

Overview of the Engelhardt-School