Climate change—environmental and technology policies in a strategic context

There are a number of features of climate change which make it one of the most challenging problems confronting policy makers and policy analysts. In this paper we consider three such features: (i) climate change is a global pollutant so there are strategic interactions between governments over climate policy; (ii) cutting greenhouse gas emissions can have significant cost effects across a number of sectors of the economy, raising concerns about the implications of climate change policy on competitive advantage; (iii) the long-time scales on which climate change operates means that an important dimension of climate change policy is policy towards R&D to cut the costs of dealing with climate change. In Ulph and Ulph (1996) [Ulph A, Ulph D (1996) In: Carraro C, Katsoulacos Y, Xepapadeas A (eds) Environmental policy and market structure. Kluwer, Dordrecht, pp 181–208] we presented a model to analyse these issues, but considered only environmental policies. In this paper we extend that analysis to allow for both a richer set of policy instruments (environmental and technology policies) and a richer strategic context.     

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.     

Partial cross-ownership and strategic environmental policy

This paper analyzes the effect of passive investment in rival firms on the setting of cooperative and non-cooperative environmental taxes. We consider two firms located in different countries, with each firm owning the same percentage of the stock of its rival. We show that bilateral partial cross-ownership affects the taxes set by the countries in the cooperative and non-cooperative cases. When the stake that one firm has in its rival is great enough and environmental spillovers are low enough, cooperative taxes are lower than non-cooperative taxes. For the remaining values of parameters the opposite result is obtained.     

Socially responsible firms and endogenous choice of strategic incentives

In this paper we are analyzing a mixed quantity-setting duopoly consisting of a socially concerned firm and a profit-maximizing firm. The socially concerned firm considers one group of stakeholders in its objective function and maximizes its profit plus a share of consumer surplus. Both firms have the option to hire a manager who determines the production quantity on behalf of the firm's owner. We find that in the subgame-perfect equilibrium of this game both firms hire a manager and delegate the production choice. If the unit production costs of the firms are similar, then the socially concerned firm has a higher market share and even higher profit. Interestingly, we observe that the relationship between the share of consumer surplus taken into account by the socially concerned firm and its profit is non-monotonic. As the share increases, the socially concerned firm's profit first increases and then decreases. The conclusion is that it pays off to take stakeholder interests into account, but not too much.     

The range of strategic choice in Tanzanian industry

This paper reports the results of a strategic planning exercise carried out in Tanzania and shows that under actual planning conditions there can be a wide range of potential outcomes for decision-makers to consider. With a given output mix and the same level of investment over twenty years, employment creation could be 35 percent higher than the most capital-intensive alternatives would allow and incremental value added could be 5 percent higher. If different output mixes are introduced and a basic, heavy-industry strategy compared with one based strictly on economic efficiency, the most labor-intensive outcome would create 70 percent more jobs than the most capital intensive and produce 12 percent more incremental value added. A basic industry strategy can substantially reduce reliance on international trade, lowering the share of industrial value added due to trade-dependent industries from 47 percent to 11 percent, but may be more difficult to implement.     

中小医药企业面临的困境及营销战略选择

中小医药企业在当前面临着严峻的市场竞争环境,而且普遍面对着各种各样的困境,如何成功突围就成了这些企业需要认真思考的问题。从营销的角度出发,中小医药企业应该重新思考自己的营销体系。要从优化产品线开始,然后构建高效的营销网络,同时进行深层次的战略思考,这样才能成功突围。     

Theoretical perspectives on strategic environmental management

Strategic Environmental Management (SEM) incorporates into firms' core strategies the transformation of products and processes that they believe an environmentally concerned society will increasingly demand. Significant threads have to do with the discovery of cost savings and market opportunities from reducing environmental impacts. SEM, like the environmental regulation hypothesis associated with Michael Porter, implies that society's efforts to reduce external environmental costs often lead to identification of hitherto-ignored or undeveloped profit possibilities. This would be surprising from the standpoint of neoclassical economic theory, to the extent that SEM utilizes available information about the potential costs and benefits of projects. Within the framework of evolutionary, capabilities-based theories of the firm, however, this discovery and its exploitation in SEM make perfect sense. Capabilities theory would imply that firms' intrinsic path dependence may previously have obscured such opportunities. This paper examines the theory of SEM, its implications for neoclassical and capabilities theories of the firm, and survey results drawn from the author's work with member companies in a regional pollution prevention roundtable. RID="*" IDI have enjoyed the able and insightful research assistance of Justin Vernon. Cooperation from the companies that participated in the survey, and financial support from Allegheny College and its Center for Economic and Environmental Development, are gratefully acknowledged. Reviewers for this journal provided numerous, valuable suggestions. Responsibility for the material herein remains mine alone.     

我国企业对外直接投资的战略选择

市场全球化使得企业必须重视国内和国外市场上的竞争，特剐是直接投资打入发达国家技术发明中心，跟踪国际新技术发展动态，利用比较优势向发展中国家提供适用性技术，将我国的经济发展置于更广阔的空间，是我国企业在开放经济条件下和剧烈的国际竞争中经营发展的必要选择。对外直接投资、从事跨国经营活动是一个国家加入WTO后经济发展的必然趋势和选择，是适应经济全球化发展的必然要求。本文简略地分析了我国对外直接投资发展的现状，着重探讨了我国企业对外直接投资的战略选择问题。     

我国企业对外直接投资的战略选择

市场全球化使得企业必须重视国内和国外市场上的竞争,特别是直接投资打入发达国家技术发明中心,跟踪国际新技术发展动态,利用比较优势向发展中国家提供适用性技术,将我国的经济发展置于更广阔的空间,是我国企业在开放经济条件下和剧烈的国际竞争中经营发展的必要选择.对外直接投资、从事跨国经营活动是一个国家加入WTO后经济发展的必然趋势和选择,是适应经济全球化发展的必然要求.本文简略地分析了我国对外直接投资发展的现状,着重探讨了我国企业对外直接投资的战略选择问题.     

Learning in strategic technology alliances

In this paper we examine the influence of strategic technology alliances on organisational learning. From an empirical perspective we examine the pre- and post-alliance knowledge bases of allying firms. We find that the pre-alliance knowledge base overlap of the allying firms has an inverted U-shaped relationship with the degree of learning taking place in the alliance. Alliances established for the purpose of learning also show a significantly greater increase in knowledge base overlap for the allying firms than for non-learning alliance or non-allying firms. This shows the particular importance of learning alliances as a vehicle for organisational learning and competence development. Contrary to what we expected we found that weak ties are more important than strong ties in organisational learning within strategic alliances.     

Learning in strategic technology alliances

In this paper we examine the influence of strategic technology alliances on organisational learning. From an empirical perspective we examine the pre- and post-alliance knowledge bases of allying firms. We find that the pre-alliance knowledge base overlap of the allying firms has an inverted U-shaped relationship with the degree of learning taking place in the alliance. Alliances established for the purpose of learning also show a significantly greater increase in knowledge base overlap for the allying firms than for non-learning alliance or non-allying firms. This shows the particular importance of learning alliances as a vehicle for organisational learning and competence development. Contrary to what we expected we found that weak ties are more important than strong ties in organisational learning within strategic alliances.     

Host country's strategic policies and multinational firm's choice of entry mode

This paper examines the effects of contract enforceability and market structure on a firm's choice between licensing and foreign direct investment. Clearly, the firm's choice impacts upon social welfare in the host country. Therefore, the government of the host country is likely to set contract enforceability for inducing the multinational firm (MNF) to choose a desirable mode of entry. The paper takes into account two different cases. In the first case, the host country does not have an incumbent that can compete with the MNF, and in the second case, it has one incumbent that can compete. The paper shows that the government's choice of contract enforceability is crucially dependent upon the domestic market structure and the domestic capacity to absorb the advanced technology of the MNF.     

Location choice under trade and environmental policies

In this paper, we use a game theoretic model to analyze the trade-off between the attractiveness of FDI and the environmental damage caused by production under asymmetric information. In the first stage, the domestic developing country reveals the level of import tariff and pollution tax under information uncertainty about the environmental damage that the foreign firm can cause. The foreign firm from a developed country decides where to locate afterwards with complete information about its own damage. Results show that the developing country can be better off encouraging FDI if and only if the marginal damage of pollution is sufficiently low. The optimal level of pollution taxes attracting FDI is higher than the marginal damage of pollution. However, the optimal pollution tax without FDI can be lower than the marginal damage of pollution with sufficiently high demand in the developing country.     

中国银行保险模式创新与转型的战略选择

构建银行和保险的战略组合,充分发挥二者的有机配置的整体效应,实现二者的"双赢",是实施银保合作的目标。根据中国的国情,在银行保险的四种经营模式中,合资企业和金融集团是较为高级的、涉及资本融合的两种模式,也是银行保险较为发达的国家通常采用的模式。     

新形势下广东服务贸易的战略选择分析

当今世界服务贸易快速发展,全球经济竞争的重点正从货物贸易转向服务贸易.扩大服务贸易,改善服务贸易结构,应是提高广东参与国际分工和竞争能力的新举措.<广东省国民经济和社会发展十一五规划纲要>明确提出要全面推动服务贸易发展,着力承接国际服务业转移,扩大服务贸易出口.笔者就新形势下发展广东服务贸易的战略选择展开分析.     

Global stability and the choice of policy targets under rational expectations

It is shown that if the supply of capital is properly incorporated in a macromodel with rational expectations, the government cannot peg its expenditures wholly in real terms since, otherwise, the economy will be globally unstable.     

Plant location and strategic environmental policy with inter-sectoral linkages

In recent debates on trade liberalisation the concern has often been expressed that with more competitive international trade governments will be worried that by setting tougher environmental policies than their trading rivals they will put domestic producers at a competitive disadvantage, and in the extreme case this could lead to firms relocating production in other countries. The response by governments to such concerns will be to weaken environmental policies (‘eco-dumping’). In competitive markets such concerns are ill founded, but there is a small amount of literature which has analysed whether governments will indeed have incentives for eco-dumping in the more relevant case of markets where there are significant scale economies; even here there is no presumption that the outcome will involve eco-dumping.In this paper we extend the analysis of strategic environmental policy and plant location decisions by analysing the location decision of firms in different sectors which are linked through an input-output structure of intermediate production. The reason why we introduce inter-sectoral linkages between firms is that they introduce an additional factor, relative to those already analysed in the literature, in the plant location decision, which is the incentive for firms in different sectors to agglomerate in a single location. This has a number of important effects. First, there is now the possibility of multiple equilibria in location decisions of firms. Following from this there is the possibility of catastrophic effects where a small increase in an environmental tax can trigger the collapse of an industrial base in a country; however there is also the possibility that a country which raises its environmental tax could attract more firms to locate in that country, because of the way the tax affects incentives for agglomeration. Finally, and again related to the previous effects, there is the possibility of a hysteresis effect where raising an environmental tax in one country can cause firms to relocate to another country, but subsequently lowering that tax will not induce firms to relocate back into the original country.We consider a simple model with two countries, two industries, an upstream and a downstream sector, and two firms per industry. The analysis proceeds through a three-stage game: in the first stage the governments of the two countries set their environmental policies; in the second stage the firms in both industries choose how many plants to locate and where; in the third stage firms choose their output levels, with the demand for the upstream firms being determined endogenously by the production decisions of the downstream firms. We assume that there are no limits to production capacity, so that firms do not build more than one plant in any country. However, firms may build plants in different countries because of positive transport costs. Although the model appears very simple, it cannot be solved analytically, so all the conclusions must be drawn from numerical simulations.     

On the strategic potential of technological aid in international environmental relations

Prior to noncooperative choices of abatement of a transboundary pollutant, a technologically advanced country considers making an unconditional transfer of abatement technology to its less-advanced rival. Even though technological aid is given unconditionally and abatement strategies are chosen noncooperatively, in a number of plausible circumstances, a transfer of a superior control technology will induce Pareto-superior pollution abatement.     

Auction choice for ambiguity-averse sellers facing strategic uncertainty: Comment

This note demonstrates epsilon equilibria in the first-price auction that achieve lower worst-case expected revenues than the lower bound proposed by Turocy (2008) (Auction choice for ambiguity-averse sellers facing strategic uncertainty, Games Econ. Behav. 62 (2008) 155–179). Additionally, it stresses the importance of a careful specification of the action space to properly characterize expected revenues when bidders systematically deviate from equilibrium play.