A typology of strategic choice

There is an incredible paucity of studies focusing on what it takes to produce a successful strategic decision. The purpose of this paper is to advance the body of knowledge in this most important area. Using a two-dimensional typology of strategic choice, twelve real-world cases of strategic decision making are classified and evaluated. The results of these evaluations tend to confirm the typology of strategic choice and to suggest a need for additional research to validate the hypothesis that a formal decision-making process is conducive to successful strategic decision outcomes. This paper is intended for both professors and practioners of strategic choice.     

IT for green and green IT: A proposed typology of eco-innovation

This article is in support of the development of an ecological economic framework. It discusses, from an interdisciplinary perspective, the increasing use of green IT and their applications (IT for green). IT and sustainable development have had a concomitant rise and reach. The future world emerging from their respective interpretations enables, in both cases, a shift from today's questionable industrial capitalism towards post-industrial capitalism. This paper addresses the following questions: What is known about green IT and IT for green? Are smart solutions (buildings, energy grids, transport) always beneficial to an ecological economy? And, if so, in what ways? In the first part of this article, we analyse the economic, social and environmental impact of IT and argue for the need for green applications of green IT in order to achieve sustainable outcomes. The second part focuses on the managerial dimension of eco-innovation theory and presents one of the distinctive features of green applications of green IT: the collective organisation of innovation. A typology of eco-innovation aimed at reconciling IT development and green growth is then proposed explicitly addressing four kinds of changes towards sustainable development: technological, social, institutional and organisational innovation.     

Monopolistic competition and the cyclicality of pricing and productivity—A typology of industries

We develop a market model which explains how prices and productivity react to short-run demand variations when the number of price-setting firms is held fixed on its long-run level and profits are endogenous. We assume that for each firm the average production cost function is U-shaped, that customers are imperfectly informed about offer prices, and that customers may search for better offers.For low degrees of market transparency the long-run market outcome exhibits price dispersion with an endogenous finite number of firms. In this case, in the short run, prices and price mark-ups respond countercyclically to demand variations (while input prices are exogenously fixed) and productivity is procyclical. In the complementary case of higher degrees of market transparency, in the long run we have a single-price equilibrium. In that case, in the short run, prices are procyclical while mark-ups remain countercyclical and productivity diminishes with any deviation of demand from its long-run level.Thanks for helpful discussions go to the participants of workshops at the Winter Symposium of the Econometric Society at Warsaw 1990, at the 6th World Congress of the Econometric Society at Barcelona 1990, at the Annual Meetings of the Verein für Socialpolitik in Lugano 1991 and of its Ausschuß für Industrieökonomik in Basel 1992, and at several university workshops. Thanks go also to two anonymous referees. Financial support by the Swiss National Science Foundation, grants No 12-26387.89 and 12-28722.90, are gratefully acknowledged.     

Revisiting incubation performance: How incubator typology affects results

Relevant literature has discussed incubator versus nonincubator firm performance and the characteristics of different types of incubators. However, it has not considered assessing performance individually by archetype. We studied company performance in four archetypal incubators. Performance measures used fall into five categories drawn from literature: a) firm growth b) participation in R&D programs c) Input R&D d) Output R&D e) Employment generation cost. We find there are significant differences in three of the five performance categories among incubator types. We assess the performance of each one by determining whether the objectives for which each was created are met. Private, basic research and University archetypes meet their objectives. Regional development archetype does not.     

A commodity-money refinement in matching models

We apply a commodity-money refinement to matching models in which people meet in pairs and buyers make take-it-or-leave-it offers to sellers. The refinement is applied by attaching a utility value to nominal money and letting that value approach zero. An equilibrium satisfies the refinement if it is such a limit. We show that the refinement eliminates a class of non-full-support steady states.     

External technology commercialisation projects: objectives,processes and a typology

Firms increasingly consider external technology commercialisation (ETC) – the commercialisation of technology assets – as an important part of their strategies. ETC goes beyond the marginal activity of commercialising residual technologies, yet prior research has not systematically analysed its monetary and strategic benefits, nor has much been published about the process of managing ETC. Accordingly this paper offers a classification of ETC objectives based on case studies of 25 technology-oriented companies. A detailed segmentation of the process of managing these projects is established by focussing on large industrial companies whose main business is internal technology exploitation (i.e. the application of technologies in their own products and/or services). Based on these classifications, four types of external technology exploitation projects are identified and the different managerial challenges are described along the process segmentation.     

A particular class of continuous-time stochastic growth models

This paper generalizes to uncertaintly the neoclassical one-sector model by transforming the basic differential equation on the capital labor ratio into a “stochastic” differential equation. The capital-labor ratio and related economic variables become random variables whose probability distributions vary with time, and the paper is focused on the existence of a steady state denfined by the (probabilistic) stationarity of these variables. An application of the results is given for a specific example with a Cobb-Douglas production function and uncertainty on the saving coefficient, the labor-force rate of growth, and the capital depreciation rate.     

政府公益性项目管理模式--实施建设管理代理制引起的思考

如何管理好政府工程项目是世界各国一直在探索的问题,对于发展中国家来说更是如此。我国当前政府公益性投资项目正处于高速发展时期,加之体制的改革,政府公益性投资项目效益低下更为明显。目前许多地区,特别是西部地区,一方面继续进行着体制的转轨,另一方面面临着大规模的政府公益性投资项目,寻求合理的项目管理模式具有重要的现实意义。本文针对目前一些地方政府提出的政府公益性投资项目实行建设管理代理制为研讨对象,在对国外政府公益性项目管理模式进行分析的基础上,通过与我国一些地区目前做法的比较,提出地方政府可借鉴的一…     

A spectral decomposition for structural VAR models

Based on structural VARs, this paper proposes a spectral decomposition which allows to infer the effects of changes in one variable on the other variables in the frequency domain. It is shown that there is a close relationship between this concept and conventional forecast error variance decomposition techniques for VARs. An empirical example demonstrates the usefulness of this additional tool in analyzing the relationships among time series.     

A procedure for adapting technological forecasting models

A simple procedure is presented for adapting available mathematical models for forecasting technological substitution. The procedure takes into consideration the strengths and weaknesses of the available models and the environmental interactions to identify a set of feasible alternative forecasts, from which a selection is to be made by the decision-maker based on judgement.     

A critique of the microfoundations of macroeconomic policy models

The contemporary economic debate is focused mainly on the causes and cures of stagflation. There are three major macroeconomic parties to this debate: Incentivists (supply siders), Keynesians, and Monetarists. Each of these schools prepares policy forecasts promoting the merits of its particular remedies for countering stagflation. Though the models driving these forecasts are different in terms of the determinants they emphasize and the economic casuality they invoke, all are predicated on the same set of microeconomic assumptions: those organized under the neoclassical theory of the firm. The fact that the Incentivist, Keynesian, and Monetarist models all share the same microfoundation pretty much eliminates the firm and its properties from the arena of argument. From the standpoint to be developed in this article, this omission is unfortunate, as contemporary enterprises bear increasingly little resemblance to their neoclassical predecessors. The disparities are particularly important in two respects. First, increases in organizational size and complexity mark modern firms as increasingly susceptible to certain inefficiencies that ultimately affect aggregate economic performance adversely. But the mainstream macroeconomic models do not comprehend microeconomic stimuli to stagflation and therefore cannot presume to control them. The result is perhaps a consistent understatement of the reparative task the Incentivists, Keynesians, and Monetarists are promoting for themselves. Second, modern firms entail a potential for autonomous activities that is a priori denied neoclassical enterprises. Increases in autonomy imply some unresponsiveness to exogenous controls of the type the mainstream schools propose to employ as means of restoring economic integrity. To this extent, their policy models may be uniformly overstating the effect their instruments can enjoy in the present economic context. When the likelihood of underestimating the magnitude of the stagflationary problem is coupled with the probable overestimation of interventionist capabilities, the policy forecasts of the Incentivist, Keynesian, and Monetarist schools may be suspected of a degree of optimism entirely unwarranted by current microeconomic realities.     

Estimating models of expectations: A simplified sequential approach

This paper outlines a simple method for continuous updating of parameters that requires direct estimation only in the initial period. The basic technique, which is fairly well-known in the statistics literature, is useful for estimating models of expectations where period by period updating is typically necessary.     

International capital movements: A synthesis of alternative models

The several alternative approches to international capital movements have not been compared theoretically. By showing that each represents a special case from a general simultaneous equation model, this note clarifies the theoretical relationships among the approaches, thus providing a convenient framework for their evaluation.     

Identification of dependent probit models: A simplified approach

This paper analyzes the estimability of dependent probit models. Three important cases are examined for the binary choice model and an extension is offered for the multinomial case. Particular attention is paid to the implications of the results for actual use of these models.     

A difficulty with the address models of product differentiation

Summary. In models of product differentiation and location models it is implicitly assumed that consumers can afford to buy the differentiated goods in the market. I show that with income heterogeneity there are severe existence problems of a price equilibrium in models of horizontal product differentiation with unit demand because some consumers are income-constrained. The result generalizes to other models of product differentiation, search, and switching costs. I present an alternative specification of variable individual demand in which this kind of existence problem cannot arise. Received: October 17, 1997; revised version: February 20, 1998     

A note on the hedging effectiveness of GARCH models

This note compares the hedging effectiveness of the conventional hedge ratio and time-varying conditional hedge ratios (of which GARCH ratio is a special case). It is shown that, in large sample cases, the conventional hedge ratio provides the best performance. For small sample cases, a sufficiently large variation in the conditional variance of the futures return is required to produce the opposite result. The result is due to the fact that the hedging effectiveness measure is based upon the unconditional variance; meanwhile, the conventional hedge ratio minimizes the unconditional variance and the conditional hedge ratio aims at minimizing the conditional variance.     

项目管理建设模式探索

随着中国改革开放步伐的加快,特别是加入WTO后,一批国外知名企业纷纷踏足中国,以独资或合资的方式兴建大型项目,以期在这个全球最大的市场上有所作为。伴随着这些大型项目的建设,一些国际流行的建设管理模式也被陆续引进到中国。“项目管理模式(PM)”便是其中之一,该模式是指项目业主聘请一家公司(一般为具备相当实力的工程公司或咨询公司)代表业主进行整个项目过程的管理,这家公司在项目中被称做“项目管理承包商”(ProjectManagementCon-tractor),简称为PMC。选用该种模式管理项目时,业主方面仅需保留很小部分的基建管理力量对一些关…     

Technological growth curves : A competition of forecasting models

In order to determine procedures for appropriate model selection of technological growth curves, numerous time series that were representative of growth behavior were collected and categorized according to data characteristics. Nine different growth curve models were each fitted onto the various data sets in an attempt to determine which growth curve models achieved the best forecasts for differing types of growth data. The analysis of the results gives rise to a new approach for selecting appropriate growth curve models for a given set of data, prior to fitting the models, based on the characteristics of the data sets.     

A note on input-output analysis and macroeconometric models

This note presents a theoretical discussion on the introduction of input-output analysis in long-term macro-econometric models. It emphasizes the importance of making the treatment of imports explicit. It is shown that earlier works on macroeconometric models are inconsistent.