R&D in a strategic delegation game

This paper studies how a separation of ownership and management affects firms' R&D and production decisions in Cournot quantity competition. It is found that when R&D spillovers are small, owners strategically direct their managers away from profit maximization towards sales. Consequently, managerial firms invest more in R&D and have higher output and lower prices compared to their entrepreneurial counterparts. On the other hand, when spillovers are large, owners ‘penalize’ managers for sales. In this case, managerial firms have lower R&D, lower output and higher prices. Nonetheless, managerial firms have lower profits than their entrepreneurial counterparts regardless of spillovers. This paper also examines the welfare effects of a separation of ownership and management. It is found that in terms of first-best social welfare, managerial firms are more (less) efficient than their entrepreneurial counterparts with low (high) spillovers. However, in terms of second-best social welfare, managerial firms are less efficient with all spillovers. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

R&D spillovers and strategic delegation in oligopolistic contests

Considering oligopolistic contests with R&D spillovers and strategic delegation three results can be obtained: (1) There exist multiple asymmetric equilibria where one owner highly favors sales as a basis for his manager's incentives which drives the other firm out of the market. (2) If R&D spillovers are zero, a managerial firm will have a strong strategic advantage when competing with an entrepreneurial firm. If both owners endogenously decide about delegation, each owner's dominant strategy will be to delegate, given that the manager's reservation value is not too large. (3) If R&D spillovers are maximal, collusive market outcomes become very likely, which makes strategic delegation less important. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Strategic delegation in oligopolistic tournaments

This paper considers a two-stage game with two owners and two managers. At the first stage, the owners choose a linear combination of profits and sales as incentives for their managers. At the second stage, the two managers compete in an oligopolistic tournament against each other. The findings substantially differ from the results for Cournot or Bertrand oligopoly: There exist asymmetric equilibria where one owner puts a positive weight on sales and the other a negative one, although the structure of the game is completely symmetric. If the influence of noise vanishes, the owner of the more aggressive firm will even induce sales maximization to his manager in order to preempt his competitor. Received: 22 April 2004, Accepted: 25 December 2005 JEL Classification: L1, M2 I would like to thank the editor Semih Koray, two anonymous referees, Ulf Schiller, Dirk Sliwka, Gunter Steiner, and the participants of the Microeconomics Seminar of the Humboldt University at Berlin for very helpful comments. Financial support by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), grant KR 2077/2-3 and SFB/TR 15 ("Governance and the Efficiency of Economic Systems"), is gratefully acknowledged.     

R&D in a strategic delegation game revisited: a note

In this note we reconsider the paper of Zhang and Zhang (1997), published in Managerial and Decision Economics, who analyze a strategic delegation model with R&D spillovers in an imperfectly competitive market. We were motivated to study their setup by a puzzling result given in their paper: delegating the production and R&D decisions to managers is never beneficial for the owners of the firm. When we tried to understand the driving forces of this result, we found however that the findings of Zhang and Zhang (1997) are incorrect. We explain why their derivations are wrong and demonstrate via counterexamples that the main propositions in their paper do not hold. In addition, we show how the correct solution of this R&D model with spillovers can be obtained. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A model of strategic delegation in contests between groups

We analyze a contest between two groups where group members have differing valuations for the contested rent. Generically the pivotal group member with the median valuation of the rent will not act himself but will want to send a group member that has preferences different to her own into the contest. The delegation can be either to more or less “radical” group members. The direction of delegation depends on the order of moves and the relative “aggressiveness” of the group medians. We show that almost certainly very asymmetric equilibria arise, even if the median group members value the rent (almost) equally. Delegation can lead to a social improvement in terms of resources spent in the contest. We are indebted to Tobias Boehm, Nicolas Klein, Kai Konrad, Dan Kovenock, Matthias Messner, Johannes Muenster, Ray Rees, Hans Zenger and seminar participants at the 2005 Meeting of the Public Choice Society, the European Public Choice Society, the Royal Economic Society, the WZB Berlin, and the Universities of Guelph and Munich for their comments and suggestions. The editor, Massimo Morelli, and an anonymous referee helped to substantially improve the paper.     

Cooperation with a multiproduct corporation in a strategic managerial delegation

We consider an industry composed of a multiproduct corporation that adopts corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a strategic managerial delegation and examine the profit-incentive to form a cooperative group. We find that competition is an equilibrium for any degree of substitutability and yields the highest CSR, which is increasing in the degree of substitutability. We also show that full cooperation is an equilibrium for lower substitutability but induces no CSR, whereas partial cooperation with one uniplant firm is an equilibrium for higher substitutability but yields lower CSR than that under competition. Therefore, cooperation might reduce strategic CSR activities, whereas competition will encourage higher CSR but yield lower industry profits.     

Delegation and strategic incentives for managers in contests

Owners usually want their managers to maximize profits. As the literature on strategic delegation has shown it may be beneficial to owners to put a positive weight on sales in the optimal linear incentive scheme for managers to make them behave more aggressively in the market. This paper shows that if the competition between the managers can be characterized as a contest, owners may induce their managers to maximize sales. Moreover, there is a first‐mover advantage for owners when choosing their incentive schemes. If delegation is endogenous the type of contest will determine whether all owners delegate their decisions to managers or not. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The new role of material managers in hospital strategic planning

The future direction and challenges of hospital strategic planning require the knowledge and skills of material managers. The approach taken in participating in hospital planning efforts is not as important as the level of involvement. Understanding the strategic planning process at the hospital and knowing what information is critical to that process will improve the ability of the material manager to become an active participant and a valuable contributor to the strategic planning process. Cost management will continue to be the overriding concern of the health care industry in the 1990s. Hospitals will reorganize to control cost and improve productivity, while striving to maintain the quality of care. Material managers must align their departments with hospital strategic goals and assert their new roles in achieving those goals.     

Herding in the strategic allocations of Spanish pension plan managers

This paper empirically examines herding behavior in the strategic style allocations of Spanish pension plan managers. The study uses both the standard metric used in financial literature to capture institutional herding and a new approach to address some shortcomings of this traditional measure. Concretely, some authors have highlighted that the traditional measure does not take into account that the probability that a manager buys rather than sells a certain stock depends on both the initial holding in the stock and the asset flows. As a consequence, this study proposes a new approach, which can be applied to other financial markets and provides more accurate values of the probability to increase (or decrease) the style exposures bearing in mind the previous exposure of each portfolio. The study confirms the existence of herding behavior by using both methods. Although the strength of this behavior decreases using the new approach, the herding levels detected in this study of style herding of Spanish pension plans are higher than those of previous research analyzing portfolio holdings in other countries. Additionally, herding levels are higher in periods of low volatility while market returns does not seem to influence herding levels.     

The strategic interaction between managers and workers in Soviet industrial enterprises: Work-place motivation and economic performance

We construct a model of Soviet industrial enterprises, examining the strategic interaction between managers and workers as technology and workers' pay/performance relations evolve. Before 1965, when both players started sharing a bonus fund, workers received piece wages and selected their effort independently of management. With standardised technology, this regime fostered economic growth, at least until the weakening of the pay/performance nexus in 1965. After 1965, the game changed: anything making one player less motivated engendered a similar action by the other. The economy's vulnerability as technology changed and inflation weakened motivation no doubt contributed to its recent collapse.     

A scheme to involve managers in training

This is a plan to allow managers to develop a priority of training needs and the cost/result relationships of the programs planned to meet such needs.     

Using a competency approach to understand host-country national managers in Asia

This study empirically explored host-country nationals (HCNs) in multinational enterprises (MNEs) using a competency approach. Participants consisted of 500 managers working for a leading Japanese retail MNE, with 100 each from Japan, China, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Thailand. The study highlighted three competency variables for 12 skills of those managers: (1) the level of competency demands, (2) the level of developed competencies and (3) the level of competency improvement needs as assessed by the difference between the levels of developed competencies and the levels of corresponding competency demands. Three conclusions were drawn: First, relationship skills are the most demanded and developed competency of HCN managers in Asia, while their levels tend to vary with Asian countries. Second, goal-setting skills are also very important competency demands but are insufficiently developed by HCN managers. Therefore, HCN managers need to improve their goal-setting skills to a great degree as a top priority. Third, interpersonal and behavioral competency areas of the 12 skills are more important demands for HCN managers than analytical and perceptual competency areas. Based on the empirical evidence obtained from this study, theoretical and practical implications were discussed.     

Corporates' strategic responses to economic policy uncertainty in China

Using a novel news‐based index of economic policy uncertainty, this paper studies the impact of economic policy uncertainty on corporate strategic positioning and corporate risk in China from 2009 to 2015. The study also investigates the impact of corporate strategic positioning on corporate risk. The results show that corporate strategic positioning and economic policy uncertainty have a significant positive impact on corporate risk. The results also explain that economic policy uncertainty increases the market risk of the firms irrespective of their corporate strategy. However, it increases the business risk of prospector firms and decreases the business risk of defensive firms. The study may help the firms to formulate and improve their strategic positioning while considering economic policy uncertainty. Our results are robust to alternate proxies of economic policy uncertainty and corporate risk.     

Private returns to R&D in the presence of spillovers,revisited

This is both a replication of Eberhardt et al. (Review of Economics and Statistics, 2013, 95(2), 436–448) using different software, and a critical extension and diagnostic reassessment of the original results. The main findings of the paper are confirmed and sometimes reinforced. We point out some inconsistencies, in particular in the calculation of standard errors for the common correlated effects pooled model; we extend the diagnostic checks; lastly, in the spirit of the original contribution, we show how local cross‐sectional dependence diagnostics can be used to provide a first assessment of the direction of spillovers. We provide complete replication code in open source R.     

企业如何有效开展研发与标准化同步工作

随着企业对标准化工作的不断重视,研发与标准化同步正成为企业标准化工作的重点。文章在总结实践经验的基础上,从开展研发与标准化同步的意义,开展该项工作的资源保障,主要开展的内容以及开展效果的评价等方面进行了阐述,为企业有效开展研发与标准化同步工作提供了有益的借鉴。     

From issues to checkpoints and back: managing green issues in R&D

The article is based on a qualitative study of how green issues affect the R&D work in two large Swedish manufacturing firms. Both internal (environmental staff, top management) and external (regulators) actors drive the greening processes and our firms seem to be far reaching in their green works. In our discussions, we rely on a dynamic model of organizational change to emphasize that if green issues, in our cases perceived as strategic issues, are to change the firm and its R&D work, there has to be a focus on not only technological (tangible) components, but also on cultural (intangible) aspects. A proactive environmental product development strategy might therefore benefit from widening its focus to the whole organization. In addition to a more holistic approach, a basic argument in the paper is also that if green issues are to survive, they have to be kept evergreen. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

完善我国研发支出的财税政策

随着经济发展,研发创新活动已经成为各国竞争的重要手段之一.科技创新可以优化一个国家的资源配置,提高国家的综合竞争力.各国政府为了研发创新活动的开展,都在积极探索并制定研发创新的财税政策.本文分析了我国目前研发支出财税政策存在的不足之处,如财税政策的受益范围窄且力度小、财税支持方式不合理及法律法规不健全等问题.接着介绍国...     

Attitudes of police managers to different leadership roles in their jobs: An empirical study in Norway

The background for this study is the increased complexity in policing that has become more knowledge‐based and more professional in the past decade. The aim of this article is to present empirical results from a study of attitudes of police managers to different leadership roles in their jobs in two police districts in Norway. A questionnaire was developed and administered among police managers in two police districts in Norway. Participants in leadership programs were selected for this survey research. The Follo police district and Hedmark police district had a total of 130 participants in these programs, with 60 managers from Follo and 70 managers from Hedmark. The research was carried out in March and April 2010. The personnel leader role was found to be most important, followed by the resource allocator role. Responding police managers reported that they felt least competent in the liaison role.     

Differences in RBV strategic factors and the need to consider opposing factors in turnaround outcomes

The resource‐based view‐related empirical literature has focused on one‐industry–one‐focal‐resource studies to provide support for its core tenets. We complement that literature with a first empirical analysis of multiple strategic factors, including opposing factors, and covering multiple industries, based on a recent survey of turnaround professionals. We focus on two issues. First, we explore what factor characteristics correlate to differences in the level of impact on firm performance that different types of factors have. Second, we explore the balance between opposing strategic factors (i.e., beneficial versus detrimental factors) relating to which turnaround outcome occurs. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.