European Family Firms in International Business: British and Greek Tramp-Shipping Firms

This article traces the similar paths and common characteristics of British and Greek tramp-shipping companies over the last 130 years through a comparative and international perspective. Despite the tendency of companies to adopt corporate and managerial forms, British and Greek tramp-shipping firms remained first and foremost family firms. The strength and the viability of these firms were networks, on a local, national and international level – networks whose cohesion was based on trust and a particular business culture that was developed in the maritime regions whence they came, centred on family firms involved in international business.     

The Internationalization of Service Firms in China: A Comparative Analysis with Manufacturing Firms

In this article, we expand upon the springboard perspective of emerging markets in the service sector. We investigate the phenomenon of service firm internationalization in China and the distinct differences between service and manufacturing firms during international expansion. Using dynamic analysis of historical data for 363 service firms and 569 manufacturing firms from 2001 to 2007, we find that the internationalization of service firms in China is different from that of manufacturing firms in terms of resource requirement and experience exploitation. The internationalization of service firms relies more on international experience than corporate resources. Furthermore, we also identify the structural differences between hard and soft service industries. In China, identifiable intangible assets are found to be more important for the international expansion of hard service firms than they are for soft service firms. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Beyond Competence:

This article takes the approach that client service can and should be a differentiating strategy for the service firm-particularly the professional service firm. The method suggested for accomplishing the necessary level of service is the use of an unconditional service guarantee.     

Business Group Affiliation and Corporate Sustainability Strategies of Firms: An Investigation of Firms in India

In spite of an overwhelming importance of business groups (BG) in the economic development of many countries, systematic inquiry on how the BGs and their affiliated firms approach and contribute to shared value creation and sustainable development is rare. In this paper we address this research gap by investigating two related questions—do BG-affiliated firms differ from non-BG firms in their corporate sustainability strategy (CSS) and how does BG affiliation influence the relationship between stock of fungible resources and CSS of firms? Drawing from the BG literature we theorize that BG-affiliated firms tend to adopt of both environmental and social sustainability strategies more than non-BG firms. We also argue that although according to resource-based view, the stock of fungible resources of firms positively influences CSS, BG affiliation negatively moderates the relationship between stock of fungible resources and CSS of firms. Stock of fungible resources matters less for BG-affiliated firms in undertaking CSS as they have access to resources of the BG network. We test our theoretical predictions using a proprietary data set of 163 Indian publicly listed firms, out of which 76 are BG-affiliated firms belonging to 74 BGs. The data for corporate environmental and social sustainability strategies have been obtained by administering a survey instrument among the top level executives of the participating firms. We find support for our theoretical predictions that signify that BGs and their affiliates make important contributions to shared value creation and sustainable development in emerging economies like India.     

Productivity Premia for German Manufacturing Firms Exporting to the Euro‐Area and Beyond: First Evidence from Robust Fixed Effects Estimations

This paper reports estimates of the productivity premium of German firms exporting to the Euro‐zone and beyond, controlling for unobserved time‐invariant firm‐specific effects. Furthermore, it tests for self‐selection of more productive firms into exporting beyond the Euro‐zone. The main contribution of the paper is to correct a serious flaw in hitherto published studies that ignore the potentially disastrous consequences of extreme observations, or outliers. The paper shows that estimates of the exporter productivity premium by destination are driven by a small share of outliers that comprises some five per cent of all firms. These outliers are identified by a recently developed highly robust estimator for models with fixed effects. Using a ‘clean’ sample without these outliers, the estimated productivity premium of firms that export to the Euro‐zone only is no longer statistically different from zero at a conventional error level, and the estimated premium of firms exporting beyond the Euro‐zone, too, over firms that serve the German market only is tiny. Furthermore, an ex‐ante differential that is statistically significant and large only shows up for enterprises that exported to the Euro‐zone already and start to export to countries outside the Euro‐zone. These conclusions differ considerably from those based on non‐robust standard regression analyses.     

The Life-Cycle of Privatized Firms in Russia:

No abstract available for this article.     

论《国际商事合同通则》对长期合同的调整

由于长期性、关系性和不完全性等特征,长期合同在适用一般合同法时会产生诸多困难。为此,罗马国际统一私法协会推出了《国际商事合同通则2016》,对长期合同的概念进行了界定,并在诚信谈判、开放性条款、非固定条款、当事人之间的合作、不可抗力、无固定期限合同终止后的恢复原状、后合同义务等方面作了特别规定,从而对长期合同的立法调整产生了积极的影响。为避免直接适用于长期合同所产生的不合理结果,我国《合同法》应借鉴《国际商事合同通则2016》的相关规定,加入调整长期合同的特别条款。     

Human Love, Boundless Love

On August 15, a special charity performance was carried on in Malaysia by IPC Shopping Services （M） Sdn Bhd, an ECommerce company based on Malaysia. It was special for ＂＇May 12 Earthquake＇＂ in China＇s Sichuan Province, and special tbr those suffering children in the disaster. Months have past, but moving and touching stories happened during the earthquake encourage the people alive to create a better life and never give up hopes. What the post-earthquake construction left to us is the human love and boundless love, which is also the theme of the ＂＇8.15 Yu Miao Charity Pertbrmance＂.     

Negotiating Complex Contracts

Work to date on computational models of negotiation has focused almost exclusively on defining contracts consisting of one or a few independent issues and tractable contract spaces. Many real-world contracts, by contrast, are much more complex, consisting of multiple inter-dependent issues and intractably large contract spaces. This paper describes a simulated annealing based approach appropriate for negotiating such complex contracts that achieves near-optimal social welfares for negotiations with binary issue dependencies.     

Love Is Blind: How Our Love for More Choice Costs Time

The paper applies a multilevel modeling approach in the study of individual behavior in choice experiments. The purpose is to study the relationship between choice time and several features of the choice task such as the number of choice alternatives, amount of choice information, and (dis)similarity of the choice alternatives. A special focus is on the difference in choice time between individuals who frequently maximize in choice making and their counterparts who are habitually satisficing. In total, 15 choice experiments were conducted (three versions of choice experiments for five different choice stimuli: restaurant, holiday resort hotel, smartphone, job, and project partner). The results show that choice time increases as choice tasks are more complex. As to the people's maximizing tendency, no significant differences in choice time are found between maximizers and satisficers.     

Unfair Terms in Contracts: Proposals for Reform in the UK

The English and Scottish Law Commissions have made radical proposals for simplifying UK law on unfair terms in consumer contracts, combining the Regulations that implement the Directive and the earlier legislation into a single instrument that is to be written in language that would be clear and accessible to consumers and businesspeople. The article discusses some of the difficult policy choices involved in combining the different approaches of the two existing instruments, what is needed in order to make the legislation understandable to the lay person, and the extent to which the case of Commission v The Kingdom of the Netherlands requires Member States to use the language of the Directive when implementing it. The Law Commissions also proposed to extend the broader controls found in the Directive to business-to-business contracts, but the proposals did not find favour with the business community.     

Biotechnology Firms in Sweden

The purpose of this study is to create an understanding of the strategies that biotechnology firms in Sweden implement, how they manage to keep their competence ahead and how they finance their research. Their main factor of success is the ability to rapidly identify the latest research findings from academia and turn them into commerciable technology. The collaboration with academia is thus an important part of the networking strategy of the biotechnology firms in Sweden. Outsourcing parts of their activities keeps the firms flexible, which is necessary in this high risk business.Whether a firm chooses an intermediary or integrating position is not found to be correlated to age or size. It is instead heavily influenced by the strategies of large pharmaceutical companies, the nature of the firms' core technology, expectations of investors and the overall access of capital. The private capital market in Sweden has undergone a change during the last years. New marketplaces for young, innovative firms have been created in Sweden and their existence is most likely one reason for the increasing presence of venture capitalists in the country. That, in turn, increases the opportunities for new firms within biotechnology to develop in Sweden.     

Integrative Social Contracts Theory: Hype over Hypernorms

Applying social contract theory to business ethics is a relatively new idea, and perhaps nobody has pursued this direction better than Thomas Donaldson and Thomas W. Dunfee. Their "Integrative Social Contracts Theory" manages to combine culturally sensitive decision making capacities with trans-cultural norms by setting up a layered system of social contracts. Lurking behind their work is a concern with the problems of relativism. They hope to alleviate these problems by introducing three concepts important to the ISCT: "authentic norms," which clarify culturally specific norms, "priority rules," which determine the rules of engagement when authentic norms clash, and "hypernorms," which measure the value of authentic norms against a thin set of universally upheld values. This paper traces the genealogy of these hypernorms and challenges their value for the ISCT. It argues that well-conceived priority rules can do everything hypernorms can, and can do so more simply.     

政府补助、投融资约束与企业僵尸化

僵尸企业丧失活力但仍然存续,对国民经济效率具有严重的不利影响,清理僵尸企业是供给侧结构性改革的关键步骤。政府补助与僵尸企业形成的关系是当前供给侧结构性改革研究中的焦点问题之一。基于企业面临的主要约束类型,本文将企业划分为缺乏投资机会的投资机会约束企业和缺乏资金来源的融资约束企业,以2007—2016年A股上市公司为样本,研究不同约束类型下企业获得政府补助对企业僵尸化的影响。结果表明,政府补助更多拨付给投资机会约束企业而非融资约束企业;政府补助是企业僵尸化的推手之一,但仅在投资机会约束企业中显著;专用于扩大企业融资的融资补助对于投资机会约束企业僵尸化的作用较政府补助总额更为显著;政府补助总额与融资补助均未起到缓解融资约束企业僵尸化的作用。在控制反向因果的内生性问题、替换代理变量、滞后补助变量和对亏损企业样本僵尸化进行讨论的稳健性测试中,结果仍然显著。本文为政府补助与僵尸企业形成问题提供了企业面临主要约束这一异质性视角,并基于补助错配问题,提出优化政府补助政策与解决企业僵尸化问题的政策建议。     

Networks in Entrepreneurship: The Case of High-technology Firms

The value of networks as an integral part of the explanation of entrepreneurial success is widely acknowledged. However, the network perspective does not specify the role of networks in the emergence and early growth of a venture. We have distinguished three entrepreneurial processes in new venture development, i.e. discovery of opportunities, securing resources, and obtaining legitimacy, which are of importance for survival and performance. This paper examines how these processes are influenced by strong and/or weak ties and whether the degree of innovation (incremental versus radical) acts as a contingency factor in the way network ties support entrepreneurial processes. In this explorative study three cases on high technology firms in The Netherlands provide empirical material enabling us to develop a number of propositions on the network effect, in particular the mix of strong and weak ties, on the three entrepreneurial processes.     

Why Small Firms Export: Another Look

This article examines what factors motivate small firms to export. Specifically, this study looks at firms with 200 or fewer employees, dividing the sample into two groups: firms with 25 or fewer employees and firms with more than 25 employees. The results suggest that firms with 25 or fewer employees export for two main reasons: the firm has a unique product, and it has a technological advantage over competitors. Firms with more than 25 employees export for the above two reasons, plus two additional reasons: to achieve economies of scale and to avoid losing out on foreign opportunities. Due to the limitations of the size and scope of this research, future research should include additional SIC categories as well as firms outside California.