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.     

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.     

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。     

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。     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Interconnected games and international environmental problems

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the concept of interconnected games and to show its relevance for modeling international environmental problems. It is argued that an interconnected game approach to international environmental problems may enhance cooperation and provide an alternative to the use of financial side payments to induce countries to cooperate. Two types of interconnected games are distinguished in this paper, i.e. direct sum games and tensor games. In the former all the constituting isolated games are games in strategic form and in the latter they are repeated games. In both cases the interconnected game can be interpreted as a multiple objective game, but only the setting where a trade-off is made for the vector-payoffs is considered. In addition to the formal definition of these types of interconnected games, some elementary results concerning Nash equilibria of such games are derived.Folmer and v. Mouche: Landbouwuniversiteit Wageningen, Postbus 8130, 6700 EW Wageningen, The Netherlands; Ragland: University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, Colorado 80309-0256, U.S.A. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the EAERE conference in Stockholm, June 1991. The authors appreciate comments made by conference participants and journal referees.     

Collective choice functions on non-convex problems

Collective choice problems on sets in _boxclose_boxclose^n{\frak R}_+^n arise naturally in economics. Such problems have been extensively studied both in the theory of revealed preferences (Peters and Wakker, 1991) and in axiomatic bargaining theory under the assumption of convexity. However, our knowledge of collective choice functions on non-convex problems is still patchy. In this paper I study the existence and characterisation of continuous choice functions on the domain G\Gamma of comprehensive problems. The main result completely characterises rational choice functions that are continuous and satisfy Weak Pareto Optimality: they form the class of Monotone Path Choice Functions on G\Gamma. I also show that any discontinuous rational and weakly Pareto optimal choice function must be non- anonymous.     

Disutility and constrained quality choice in self-selection problems

This paper analyzes the self-selection problem in a monopoly market where (i) consumer types are characterized by both utility of service and disutility of interrupted service and (ii) qualities (reliabilities) are interdependent. We derive behavior of a profit-maximizing monopolist in offering self-selection menu of price and reliability and in choosing capacity investment. We further analyze welfare distortions of the monopolistic behavior. The major findings are: (i) depending on the magnitude of utility and disutility, either consumer type may end up with zero surplus, (ii) the possibility of inefficient production may lead to idle capacity, and (iii) depending on the consumer preference structure, the monopolist's investment is lower than, equal to, or higher than the socially optimal level.     

Competition,strategic delegation and delay in technology adoption

This paper examines how strategic managerial delegation affects firms' timing of adoption of a new technology under different modes of product market competition. It demonstrates that strategic delegation has differential impacts on adoption dates under Cournot and Bertrand competitions. Strategic delegation with ‘own-performance’-based incentive schemes always leads to early adoption in markets with Bertrand competition compared to that under no-delegation, but not necessarily so in markets with Cournot competition. It also shows that under strategic delegation with ‘own-performance’-based incentive schemes, adoption occurs earlier (later) in markets with Cournot competition than in markets with Bertrand competition, if the degree of product differentiation is high (low). In contrast, under strategic delegation with ‘relative-performance’-based incentive schemes, adoption dates do not differ across markets with different modes of competition. It also analyses implications of firms' choice over types of managerial incentive schemes on the speed of diffusion of new technology.     

城市化与三农问题及云南的路径选择

我国农业、农村、农民问题,一直是困扰经济发展、阻碍国家现代化实现的主要问题。就现在农村的情况而言,农民也难以富裕起来,更难以和城市居民相比。在农村,仅靠农业来解决农民问题是很难有出路的,因为农民占有的农业生产资料太少,尤其是耕地。在有限的耕地资源条件下,要想让农民富裕起来,减少农民数量是一个行之有效的途径。要从根本上解决我国的三农问题,主要途径在城市化,就是把大部分农民变成城市居民。     

Revealed group preferences on non-convex choice problems

Summary. This paper studies the conditions under which the basic results of the revealed preference theory can be established on the domain of choice problems which include non-convex feasible sets; the exercise is closely related to the works of Peters and Wakker (1991) and Bossert (1994). We show that while no continuous choice function can satisfy strong Pareto optimality over the class of all compact and comprehensive choice problems, strong Pareto optimality, Arrow's choice axiom, upper hemicontinuity and a weak compromisation postulate turn out to be necessary and sufficient to represent choice correspondences by continuous, strictly increasing and quasiconcave real-valued functions. Some applications of our main findings to axiomatic bargaining theory are also studied. Received: December 2, 1996; revised version: February 27, 1998