Role of search for domain knowledge and architectural knowledge in alliance partner selection

Research Summary: The literature on technological alliances emphasizes that search for knowledge drives alliance formation. However, in conceptualizing technological knowledge, prior work on alliances has not made a distinction between domain knowledge—knowledge that firms possess in distinct technological domains—and architectural knowledge—knowledge that firms possess about how to combine elements from different technological domains. We argue that firms seek partners that are similar in domain knowledge to deepen their knowledge, and partners that are dissimilar in architectural knowledge to broaden their knowledge. Our results indicate that the likelihood of alliance formation increases when two firms are similar in domain knowledge and dissimilar in architectural knowledge. Further, our results show that these effects are positively moderated by the degree of decomposability of a firm's knowledge base. Managerial Summary: In dynamic environments, companies need to continually deepen and broaden their technological knowledge, and they often look for alliance partners who can provide them that knowledge. For knowledge deepening, companies are more likely to form alliances with those companies that have expertise in similar technological fields. For knowledge broadening, they are more likely to form alliances with those companies that have expertise in the same technological fields, but have different recipes for combining knowledge from those fields. Furthermore, a company with a modular knowledge base is more likely to seek a partner that has expertise in similar technological fields or whose recipes for combining knowledge from different technological fields are different from the recipes it has.     

Regional concentration of FDI in post-reform India: A district-level analysis

We analyze the concentration of foreign direct investment (FDI) in India at the district level, based on project-specific location choices since the reform program in the early 1990s. The decomposition property of the Theil index allows us to trace changes over time in the overall concentration of FDI to changes in concentration between and within subgroups of districts. We also differentiate between major types and sources of FDI. We find that FDI concentrated in a persistently decreasing number of districts. Concentration across those districts that received at least one FDI project within a given time interval also increased, but this increase leveled off in the more recent past. These trends hold for essentially all types and sources of FDI, while the average level of concentration varies considerably between these types and sources.     

A general class of additively decomposable inequality measures

Summary. This paper presents and characterizes a two-parameter class of inequality measures that contains the generalized entropy measures, the variance of logarithms, the path independent measures of Foster and Shneyerov (1999) and several new classes of measures. The key axiom is a generalized form of additive decomposability which defines the within-group and between-group inequality terms using a generalized mean in place of the arithmetic mean. Our characterization result is proved without invoking any regularity assumption (such as continuity) on the functional form of the inequality measure; instead, it relies on a minimal form of the transfer principle – or consistency with the Lorenz criterion – over two-person distributions. Received: October 27, 1997; revised: March 25, 1998     

企业关键业绩指标体系探讨

绩效管理是战略执行工具，建立关键业绩指标体系的目的是把战略转化为可衡量、评价的指标。如何运用关键成功因素法分解指标，关键业绩指标制定应遵循的原则，指标的标准和权重设定是关键业绩指标体系的主要内容。     

Differentiating Between Dimensionality and Duration in Multidimensional Measures of Poverty: Methodology with an Application to China

We develop a multidimensional poverty measure that is sensitive to the within‐individual distribution of deprivations across dimensions and time. Our measure combines features from a static multidimensional measure (Alkire and Foster, 2011a ) and a time‐dependent unidimensional measure (Foster, 2009 ). The proposed measure separately identifies—and can therefore be decomposed according to—the proportion of the poverty score attributable to: (i) the concentration of deprivations within periods; (ii) the concentration of deprivations within dimensions. In doing so it allows for a poverty ranking that is robust to assumptions about the trade‐off between the two components. Previous measures have not allowed for the features proposed here due to the inability to calculate the exact contribution of each dimension to overall poverty. We overcome this by adapting to our measure the Shapley decomposition proposed in Shorrocks ( 2013 ) (based on Shapley, 1953 ). The measure is applied to data from China, 2000‐2011.     

A survey on the bandit problem with switching costs

The paper surveys the literature on the bandit problem, focusing on its recent development in the presence of switching costs. Switching costs between arms makes not only the Gittins index policy suboptimal, but also renders the search for the optimal policy computationally infeasible. This survey will first discuss the decomposability properties of the arms that make the Gittins index policy optimal, and show how these properties break down upon the introduction of costs on switching arms. Having established the failure of the simple index policy, the survey focus on the recent efforts to overcome the difficulty of finding the optimal policy in the bandit problem with switching costs: characterization of the optimal policy, exact derivation of the optimal policy in the restricted environments, and lastly approximation of optimal policy. The advantages and disadvantages of the above approaches are discussed.     

When is the probabilistic serial assignment uniquely efficient and envy-free?

We study the problem of allocating objects using lotteries. For each economy, the serial assignment, the assignment selected by the (probabilistic) serial rule, is $sd$-efficient and $sd$-envy-free (“$sd$” stands for stochastic dominance) but in general, it is not the only such assignment. Our question is when the uniqueness also holds. First, we provide a necessary condition for uniqueness, termed top-objects divisibility. Exploiting the structure revealed by top-objects divisibility, we then provide two sufficient conditions: preference richness and recursive decomposability. Existing sufficient conditions are restrictive in that they are satisfied only if there are sufficiently many agents relative to the number of objects; and that they only focus on preferences, ignoring other aspects of the problem that are also relevant to uniqueness. Our conditions overcome these limitations and can explain uniqueness for a wide range of economies.     

All-engaging Systems

A multiple product system is represented by a couple of matrices that describe the inputs and outputs of every process. Under specific assumptions on the matrices, the economy behaves like a single-product system, at least locally. It is called ‘all-engaging’ if the economy is indecomposable and ‘all-productive’ otherwise. An exhaustive study of the mathematical and economic properties is proposed. This approach is useful to formalize the notion of sector.