The impact of purchasing strategy-structure (mis)fit on purchasing cost and innovation performance

The organizational design literature strongly supports the notion of “structure follows strategy”, and suggests that a misfit between the two has a negative effect on performance. Building on this line of argument, we examine to what extent the (mis)fit between purchasing strategy and purchasing structure impacts purchasing performance. We focus on cost and innovation purchase category strategies, and examine how the deviation from an ideal purchasing structure defined along three dimensions (centralization, formalization, and cross-functionality) impacts purchasing performance. Analysing data collected from 469 firms in ten countries, we demonstrate that a strategy-structure misfit negatively impacts purchasing performance in both cost and innovation strategies. We also find that purchasing proficiency is a mediator in this relationship between misfit and performance. Our findings aid managerial decision making by empirically validating the necessity of having the right purchasing structure for successfully executing different purchasing strategies.     

我国“一带一路”沿线地区风险投资时空分布及影响因素研究

深入分析我国“一带一路”沿线地区风险投资时空格局及影响因素，有助于促进创新创业与企业发展、提高区域科技创新水平。运用空间分析方法和空间计量模型，对2003-2018年我国“一带一路”沿线139个城市风险投资的时空分布特征及影响因素进行分析，结果表明：①沿线地区的风险投资发展具有不均衡性，呈现为沿海高、西部低的分异格局；②风险投资的全局自相关系数均为正，呈现出明显的空间集聚特征；③风险投资机构数、国家高新区数量、风险投资退出、政府引导基金发展、财政科技支出对区域风险投资具有显著促进作用，环境污染对风险投资有一定抑制作用。随着ESG投资理念逐渐获得认可，沿线地区可以通过提升绿色发展水平促进风险投资发展。     

户籍制度扭曲及放松对经济的影响:理论与实证

户籍制度是我国劳动力流动的主要障碍.那么,当前我国的户籍扭曲程度几何?户籍制度放松对经济又会有怎样的影响?对这些问题的回答将有助于政府评估户籍制度改革的空间和经济效益.文章在Hansen和Prescott(2002)的两部门劳动力流动模型基础上,将工人分为农业和非农户口,引入户籍扭曲因子,构建两部门两类工人的户籍扭曲模型;然后,使用1984?2013年宏观经济数据度量户籍扭曲程度,并对2013年我国户籍制度逐渐放松过程中经济变量的变化进行模拟;最后,文章建立了包含"农业与非农"和"本地与外地"户籍差异的省份异质性户籍扭曲模型.研究表明:(1)经济和户籍制度改革的不同步导致了1984?2013年我国户籍扭曲程度呈现倒"U"形变化,且相较于韩国尚有较大的改善空间;(2)以韩国为参照,若2013年我国户籍制度完全放开,经济达到均衡时,农业部门和非农部门的就业人数将分别下降58.83%和上升26.92%,工资率将分别上升19.44%和下降6.77%,社会增加值将增长15.33%,这说明社会经济效率将得到提升,贫富差距将缩小.文章丰富和完善了户籍扭曲的理论模型,从减少劳动力流动摩擦的视角为政府制定相关政策提供了参考.     

The Role of Ideas in Understanding Industrial Relations Policy Change in Liberal Market Economies

This paper analyzes the uneven processes underpinning industrial relations policy liberalization in New Zealand, Australia, the UK, and Ireland. Drawing upon 140 elite interviews and building upon ideational comparative political theories, the paper highlights the role of ideas in the policy change process. It identifies how particular ideas can be used to construct policy problems, how these ideas can gain legitimacy through battles with competing ideas, and how policy legacies can influence whether ideas take root. The findings from the comparative case analysis expose a critical difference between “positive legacies” and “negative legacies” to account for different liberalization trajectories.     

Shareholder Activism and Voluntary Disclosure Initiation: The Case of Political Spending

Demand for disclosures on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues has increased dramatically. Using corporate political spending disclosures as our setting, we conduct a detailed inquiry of 541 political spending‐related shareholder proposals from 2004 to 2012 to highlight the role of shareholder activism as a mechanism to motivate ESG disclosure. Unlike earlier studies, we examine both proposals that went to a vote and proposals that were withdrawn by the activist, allowing us to assess more comprehensively the success of shareholder activism. We find that 20 percent of firms targeted by disclosure proposals begin disclosing in the subsequent year, although implementation rates vary by proposal type—8 percent for proposals subject to a vote versus 56 percent for proposals withdrawn. The sponsor is also important: unions and public pension funds are less likely than other activists to target firms with agency problems and are less successful in having proposals withdrawn, and the implementations they obtain are viewed more negatively by the broader investor base. Our findings highlight shareholder proposals as one mechanism through which investors can successfully express their preferences for corporate disclosure policies. Given activists' long‐standing interest in environmental and social disclosure policies, we believe our findings generalize to a broader set of ESG disclosures.     

Coping with coopetition—Facing dilemmas in cooperation for sustainable development: The case of the Dutch smart grid industry

This paper is amongst the first to examine coopetition strategy for sustainable development at the network level. Companies who want to successfully implement complex innovative technologies that support sustainable development need to collaborate with other actors of the innovation ecosystem, including their competitors, so that they can develop standards, interoperable products, pool knowledge, and resources and bundle forces to compete against other technologies. Collaboration with competitors brings benefits, but also many risks. We investigated how firms cope with these risks when establishing an innovation ecosystem to implement a new technology in society. We conducted research in the Dutch smart grids sector and explored how these firms minimize inherent risks of coopetition. We found that system‐building actors in the Dutch smart grid field not only minimize inherent risks, but from the start of their collaboration they implement so‐called enablers to prevent these risks upfront.     

Policy capturing in small‐group decision making: Using linear programming to assign factor weights for the NCAA Selection Committee's ranking decisions in the 2016 through 2018 men's basketball tournaments

We present a general approach for applying policy capturing to small‐group decision making and demonstrate the approach with the NCAA Selection Committee's rankings of the 68 teams in the three most recent Division I Men's Basketball Tournaments. We develop a linear programming model that minimizes the extent to which the evaluation of a lower‐ranked team exceeds that of a team ranked immediately above it. The result is a set of linear weights that approximates a group decision when the decision itself is demonstrably internally inconsistent in that a group ranks some teams higher than others despite a lower implied evaluation.     

Lobbying as a potent political marketing tool for firm performance: A closer look

This study endeavors to enhance political marketing literature about the impact of lobbying on firm performance. Our sample is composed of 140 U.S. firms and spans the years 2007–2014 to encompass the 2007–2009 recession and the subsequent recovery period. Our findings indicate that lobbying expenses positively contribute to firm performance. Also, government contracts in both ways, dollar amount and number of government contracts, act as mediators between lobbying expenses and firm performance. In addition, organizational slack moderates the relationship between lobbying expenses and government contracts. The managerial implications suggest that lobbying expenses can be leveraged as a potent tool for firm performance. Firms with larger lobbying efforts acquired both, higher dollar amounts and a greater number of government contracts.