不确定环境下的企业战略设计模式

本文通过对传统企业战略设计模式的再思考 ,并从企业战略设计的实际情况出发提出 :当企业面对不确定环境时 ,战略思维方式应该从线性向非线性转变 ,从而提高企业战略在不确定环境下的“预见”力和应变能力。本文建立了一个基于战略转换的战略形成、实施同步并行的企业战略设计模式 ,来达到在复杂、不确定的环境中获取持续竞争优势的目的。     

Dynamics of social factors in technological substitutions

Diffusion models of technological innovations are often based on an epidemic structure which has a good fit to historical data but whose communication assumptions lack explanatory power. They assume a simplified decision process, uniform decision criteria across adopters categories, and a fully interconnected social structure. The objective of this paper is to show that the dynamics of social factors during technological substitutions have significant effects on substitution patterns. The success of a paradigmatic shift is not only a function of technological characteristics but also depends on change agents and many social dynamics. Such complexity requires analysis at several levels of granularity. We start with cognitive processes at the individual level using concepts from cognitive psychology and decision making under uncertainty and then move to interpersonal communications at the aggregate social level. We show that population heterogeneity generates different decision criteria and a social topology which greatly affect perceptions and the formation of expectations. The structure of interpersonal networks also explains how the relevance and credibility of information impact the critical mass dynamics of technology adoption. A more complete model accounting for social interactions provides a useful framework for understanding complex substitution patterns and reducing the risk of misreading the market.     

Modeling System Complexity in the Context of Geopolitics Related to Climate Change

Due mainly to the evolution of science and technology, ontic systems have continuously become more complex. Thus, original institutional economics has adopted and advanced the concepts of complex systems. This article further develops complexity concepts and relates them to problems of climate change. Systems complexity is combined with concepts from geopolitics in order to introduce geopolitical analysis about boundaries/borders into complex systems. The addition of geopolitical ideas allows for systems to focus on a designated social and ecological context that fits the problem of interest. The social and ecological components of open geopolitical systems lead to processes that are dynamic and complex. Thus, complex-systems modeling needs the assistance of geopolitical concepts and geopolitical models need to be embedded in complex systems. Each section of the article clarifies its meaning with examples of climate change concerns.     

Institutions, social norms, and decision-theoretic norms

This article attempts to contribute to the debate on how to define and theorize institutions, particularly regarding normativity and explanations for conformity. Firstly, it proposes some distinctions and concepts: it separates moral from epistemic values, leading to different types of legitimacy and social norms; then it distinguishes different meanings of the term ‘normative’ and introduces the concept of decision-theoretic norm. Secondly, the article defends a broad concept of institutions by arguing that some institutions are neither social norms nor decision-theoretic ones, a point that matters for institutional change and stability. Some conventions from which innovators break are highlighted as an example.     

The Place of Uncertainty in Heterodox Economics Journals: A Bibliometric Study

Uncertainty is a common theme in heterodox economics. This article investigates how heterodox journals have been dealing with the concept of uncertainty. It relies on a bibliometric analysis to identify the concept of uncertainty in top heterodox journals and the genealogy of different heterodox meanings of uncertainty among those journals.     

双重不确定性下的流动劳动力储蓄行为--对“中国储蓄之谜”的另一种解读

基于2012年广东省调查数据,从收入不确定性和支出不确定性两个方面研究预防性储蓄对流动劳动力储蓄行为的影响,发现：（1）流动劳动力储蓄行为与收入水平显著相关,高储蓄率是通过“节衣缩食”、维持基本生存消费来实现;（2）流动劳动力储蓄行为与收入不确定性相关,技能程度、签订劳动合同、劳动合同期限年限对流动劳动力储蓄率有显著影响;（3）流动劳动力储蓄行为与支出不确定性相关,在流入地购买社保、户口性质等对流动劳动力储蓄率有显著影响。研究结果拓展了“中国储蓄之谜”的研究领域,为加快实现流动人口城镇化、推动流动劳动力市民化融入提供了初步的经验证据。     

The economic implications of exaptation

Accounts of economic change recognize that markets create selective pressures for the adaptation of technologies in the direction of customer needs and production efficiencies. However, non-adaptational bases for technological change are rarely highlighted, despite their pervasiveness in the history of technical and economic change. In this paper the concept of exaptation -a feature co-opted for its present role from some other origin - is proposed as a characteristic element of technological change, and an important mechanism by which new markets for products and services are created by entrepreneurs. Exaptation is a missing but central concept linking the evolution of technology with the entrepreneurial creation of new markets and the concept of Knightian uncertainty.JEL Classification: O3, M13, D8, D52Correspondence to: Nicholas DewThe authors would like to acknowledge the financial support of the Batten Institute of the Darden School of Business Administration, University of Virginia, for carrying out this research. We also wish to thank Rama Velamuri and an anonymous referee for their comments, which significantly improved this paper. All remaining faults are the sole responsibility of the authors.     

Measuring Change of Capitalist Varieties: Reflections on Method,Illustrations from the BRICs

How to indicate institutional diversity and gradual change in capitalist political economies? What is the appropriate typological method, how could a suitable typology look? In the Weberian tradition, this article pleads for a method that rigorously distinguishes ideal types from empirical cases. Ideal types (like liberal capitalism) idealise reality by emphasising certain aspects, cases (like Brazilian capitalism) are hybrids more or less approximating the types. Contrasting static classifications that do not allow for gradual change, the latter has to be understood as the movement of cases in the field between the types. Using the state–economy and capital–labour relationships as criteria the article proposes a typology consisting of liberal, statist, corporatist, meso-communitarian and patrimonial types. Liberalism, statism and particularly patrimonialism are relevant for emerging economies. In the second half, the article illustrates its methodological recommendation by indicatively mapping institutional change from 1998 to 2008 in political economies that recently gained importance: the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, China), Turkey and a few Eastern European ones. It turns out that most of them liberalised but that this change was rather modest in the BRICs, while it was more significant in Eastern Europe. Yet statism and patrimonialism appear still to be strong.     

Future memories

Although the concept of foresight is now widely used by Anglo-American writers, the Romance-language countries have continued to refer to the concept of la prospective or prospectiva since the early 1960s. Despite cultural differences, the two concepts are very similar. Nevertheless, the author argues that prospective is closer to strategic foresight. The prospective attitude does not wait for change and then react; it aims to master expected change (preactivity) and to induce a desired change (proactivity). Preactivity is what guides all approaches to future studies, forecasting, scenario planning and foresight. Proactivity is more voluntarist, and aims to bring about the desired changes by means of strategic planning. This leads to a hopeful message: We just have to rethink the problems to move forward. The author highlights the enduring relevance of several key thinkers ranging from Saint Augustine and Seneca to Gaston Berger and Igor Ansoff. He emphasizes the importance of a collectivity's thinking together about the future and taking action. Overall the article pleads for rigor yet some common sense explains the utility of participatory foresight with simple tools (morphological analysis, prospective workshops). In conclusion, this article emphasizes two symmetrical errors: ignore the existence of a hammer when in front of a nail or consider every problem a nail because you have a hammer!     

The Limits of Organizational Change

The paper builds on the Marxist concept of exploitation to explore the meaning of the Post Keynesian notion of uncertainty. Uncertainty is mediated by institutions and is distributed unevenly among different social groups. As different historical social formations entail different institutional structures, the distribution and nature of uncertainty will also differ. The social configurations between class relations and uncertainty are analyzed for the capitalist, feudal and slave modes of production. It is demonstrated that modes of production do not only imply specific exploitative relations but also different relative distributions of uncertainty amongst classes. The joining of Marxian and Post Keynesian approaches allows for a richer understanding of exploitive relations and illuminates the full societal impact of uncertainty. It is shown that only in capitalism is the exploited class exposed to a substantial degree of economic uncertainty.     

‘Expected utility / subjective probability’ analysis without the sure-thing principle or probabilistic sophistication

Summary. The basic analytical concepts, tools and results of the classical expected utility/subjective probability model of risk preferences and beliefs under subjective uncertainty can be extended to general event-smooth preferences over subjective acts that do not necessarily satisfy either of the key behavioral assumptions of the classical model, namely the Sure-Thing Principle or the Hypothesis of Probabilistic Sophistication. This is accomplished by a technique analogous to that used by Machina (1982) and others to generalize expected utility analysis under objective uncertainty, combined with an event-theoretic approach to the classical model and the use of a special class of subjective events, acts and mixtures that exhibit almost-objective like properties. The classical expected utility/subjective probability characterizations of outcome monotonicity, outcome derivatives, probabilistic sophistication, comparative and relative subjective likelihood, and comparative risk aversion are all globally robustified to general event-smooth preferences over subjective acts.Received: 4 May 2004, Revised: 4 October 2004, JEL Classification Numbers: D81.This paper presents a considerably improved version of the concept of event-differentiability from Machina (1992). An alternative definition has been independently developed by Epstein (1999) in his analysis of the concept of uncertainty aversion. I am grateful to Kenneth Arrow, Mark Durst, Jürgen Eichberger, Daniel Ellsberg, Clive Granger, Simon Grant, Edi Karni, Peter Klibanoff, David Kreps, Duncan Luce, Robert Nau, Uzi Segal, Peter Wakker, Joel Watson and especially Larry Epstein, Ted Groves and Joel Sobel for helpful discussions and comments. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants No. 9209012 and 9870894.     

Uncertainty: individuals, institutions and technology

In an attempt to refine the concept of uncertainty, this paperelaborates an ontology of the social world concentrating onindividuals, institutions and technology. It shows the strongentwinement of the ontological aspects of the conceptualisationof uncertainty and epistemological ones. It highlights the ontologicaland epistemological dimensions of different concepts of uncertainty,such as fundamental uncertainty, procedural uncertainty, ambiguityand weak uncertainty (or risk). It also comments on a few writingsthat distinguish varieties of uncertainty with adjectives suchas ‘ontological’ and ‘epistemological’or ‘epistemic’.     

Social Security Reform with Heterogeneous Agents

This paper analyzes the quantitative role of idiosyncratic uncertainty in an economy in which rational agents vote on hypothetical social security reforms. We find that the role of a pay-as-you-go social security system as a partial insurance and redistribution device significantly reduces political support for a transition to an economy with a fully funded system. We conclude that the status quo bias in favor of an unfunded social security system is stronger in economies in which agents of similar age differ significantly with respect to labor earnings and wealth because of idiosyncratic income uncertainty. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: H55, E62, H3     

The typology of technology clusters and its evolution — Evidence from the hi-tech industries

Clustering is one of the key drivers for regional economic growth. Development of clusters is a dynamic process shaped by a variety of internal and external factors such as availability of skilled labor, presence of functioning networks and partnerships, technological changes, and market competition, etc. As a result, the patterns of cluster growth may differ from one another. Although each cluster is unique in some way, previous research has attempted to identify few simplified models of evolution of clusters. In this study, we briefly reviewed the literature on a variety of models of clusters. Based on these models, we investigated 15 hi-performing metropolitan-based clusters in the United States, covering communications equipment manufacturing, information technology, and biopharmaceutical industries, in order to find out the similarities and differences between real-world clusters. Specifically, by examining the composition of these high-tech clusters, we attempted to find out the following: 1) What are the typologies of these technology clusters? 2) Whether different industries tend to support different cluster typologies? and 3) How do clusters change their typologies over time? Our analysis results suggest that the real-world clusters rarely feature any single type of typology; a mixed type of typology is much more prevalent in reality.We also found that different industries tend to support different types of cluster typologies. In other words, an individual cluster's typology is to some extent shaped by the industry group it belongs to. In addition, we note that, as a cluster goes through different stages of its lifecycle, its typology may change significantly.     

从过度投资到产能过剩:理论与经验证据

过度投资与产能过剩是长期困扰中国经济发展的严峻问题,然而现有研究往往笼统地将二者视为一体。实际中,过度投资与产能过剩分别指向企业投资生产过程中的不同决策阶段,前者与需先行做出的长期投资决策有关,而后者则是后发的即期生产决策的结果。通过引入一个包含投资和生产两阶段的动态实物期权模型,尝试性地刻画从过度投资到产能过剩的形成机制,以及经济与政策这两种异质不确定性对这一形成机制的影响,进一步基于2003-2018年中国企业的微观数据进行了实证检验。理论与实证结果表明:(1)尽管产能过剩总是源自前期投资的过度扩张,但并不是所有的过度投资最终都会导致产能过剩;(2)不确定性是导致过度投资与产能过剩的重要因素,但过度投资更多地源于政策不确定性,而产能过剩则主要源于经济不确定性;(3)不确定性对产能过剩的影响要强于对过度投资的影响。因此,对过度投资的治理应以政策不确定性为主,保持政策调节的稳定性和连续性;对产能过剩的治理则应以经济不确定性为主,维护市场运行体系的稳定性。     

Conventionalism,coordination, and mental models: from Poincaré to Simon

This article focuses on the conventions that sustain social interaction and argues that they are central to Simon's decision-making theory. Simon clearly identifies two kinds of coordination by convention: behavioral mores that shape human actions, and shared mental models that govern human perceptions. This article argues that Poincaré–Carnap's conventionalism provides powerful support for Simon's theory; it contends that this theory offers a more convincing account of decision and coordination than Lewis' concept of convention. Simon's approach to applying conventionalist logic to social interaction emphasizes the normative role played by mental models in solving coordination problems and considers rationality in terms of both cognitive and moral considerations. By connecting conventional phenomena to social identifications, Simon stresses the resulting complexity of coordination problems     

Measuring emerging categories of innovation: Modularity and business model

The oft-cited dichotomy between incremental and radical innovations is less important when we have to analyze how a new technology and its social institution coevolve. In this context, besides incremental and radical innovations, C. Freeman added two more categories of technical change: one is change in the technology system and the other is change in the technoeconomic paradigm.However, as the information technology (IT) revolution progresses further, we come to need more categories of innovations. In the computer industry, the concept of “module” is becoming a solution to growing complexity. In the new IT environment, we can be proactive in demand creation. It becomes crucial, therefore, whether the creation of new “business models” has followed technical innovations. In this article, we will try to demonstrate how these different categories of innovations, i.e., modularization and new business model creation, can be measured.     

The Brave New World of Carbon Trading

Human-induced climate change has become a prominent political issue, at both national and international levels, leading to the search for regulatory ‘solutions’. Emissions trading has risen in popularity to become the most broadly favoured government strategy. Carbon permits have then quickly been developed as a serious financial instrument in markets turning over billions of dollars a year. In this article, I show how the reality of permit market operation is far removed from the assumptions of economic theory and the promise of saving resources by efficiently allocating emission reductions. The pervasiveness of Greenhouse Gas emissions, strong uncertainty and complexity combine to prevent economists from substantiating their theoretical claims of cost-effectiveness. Corporate power is shown to be a major force affecting emissions market operation and design. The potential for manipulation to achieve financial gain, while showing little regard for environmental or social consequences, is evident as markets have extended internationally and via trading offsets. At the individual level, there is the potential for emissions trading to have undesirable ethical and psychological impacts and to crowd out voluntary actions. I conclude that the focus on such markets is creating a distraction from the need for changing human behaviour, institutions and infrastructure.     

论企业筹资风险的成因与识别方法

筹资风险是指企业在筹资活动中因资金供给、需求市场、经济环境的变化或筹资来源结构、期限结构等因素而给企业财务成果带来的不确定性。基于此,论述了企业筹资风险的成因,着重阐述了企业筹资风险识别的方法。     

The choice between multiplicative and additive production uncertainty

When modeling output uncertainty, the multiplicative specification is consistently chosen over the additive form, despite the latter being arguably intuitively more obvious. The rationale for this seems to be that when production risk is the only source of uncertainty, additive uncertainty does not reduce output below the certainty level, while multiplicative uncertainty does. We show that, in the absence of hedging, this result is drastically modified when there is simultaneous price and output uncertainty. In this situation the theoretical implications of the two specifications are sufficiently similar to preclude any a priori choice between the two. Thus the choice between the additive and multiplicative formulations may be dictated by how each performs in empirical analyses.