Inter-firm Collaboration and Learning: The Case of the Japanese Automobile Industry

This paper investigates the effect of intra-firm Research and Development expenditure and inter-firm collaboration on firm performance. It is proposed that R&D expenditures enable a company to improve knowledge and assimilate the exchange of information within non-routine collaboration activities. The hypotheses are tested by an empirical study on inter-firm technical collaboration in Japanese Automobile firms during the years 1975–1995, using the method of first-order auto-regression on a panel data set. The findings indicate that R&D expenditure increases performance, but do not allow clear conclusions on the effects of collaborations.     

Strategic action generation: A comparison of emphasis placed on generic competitive methods by U.S. And Japanese managers

The paper identifies similarities and differences in the emphases and patterns that U.S. and Japanese managers attribute to a set of 22 generic competitive methods. It highlights the different ways that Japanese and American managers combine these methods to form general business strategies. Using factor analyses and smallest space analyses, the study shows differences in business strategy patterns between managers in Japan and the U.S. Such differences reflect the organizing principles underlying the strategy approaches in U.S. and Japanese firms. The organizing principle underlying U.S. responses is the desire to find way to differentiate a firm from its competitors. In contrast, the organizing principle underlying Japanese responses is a desire to establish a comprehensive, stable and defensible position. The paper discusses the implications of these results for strategic management and suggests directions for future U.S. and Japanese comparative strategy research.     

柏克德（Bechtel）——安全管理与知识管理造就全美行业翘楚

介绍了全球著名的美国第一大建筑承包商——柏克德（Bechtel）公司的总体情况,分析了该公司的国际和国内市场的经营业绩、业务范围、主营业务。重点从安全管理、知识管理两大核心竞争力剖析了柏克德公司实现可持续发展的源动力。通过比较研究,总结了柏克德公司对我国建筑企业的借鉴意义,并为我国建筑企业学习柏克德公司的先进经验提出了具体举措。     

Trends in Japanese Management: An Overview of Embedded Continuities and Disembedded Discontinuities

In this paper we consider the accounts of post-war Japan's economic development in terms of a consideration of the argument from embeddedness. We note the dangers implicit in approaches that tend to proffer over-socialized accounts of action and stress the importance of institutionally and organizationally specific levels of analysis. We establish the significance of the immediate post-war period for analysis of Japanese organizations, and look at the continuities and discontinuities in their development up to the present. The paper analyses continuities in terms of the maintenance of a long-term orientation and global vision and that organizations remain both competitive and cooperative. The discontinuities have emerged in the last decade, since the economic ills of Japan became evident. These include a shift from a growth emphasis to the balancing of multiple goals; the emergence of new forms of competitive strategy, in the form of: alliances and cooperation; changing conceptions of careers; relaxation of the centralisation of authority; a shift from lifetime employment to employability; larger differentiation of wages and promotion opportunities in the status ladder system, and the increased scope for initiative and consensus. We conclude with some implications of the analysis for future research.     

Performance implications of delayed competitive responses: evidence from the U.S. retail industry

The timing of competitive actions and responses is a key management concern that has important performance consequences. This study focuses on the timing and consequences of competitive responses. Theory predicts a negative linear relationship between response delay and responder performance mirrored by an opposing positive linear relationship between response delay and first mover performance. In contrast, our study suggests that response delay has a curvilinear relationship with responder performance, and a linear relationship with first mover performance. We test our propositions using retail industry data and discuss the implications. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The U.S. Motion Pictures Industry: An Empirical Approach

We hypothesize that the U.S. motion pictures industry is structured so that star presence increases box office receipts and (less so) admissions, but places Ricardian limits on the output of blockbusters. The few dominant studios (majors) rely on a modified star system to generate supra-normal box office by stimulating admissions at exhibitors. Rising costs (from stars and their promotion) are required for rising revenues; that is, the majors gain revenue only at higher costs. Although the industry has unique features, the empirical results are surprisingly relevant to other industries.     

美国墨西哥湾溢油事故应急响应、治理措施及其启示

2010年4月20日,美国墨西哥湾深水地平线号钻井平台发生爆炸导致溢油事故。事故发生后,美国启动了国家、区域和地方的各级应急指挥系统,统一协调各部门进行海上溢油的堵漏、治理与回收。由于各级政府和部门联合行动,协调配合,物资储备充足,布局合理,治理措施得当,大大减少了对环境的伤害。美国的海上溢油应急响应体系是依托1990年美国《石油污染法案》和1994年《溢油应急计划》建立的包括地方、区域和国家整体的应急指挥系统。美国的溢油应急指挥体系涉及16个政府部门,可随时按照国家应急计划和授权协调开展工作。对比中关两国海上溢油应急响应体系,中国的国家海上溢油应急指挥体系还不完善,建议加强溢油应急响应立法工作,明确职责与法律关系;建立国家溢油应急指挥体系,切实加强各部门之间的协作;完善中国石油企业的应急响应机制,应对未来可能发生的溢油事故。     

The value of knowledge spillovers in the U.S. semiconductor industry

This paper aims at quantifying the economic value of knowledge spillovers by exploring information contained in patent citations. We estimate a market valuation equation of the U.S. semiconductor firms during the 1980s and 1990s, and find an average value of $0.6 to 1.2 million “R&D-equivalent” dollars for knowledge spillovers embodied in one patent citation. For an average semiconductor firm, such an estimate implies that the total value of knowledge spillovers the firm received during the sample period can be as high as half of its actual total R&D expenditures in the same period. This provides a direct measure of the economic value of social returns or externalities of relevant technological innovations. We also find that the value of knowledge spillovers declines as the size of firm's patent portfolio increases, and that self citations are more valuable than external citations, indicating a significant amount of tacit knowledge or know-how spillovers that occur within the firm.     

The Welfare Effect of Advertising Restrictions in the U.S. Cigarette Industry

The welfare effect of advertisingrestrictions in the U.S. cigarette industry dependsupon the impact of advertising on consumer and producer surplus, the transfer to consumers for being exposed to utility-reducing advertising, and smoking externalities. We estimate a demand equation and a supply relation simultaneously and use the parameter estimates to generate predictions of the impact of advertising restrictions on social welfare. Our results show that advertising restrictions benefit producers by limiting competition and generating higher industry profits, and such restrictions lower social welfare if the external cost of cigarette smoking is sufficiently low.     

Supply chain management: A multidisciplinary content analysis of vertical relations between companies, 1997-2006

The aim of this work is to contribute to a better understanding of the research conducted on supply chain management (SCM) at a multidisciplinary level. To this end, a content analysis was performed of the most significant scientific literature about marketing, logistics, management and marketing channels published over the period 1997-2006. As a result, a database of 414 papers from 14 journals was created. Analysis of these works reveals the level of development of the main lines of research into SCM and makes it possible to detect the topics that require greater attention and which may be the object of future studies conducted by researchers and academics. It also allows managerial staff to identify the methodologies and tools that can be used to improve the management of relationships within the supply chain. One of the main conclusions reached in the study is the shortage of studies conducted on the supply chain as a network of enterprises, since most research focuses on a single enterprise or, at the most, on its relationships with its suppliers or direct customers.     

An Analysis of the Out-of-Market Gap for DVDs in the U.S.

We examine the out-of-market gap – the time between the end of a film’s theatrical run and its release on DVD – for a sample of U.S. films during 1988-2005. The average gap declined from 58.14 days in 1998 to 27.93 days in 2005; by 2005, 39% of the films were released on DVD prior to leaving the theaters. Probit and hazard models are estimated to explore the factors that influence a distributor’s decision to release a film on DVD before it exits the theaters, and the timing of the release for films that appear on DVD after they leave the theaters.      

A theory of global strategic alliances: The case of the global auto industry

The theory articulated in this paper suggests that the desire to reduce demand and competitive uncertainty are two separate, important motives for alliance formation. Taking this as a starting point, we predict the configuration of horizontal alliances that we might expect to observe within an industry when firms experience these uncertainties to different degrees. An empirical test of this theory using data from the global auto industry yields results consistent with the view (1) that alliances are a device for reducing both the uncertainties that arise from unpredictable demand conditions and those that arise from competitive interdependence, and (2) that variation of demand uncertainty and competitive uncertainty across firms explains differentials in both the intensity and structure of their horizontal alliance activity.     

Supply chain management in the luxury industry: A first classification of companies and their strategies

This paper aims at analysing the supply management strategies in the luxury industry in order to find out (1) whether different clusters of companies could be identified within the luxury industry, on the base of a set of contingent variables derived from previous research, and (2) which supply chain strategy is currently applied within each cluster. Case study methodology is used. A sample of 15 Italian luxury companies, belonging to different industrial sectors, was taken into account.On the basis of five classification variables (company size, selling volume, product complexity, product fashionableness and brand reputation) four clusters are identified; these clusters present differences in terms of Supply Chain strategy, as well as in terms of practices for managing manufacturing, sourcing and distribution processes.     

The Effects of Taxes and Advertising Restrictions on the Market Structure of the U.S. Cigarette Market

A dynamic oligopoly model of the cigarette industry is developed to study the effects of anti-smoking policies on the market structure of the U.S. cigarette industry. Firms are modeled as competing in price and advertising in a dynamic game. Two commonly used anti-smoking policies – advertising restrictions and tobacco tax increases – are evaluated using calibrated parameters. The simulation results show that in the long run both advertising restrictions and tax increases can successfully reduce the smoking rate. However, advertising restrictions reduce the smoking rate mainly in an indirect way through their impact on the concentration of the market, while tax increases reduce the smoking rate directly and have little effect on the concentration of the market. In addition, in the short run, advertising restrictions have a much smaller effect on reducing the smoking rate than tax increases.     

我国向欧美扩大出口纺织品的应对之策

欧美是世界上最大的纺织品及服装进口国和地区，同时也是我国的纺织品出口的主要市场。长期以来，我国纺织服装出口受其配额的限制，通过长期艰苦的谈判，我国已正式成为世界贸易组织成员。作为目前世界上最大的纺织品服装出口国，一旦取消配额，会不会像人们预期的那样我国纺织品服装在欧美市场的份额大幅提升，甚至翻番？笔者认为，中国的纺织品出口将面临新的发展机遇与挑战，挑战大于机遇。鉴于机遇已有大量文章论述，本文将就我国纺织品出口将遇到的挑战作一专门的论述，以期抛砖引玉。 1.《纺织品服装协议》(以下简称ATC)执行不…     

Inward Investment and Host Country Market Structure: The Case of the U.K.

Multinational enterprises are seen as vehicles for theinternational transfer of investment capital,protecting and increasing profits by transferringownership advantages across national boundaries. Assuch, the argument often follows that foreign directinvestment then exacerbates the monopoly problem inhost countries, by increasing concentration andfacilitating collusion. This paper however reveals thereverse, that inward investment into the U.K. acts toreduce concentration at the industry level, byincreasing competitive pressures on domesticindustry.     

U.S. national security export controls: Implications for global competitiveness of U.S. high-tech firms

U.S. exporters of high-technology, ‘dual-use’ products are competitively disadvantaged in global markets by the complexity, range, and stringency of U.S. national security export controls. This paper demonstrates that fungibility of high technology and lax interpretation of multilateral export control agreements by other advanced countries have made the existing control regime ineffective. It further shows that persistent U.S. restrictiveness of exports in non-critical, widely available goods and technologies may needlessly and permanently erode U.S. firms' competitive position in existing as well as rapidly-opening markets worldwide. The need to revise the notion of national security to include not only military security, but also its complement, economic security, is discussed. The pivotal issue of enforceability of multilateral controls is explored, and corporate strategies for U.S. high-tech firms to achieve export control policy change are suggested.