Passage: Malone et al. found that some business models, as defined by them, indeed performed better than others in a dataset consisting of the largest U.S. firms, in the period 1998 through 2002, while they did not prove whether the existence of a business model mattered.

Question: What did Malone find?
that some business models, as defined by them, indeed performed better than others in a dataset consisting of the largest U.S. firms