Managing the environmental adaptation process in supplier–customer relationships

This paper details the results and managerial implications from four case studies, which examine how the environmental adaptation process (EAP) is managed within business‐to‐business relationships. The research uses models of supplier–customer interaction and inter‐organization cooperation in order to explore inter‐firm relationships and the process of adaptation. The research findings show that either party might pursue adaptations and also establishes features of the process itself as well as identifying factors that can facilitate or hinder the introduction of environmental changes. Arriving at a satisfactory outcome to the adaptation process can be determined by individual company and relationship characteristics, as well as the behaviour and experience of those managers involved in the process. Guidelines for the management of the process of environmental adaptation are proposed. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

THE OUTPUT EFFECT UNDER OLIGOPOLISTIC THIRD DEGREE PRICE DISCRIMINATION*

This paper analyses the output effect of price discrimination in a Cournot oligopoly where firms have different costs. Criteria which are based on the demand curves but not on the industry cost structure are developed to determine the direction of output change. Such criteria may provide an analytical basis for assessing regulatory cases and developing empirical propositions in testing the social impact of oligopolistic price discrimination.     

Pricing foreign equity options under Lévy processes

This article investigates the valuation of a foreign equity option whose value depends on the exchange rate and foreign equity prices. Assuming that these underlying price processes are correlated and driven by a multidimensional Lèvy process, a method suitable for solving the complex valuation problem is developed. First, to reduce the number of dimensions of the problem, the probability measure is changed to embed some dimensions of the Lèvy process into the pricing measure. Second, to simplify the integral complexity of the discounted terminal payoff, the valuation problem is transformed to Fourier space. The main contribution of this study is that by combining these two methods, the multivariate valuation problem is significantly simplified, and very accurate results are obtained relatively quickly. This powerful method can also be applied to other multivariate pricing problems involving Lèvy processes. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 25:917–944, 2005     

The Impact of Gender Similarity on Employee Satisfaction at Work: A Review and Re‐Evaluation*

abstract We used data from the British 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey (WERS98) to examine key unanswered questions about the impact of gender similarity on employee satisfaction at work. The study sample consisted of 11,848 men and 11,278 women from over 1700 workplaces across Britain. In line with gender‐specific compositional arguments, the effects of gender similarity were found to be asymmetrical for men and women, with similarity tending to have a greater positive impact on men than on women. The effects involved were primarily linear in nature. Net of the potentially confounding influence of other factors, they were also found to be quite weak, weaker than has commonly been suggested in the literature.     

Shareholder Value Maximisation,Stock Market and New Technology: Should the US Corporate Model be the Universal Standard? 1

In 1992 a blue‐ribbon group of US economists led by Michael Porter concluded that the US stock market‐based corporate model was misallocating resources and jeopardising US competitiveness. The faster growth of US economy since then and the supposed US lead in the spread of information technology has brought new legitimacy to the stock market and the corporate model, which is being hailed as the universal standard. Two main conclusions of the analysis presented here are: (a) there is no warrant for revising the blue‐ribbon group’s conclusion; and (b) even US corporations let alone developing country ones would be better off not having stock market valuation as a corporate goal.     

Price discovery in the aluminum market

An extended version of the S. Beveridge and C. R. Nelson (1981) decomposition and a latent variable approach are used to examine how the noise content, and therefore the informativeness, of four aluminum prices that have been quoted at various times since 1970—the (now defunct) U.S. producer price, a transactions price reported in a trade journal, and the LME and Comex exchange prices. It was found that the start of aluminum futures trading in 1978 resulted in greater price transparency in the sense that the information content of transactions prices increased. LME prices quickly came to be more informative than published transactions prices. Although the initial Comex aluminum contract failed to attract liquidity and had low information content, the 1999 contract, trading currently, is as transparent as the LME contract. © 2005Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 25:967–988, 2005     

World city formation,geopolitics and local political process: Taipei's ambiguous development

This article argues that the existing literature on world city formation overlooks geopolitics and political struggles in accounting for a city's transformation. Using Taipei as a case study, the article shows that geo‐economics, geopolitics and local politics each played an important role in Taipei's ambiguous world city formation in the late 1990s and are expected to continue to do so in the not too promising future. It is argued that the globalization process in the 1980s and the corresponding restructuring of the Taiwan economy induced the state to adopt a new developmental strategy that enhanced Taipei's competitiveness. However, the democratization process facilitated a new nation‐building process in the late‐1990s and the newly‐elected regime suppressed the city of Taipei's ongoing development, as a consequence of which Taipei's competitiveness as a regional world city has been declining. Geopolitics and local politics are thus found to explain to a large degree the ambiguities currently defining Taipei's world city formation. La littérature existante sur la formation des villes mondiales néglige les luttes géopolitiques et politiques dans ses explications de la transformation d'une ville. Prenant comme cas Taipei, l'article montre que géo‐économie, géopolitique et politique locale ont chacune joué un r^le important dans la formation complexe de cette ville mondiale vers la fin des années 1990, rôle qu'elles devraient conserver dans un avenir peu prometteur. Le processus de mondialisation des années 1980 et la restructuration subséquente de l'économie taiwanaise ont conduit l'´tat à adopter une nouvelle stratégie de développement, laquelle a renforcé la compétitivité de Taipei. En revanche, le processus de démocratisation a encouragé un processus de construction nationale dans la fin des années 1990 et le régime récemment élu a asphyxié l'évolution de cette ville, en conséquence de quoi la compétitivité de Taipei en tant que ville mondiale de la région a décliné. La géopolitique et la politique locale peuvent donc expliquer en grande partie les ambiguïtés qui définissent actuellement la formation de la ville mondiale de Taipei.     

GAUGING THE SOURCES OF GROWTH OF HIGH‐TECH AND LOW‐TECH INDUSTRIES: THE CASE OF KOREAN MANUFACTURING*

Literature argues that the source of growth for high‐tech industries emanates from technological progress, while that for low‐tech industries comes from technical efficiency improvement. Also, some empirical studies have shown that technological progress is often accompanied by deterioration in technical efficiency. The focus in this study is to discuss a methodology and test the above two hypotheses with regard to Korean manufacturing data from 1970 to 1997. The study found that the 2.5 per cent average annual rate of technological progress during this period was the major contributor to total factor productivity (TFP) growth in Korean manufacturing whereas technical efficiency grew by a modest 1.1 per cent per annum. The analysis also showed that technological progress was responsible for TFP growth in both high‐tech and low‐tech industries and that both technological progress and technical efficiency improvement co‐existed in the case of Korean manufacturing industries.     

A NEW PERSPECTIVE ON INDUSTRY R&D AND MARKET STRUCTURE*

This paper aims to shed some new insights on the long‐debated and both extensively and intensively explored relationship between market concentration and industry R&D intensity. In order to do so, this study develops, from a classic Dorfman‐Steiner [1954] model of firm R&D, a model of industry R&D, where consumer preference over quality and price, R&D technology, and the joint distribution of firm‐specific technological competence and market share jointly determine the level of industry R&D intensity. The joint distribution term, which reflects both the underlying distribution of firms‐specific technological competence and the strength of its link with market share, suggests that the concentration‐R&D relationship differs depending on the strength of the link or simply the appropriability of R&D in terms of market share: A positive relationship is predicted for low‐appropriability industries, where market concentration supplements low R&D appropriability, while a negative or an inverted U‐shaped relationship for high‐appropriability industries. An empirical analysis of data, disaggregated at the five‐digit SIC level, on R&D and market concentration of Korean manufacturing industries provides supportive evidence for the predictions.     

企业家高工作满意度来源研究

企业家在市场经济中发挥着重要作用。在美国经济中,很多变革、创新和进步都来自企业家,并且由民营企业家创立的民营企业在提供就业机会上扮演了重要角色。本文所指的企业家遵从熊彼特的定义,认为企业家的职能是创新,创新是判断企业家的标准,在这个意义上,中小企业的创业者是纯正的企业家。一般人认为,美国一直不断产生企业家和创业者,实际上,创业者占劳动力市场的比例在1870至1973之间持续下降,到1976年后才开始回升。这种回升一直持续到现在。根据Gartnet与Shane的进一步研究发现:以每个单位资本所拥有的企业家,自20世纪70年代到20世纪90…