Business Conditions and Business Starts

This paper analyses the effect of business conditions on new firm starts. The birth of new firms displays a pro-cyclical behaviour, more firms being created when GDP is growing fast and the interest rate is low. The entry response to industry profitability is tempered by the level of sunk costs; for a given profit signal, more entry occurs where sunk costs are low.     

Contracting in dynamic games

We study the bargaining problem in the dynamic framework. The classical way of solving a dynamic bargaining problem is to transform the extensive form game into the normal form and then apply the theory of bargaining well developed for normal form games. This means that the parties sign a binding contract in the beginning of the game which defines their actions for the full duration of the game. In this article, we consider the setting where the players monitor the contract as the game evolves. The main purpose of the article is to study conditions under which the players do not have a rationale to renegotiate a new contract at any intermediate time period; i.e., the contract is time consistent. Time consistency restricts the set of bargaining solutions in dynamic games. We will show that time consistency of the contract is guaranteed if the bargaining solution satisfies the controversial independence-of-irrelevant-alternatives property.     

The games retailers play

Game theory has helped to clarify and simplify a wide variety of business decisions, yet has rarely been applied in a retailing context. This article pairs three contemporary retailing issues with three well‐known strategic games in an effort to spark the imagination of the strategist and the student. The issues of trading hours, saturation and Investment in innovation are examined through the application of the Prisoner's Dilemma, Tragedy of the Common, and Boxed Pigs. Implications of the games for retail decision‐making and for management education are explored.     

申奥有我一份-记恩保大陆汽车俱乐部的申奥活动

国际奥委会对世界上5个申办奥运会的候选城市进行评估后,于日前在瑞士洛桑总部召开新闻发布会.会上评估团团长讲道:评估结果认为5个候选城市中的三个城市有能力举办好2008年的奥运会,她们是:中国北京、法国巴黎、加拿大多伦多.在讲到北京的优势方面,除了悠久的历史文化、新北京巨大的变化、体育场馆的建设等之外,更主要是政府和人民的广泛支持,尤其是人民群众对申办奥运表现出极大的热情.     

Truthfulness and Business

According to a common assumption, truthfulness cannot have an intrinsic value in business. Instead, it is considered only instrumentally valuable for business, because it contributes to successful trust-building. Some authors deny truthfulness even this limited role by claiming that truth-telling is not an essential part of business, which is a sui generis practice like poker. In this article, I argue that truthfulness has indeed an intrinsic value in business and identify the conceptual confusions underlying the opposite view. My account of truthfulness as a virtue shows that truthfulness is both valuable for its own sake and instrumental to further valuable goals. It helps pinpoint the implicit contradiction in claiming that truthfulness has an instrumental value only. I then challenge the reasons for considering business exempt from the constraints of truthfulness and elaborate on the analogy between game and business, which in fact supports instead of undermining my claim that business is a truthful practice. Finally, I illustrate my argument with a case study of the current crisis of trust faced by the pharmaceutical industry. Lubomira Radoilska, PhD., is an Affiliated Lecturer at the Faculty of Philosophy, Cambridge University and a Research Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge. Dr Radoilska received her Masters degree in Philosophy from Sofia University and her MPhil and Doctorate from Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Her research interests fall within the scope of moral philosophy. She has published articles on both theoretical and applied topics.     

Teaching Business Ethics: The Role of Ethics in Business and in Business Education

The paper begins with an examination of traditional attitudes towards business ethics. I suggest that these attitudes fail to recognize that a principal function of ethics is to facilitate cooperation. Further that despite the emphasis on competition in modern market economies, business like all other forms of social activity is possible only where people are prepared to respect rules in the absence of which cooperation is rendered difficult or impossible. Rules or what I call the ethics of doing, however, constitute just one dimension of ethics. A second has to do with what we see and how we see it; a third with who we or what I describe as the ethics of being. Of these three dimensions, the first and the third have been most carefully explored by philosophers and are most frequently the focus of attention when teaching business ethics is being discussed. I argue that this focus is unfortunate in as much as it is the second dimension which falls most naturally into the ambit of modern secular educational institutions. It is here that moral education is most obviously unavoidable, and most clearly justifiable in modern secular teaching environments. I conclude by describing the importance of this second dimension for the modern world of business.     

Business Survival and Success of Young Small Business Owners

Little empirical evidence provides insight in person-oriented drivers of business survival and success of small business owners. In this paper I perform a duration analysis of business survival amongst young white (self-employed) small business owners in the U.S. Compulsory exits are distinguished from voluntary exits. This enables an alternative definition of business success: the longer one can survive and prevent inLvoluntary exit, the more successful one is. Potential drivers of survival are derived from recent empirical evidence in related studies. The potential drivers of success are also derived from historical economic thinkers such as Marshall and Schumpeter. The estimated hazard rates are affected by characteristics of the small business owner and business conditions.     

Ethical Business and Investment: A Model for Business and Society

Two key questions lie at the heart of the business challenge for business ethics: is it possible for business and investors to do well while doing good; and if so, how can this be achieved? This paper adopts an international investment perspective to address these questions. It demonstrates that it is possible for business and investors to achieve a triple bottom line of environmental, social and financial performance. A new integrated model of Ethical Business including an Ethical Scorecard performance measurement technology is presented based on international ethical investment criteria and case studies of businesses rated highly by ethical investors. Ethical Performance Scores are presented for these businesses and New Zealand business. Examples from New Zealand are presented to illustrate the Ethical Scorecard and ethical business practice. The model and scoring system provide a basis for international benchmarking of ethical business to assist investors, managers and researchers.     

Dynamic stochastic games with random moves

We reformulate the quality ladder model of Pakes and McGuire, Rand Journal of Economics, 25(4), 555–589 (1994) as a dynamic stochastic game with random moves in which each period one firm is picked at random to make an investment decision. Contrasting this model to the standard version with simultaneous moves illustrates the computational advantages of random moves. In particular, the quality ladder model with random moves avoids the curse of dimensionality in computing firms’ expectations over all possible future states and is therefore orders of magnitude faster to solve than its counterpart with simultaneous moves when there are more than just a few firms. Perhaps unexpectedly, the equilibria of the quality ladder model with random moves are practically indistinguishable from those of the model with simultaneous moves.

     

Small Business and Empirical Perspectives in Business Ethics: Editorial

In this editorial to a collection of papers on ethics in small firms, the case is made for greater use of high quality empirical research on business ethics. Sociological perspectives have much to offer to the field of business ethics that continues to be dominated by normative, moral philosophy. The second contribution of the paper is to argue for a re-orientation away from the large multi-national firm as a benchmark subject of business ethics research. One important point of view to be included is that of the small firm, which remains the dominant organisational form throughout all the OECD countries.     

Design and Implementation of Business Objects for Automated Business Negotiations

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in the specification, generation and exchange of business objects in the context of electronic commerce. Common business objects have been defined for product catalogs, purchase orders and other business entities. However, no business objects have been defined and implemented for supporting automated business negotiations even though business negotiation is very much an integral part of business activities. In this work, we have designed and implemented a set of business negotiation objects for supporting the bargaining type of business negotiations. These objects define the operations and information contents needed for negotiation parties to express their requirements and constraints during a bargaining process. They correspond to a set of negotiation primitives, which is a superset of the negotiation-related primitives defined in two popular languages: ACL and COOL. The implementation of these objects is patterned after the business object documents in the XML format proposed by the Open Applications Group, thus conforming to the established standard. The incorporation of several types of constraint specifications in these business negotiation objects provides the negotiation parties and the negotiation servers that represent them much expressive power in specifying callforproposals and proposals. Two synchronization problems and their solutions associated with the withdrawal and modification of negotiation proposals are addressed and presented in this paper. The use of these business negotiation objects in a bilateral bargaining protocol is also presented. We have validated the utility of these objects in an integrated network environment, which consists of two replicated negotiation servers, two commercial products, and some other university research systems that form a supply chain.     

The Role of Business and Friendships on WeChat Business: An Emerging Business Model in China

ABSTRACT

WeChat business is an emerging way of doing business in China, which can be considered as a marriage between traditional e-business and social networking communications. In WeChat business, firms have developed customer relationships along two distinct ways: business relationships and friendships. However, research on the combination of business relationships and friendships is relatively nascent, and there are contradictory findings. In this study, we examine the effectiveness of the two relationship strategies using data from a field experiment through the WeChat platform by an apparel firm. Results from the field experiment suggest that development of friendships with new customers can help the strategy of developing business relationships; but developing friendships and business relationships with experienced customers negates each other. The study contributes to the literature on relationship marketing and role theory, and helps WeChat managers clarify how new social networking relationships with customers can be effectively leveraged.     

The Business of Economics is Business

Advances in the subject have greatly developed the ways in which economists within a business can contribute to stategic decisions. Unilver is a case in point. The two keys to the change in the role of industrial economists have been the prevalence of strongly contested global oligopoly markets of the kind Unilver faces, and developments in the application of game theory. Economists still have to tread carefully inside companies and combine with other skills and especially with the decision-takers. Four examples are given of the contribution economists can make and should be making.     

船王与商机

商机无处不在这是一句耳熟能详的话。但是，我们身边的商机，往往像夏夜的萤光，只是匆匆地在眼前闪烁了一下，就远远地飘走了。所以要想真能握住商机的手杖，与之共舞，不什么改变了奥纳西斯的命运使他后来跻身希腊八大商业船队．并且位列希腊八大商业船队的老二，成为名副其实的世界级船王？