Incumbent heterogeneity in creative destruction: a study of three Dutch newspaper organisations

With a study of three Dutch newspaper organisations, we identify four dimensions along which incumbent response to discontinuous change may differ: response timing (early or late), size of commitment to the new business (big or small), progression of commitment to the new business (continuous or intermittent), and approaches to bridging the capability gap (internal development, strategic alliance, or acquisition). These response strategies are neither mutually exclusive nor static, and their relative focus differs over time as well as across incumbents. Such inter-temporal and cross-sectional variations in response strategies are influenced by various incumbent-specific characteristics and shaped by interrelated contingencies internal or external to incumbents.     

在位企业如何开拓新技术市场:商业模式与组织身份共演视角

新技术带来了新机遇,在位企业能否成功把握成为生存关键。采用单案例研究方法,以软件企业为案例研究对象,探索在位企业如何通过商业运营实现新技术市场开拓。研究发现:(1)商业模式与组织身份共演过程中,涌现了惯性思路-身份转移、整合思路-身份延伸、修补思路-身份增补3种演化形式;(2)战略导向变化是商业模式与组织身份演化的动因,出现了由内向外、混合导向和由外向内3种变化;(3)演化中组织身份匹配于商业模式,表现为嫁接匹配、重塑匹配和扩充匹配3种机制。扩展了在位企业应对技术变化的研究视角,丰富了组织身份的动态变化研究,深化了商业模式与技术发展间关系的研究,可为在位企业商业实践提供借鉴。     

商业模式与新进入者领先：来自电动汽车产业的实证研究

从商业模式视角探索为何目前在电动汽车市场上处于领先地位的是新进入者而非在资源上更具优势的在位者。分别在中美两国选择新进入者比亚迪和特斯拉及在位者上汽和通用汽车进行案例研究。基于专家访谈、实地参观和文献调研发现，新进入者和在位者商业模式存在显著差异，发挥电动汽车技术特性价值主张、垂直整合价值网络和可变成本较低的收支结构是新进入者获取领先优势的重要因素。丰富了现有关于新进入者创新及电动汽车产业商业模式的研究，有助于加深对两个问题的理解：一是当在位者比新进入者更早采用新技术时，新进入者应如何利用商业模式取得领先地位；二是哪种商业模式更有利于企业在电动汽车产业市场上获取领先地位。     

内部因素对家族企业传承影响的实证分析——基于在任者的视角

家族企业代际传承将直接影响企业的成长和竞争力。本文从在任者视角,实证研究了家族因素和在任者因素对家族企业代际传承的影响。研究结果表明,家族因素对传承意愿起着主导作用,说明中国传统文化深刻影响着家族企业代际传承,可以借鉴组建家族委员会的方式来协调家族成员与企业之间的关系,促进家族与企业的和谐发展;在任者的文化程度和年龄明显影响着家族企业传承计划的安排,本科以上学历的在任者会在传承时间、传承对象和继承人培养等方面更具前瞻性。在任者文化程度不高制约了家族企业发展,可以通过加强在任者素质教育来提高家族企业的传承质量。     

INSTABILITY AND THE INCENTIVES FOR CORRUPTION

We investigate the relationship between corruption and political stability, from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. We propose a model of incumbent behavior that features the interplay of two effects: a horizon effect , whereby greater instability leads the incumbent to embezzle more during his short window of opportunity, and a demand effect , by which the private sector is more willing to bribe stable incumbents. The horizon effect dominates at low levels of stability, because firms are unwilling to pay high bribes and unstable incumbents have strong incentives to embezzle, whereas the demand effect gains salience in more stable regimes. Together, these two effects generate a non-monotonic, U-shaped relationship between total corruption and stability. On the empirical side, we find a robust U-shaped pattern between country indices of corruption perception and various measures of incumbent stability, including historically observed average tenures of chief executives and governing parties: regimes that are very stable or very unstable display higher levels of corruption when compared with those in an intermediate range of stability. These results suggest that minimizing corruption may require an electoral system that features some re-election incentives, but with an eventual term limit.     

Strategic experimentation and disruptive technological change

This paper studies the diffusion of a new technology that is brought to market while its potential is still uncertain. We consider a dynamic game in which an incumbent and a startup firm improve both a new and a rival old technology while learning about the relative potential of both technologies. The main findings are that (i) risk considerations make incumbents with higher market shares more likely to adopt the new technology and (ii) changes in market power are often preceded by a subpar performance of the new technology. We also show that introducing a better new technology or confronting a worse old technology may hurt the startup firm as its new technology is then adopted earlier by incumbents.     

Natural disasters and electoral outcomes

Natural disasters are good examples of catastrophic events that may affect vote decisions. In this study, we analyze how the occurrence of earthquakes changes voters' behavior at municipal elections and which channels drive this change, focusing in particular on the role of media exposure. We exploit data from 13,338 municipal electoral cycles where incumbents seek reelection between 1993 and 2015 in Italy. We apply a difference-in-difference strategy with time and cities fixed effect to the probability of reelection and vote share using three different control groups: the universe of municipalities, a sub-sample of neighboring municipalities, and a sub-sample of municipalities identified by a one-to-one nearest-neighbor propensity score matching procedure. We find that the occurrence of destructive earthquakes significantly increases the incumbent mayors’ chance of being reelected and their vote share. We argue that this result is driven by the incumbent mayor advantage in offering recovery from disaster damages combined with a higher visibility on the media in the aftermath of the disaster. Thus, the mediatic relevance of earthquake occurrence may bias voters towards the incumbent.     

The impact of compatibility on innovation in markets with network effects

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the relationship between compatibility and innovation in markets with network effects using a model of competition with endogenous R&D, commercialization and compatibility. Compatibility is a mutual decision between firms and demand is partially dependent on overall consumption across compatible networks. Incumbent acquisition of an innovation or profit from entry provides entrepreneurs with an incentive for developing technological improvements and entrepreneurs receive greater returns if larger incumbents offer compatibility with their installed base. But for sufficiently weak network effects a large incumbent increases demand for its own product by denying compatibility to rivals. As a result, a credible threat of incompatibility reduces the entrepreneur's reserve to sell an innovation, but can also increase offers from smaller incumbents to acquire the innovation if it also avoids an incompatibility response from a larger incumbent. In response, entrepreneurs adjust their research effort in order to target a favourable compatibility regime that maximizes profit from entry or offers to acquire the innovation from incumbents. This leads to a complex relationship between the strength of network effects, innovation incentives, the entrepreneur's ambition for improvement and potentially disrupting the compatibility regime.     

Copyright reform and business model innovation: Regulatory propaganda at German music industry conferences

Inspired by new digital technologies, diverse actors in cultural and creative industries propagate conflicting visions of how to adequately innovate – or rather preserve and strictly enforce – copyright-related business models, which has resulted in substantial amounts of regulatory uncertainty. Looking at a decade of regulatory discourse at industry events in the popular music industry in Germany, we investigate how these actors make sense of and strategically shape this uncertainty in the process of industry transformation. Our longitudinal argumentative discourse analysis reveals cycles of regulatory propaganda of two discourse coalitions that do not engage in debate, but aim to find support for competing business models among regulators and the public. Organizing, canceling, and participating in industry events are discursive strategies used effectively to transport their claims by both industry lobbyists and challenging actors, but industry incumbents are failing to use these sites for testing out and introducing new business models. We conclude that regulatory struggles, not least at industry events, mediate between disruptive technologies and business model innovation.     

Technological change and forms of innovation in consumer magazine publishing: a UK-based study

This paper presents the results of research undertaken between 2002 and 2004 into the impact of technological change on the UK consumer magazine industry. The findings highlight patterns of innovation, both in the range of products (most notably monthly magazine titles) and the structure of organisations and work practices, which have tended to elude much of the contemporary debate within the ‘cultural industries’ approach adopted in the media studies discipline. Instead, our analysis makes use of insights from the innovation literature to highlight the impact of technological discontinuities on the capabilities of both incumbent firms and new entrants. It also highlights the important and growing role that is being played in innovation-led industries through the adoption of organisational practices that find their origins in the traditions of project-based firms.     

Is it the economic policy,stupid? Economic policy,political parties & the gubernatorial incumbent advantage

Incumbent politicians have a well-known advantage in seeking re-election. Using the Economic Freedom of North America dataset, we examine how changes in economic policy during an incumbent governor's tenure influence the probability of losing their re-election bid. Put simply, does economic policy matter for the incumbent advantage? The results suggest that a decrease in economic freedom increases the probability of an incumbent loss, regardless of the governor's party. A decomposition analysis indicates that these results are primarily driven by the government spending sub-index. Furthermore, a more granular analysis suggests that: (1) increases in government consumption spending and government employment are associated with a lower probability of re-election among Democratic incumbent governors, but a higher probability among Republicans; (2) increases in transfer payments relative to personal income reduce the likelihood of re-election, regardless of party; and (3) among Republican incumbents, increases of income taxation and of top marginal tax rates are associated with a higher and lower, respectively, probability of losing re-election. Finally, controlling for a variety of demographic, political and socioeconomic factors, we find that high unemployment increases the probability that an incumbent loses re-election, while increasing net population migration reduces it.     

Research Networks And Organisational Mobility In An Emerging Technological Field: The Case Of Plant Biotechnology

This paper builds on social network theory to understand technological development. Based on the empirical evidence of 367 research organisations in plant biotechnology over a nineteen-year period, we demonstrate how a structural analysis of the research network within the technological community is used to identify four collaboration-based strategic groups of research organisations. The emergence of these groups can be linked to technological breakthroughs in the field. Analyses of the four clusters point to the influence of research collaborations on stratification within an evolving technological domain. Finally, as archival data sources are used to detect incidences of collaborative research and to trace the evolution of R&D networks in an emerging field, we conclude with a discussion of the potential contribution of bibliometric data to understand the development of new technologies in their early, pre-commercial phases.     

Arrested development: the experience of European hard disk drive firms in comparison with US and Japanese firms

This paper analyses how US, Japanese, and European HDD firms responded to technological shifts in the hard disk industry from 1973 through 1996. Leading incumbent US HDD firms were frequently forced out of the market. Leading Japanese incumbent firms in the same industry, however, were not displaced by these changes. US startup firms thrived under these technological shifts, displacing US incumbent firms. Japanese startups did poorly. European firms encountered the worst of both worlds: its incumbent firms were frequently displaced by technological changes, as were US firms; while startup firms (with one exception) performed as poorly as those in Japan.     

Innovation,competition and firm size distribution on fragmented markets

This paper presents a simple model of firm and consumer behavior. We formulate a sub-market entry game, where boundedly rational firms decide on investing in R&D for inventing new products that will appeal to targeted groups of consumers. The success depends on the amount of resources available for the project as well as on the firm’s familiarity with market characteristics. Successful innovation feeds back into the firm size and (potentially into) market knowledge and increases the future R&D productivity. A new product decreases the market-shares of incumbents. However, this business stealing effect is asymmetric across incumbent population. We identify the section of parameter space where firms have an incentive to diversify horizontally. In this section, the model results in rich industrial dynamics. Firm size heterogeneity emerges endogenously in the model. Equilibrium firm size distributions are heavy tailed and skewed to the right. The heaviness of the tail depends on submarket specificity of firm’s market knowledge. This relationship is non-monotonic, emphasizing two different effects of innovation on industrial dynamics (positive feedback and asymmetric business stealing).     

Partial Regulation in Vertically Differentiated Industries

We provide theoretical foundations for quality‐adjusted price‐cap regulation in industries where a regulated incumbent and an unregulated entrant offer vertically differentiated products competing in price and quality. We show that, whether or not the incumbent anticipates the reaction of the entrant, the optimal weights in the cap depend upon the market served by the entrant, despite the latter not being directly concerned by regulation. We further show that the cap is robust to small errors in the weights. Our findings point to the conclusion that, in partially regulated industries, regulators should use information about the whole sectors rather than on the sole regulated incumbents.     

Political accountability and public service delivery in decentralized Indonesia: Incumbency advantage and the performance of second term mayors

To what extent do voters hold local elected leaders accountable for public service delivery in fiscally and politically decentralized environments, as theory suggests should be the case? We examine political accountability and service delivery in subnational Indonesia, through the lens of mayoral incumbency advantage. We apply regression discontinuity methods to a unique data set on local elections to identify the causal impact of incumbency on election outcomes and relate those effects to changes in citizen access to local public services. We find that voters in Indonesia are, in general, very willing to return incumbents to office compared to their counterparts in other countries. We also determine that the incumbent advantage is conditional on advances in local service provision: as service access expands more quickly, voters are more likely to vote incumbents back into office. Finally, we find that electorally successful incumbents—second term mayors—spend substantially less on education and health and more on infrastructure, manage their budgets less prudently, and deliver public services neither more nor less effectively than their first term equivalents. We conjecture that term limits and the attendant lack of electoral incentives leads to the disappointing second-term mayor performance.     

An Incumbent Country View on Eastern Enlargement of the EU Part I: A General Treatment

An eastern enlargement of the EU, from an incumbent country point of view,involves a fiscal burden from extending Union agricultural and cohesion policiesto new members, coupled with potential gains as well as adjustment problemsderiving from an extended customs union and a larger single market. Enlargementis controversial, because the net effect is unclear, a priori, and will certainly vary across individual countries. Our two-part contribution tries to do shed light on this controversy. In this first part, we present a general treatment of the likely effects on different incumbent countries, while a subsequent companion paper will take a closer look at the specific case of Austria. The general view of part I, in turn, first focuses on various empirical measures highlighting crucial differences between incumbents, pertaining to the fiscal burden on the one hand, and integration gains on the other. We then argue that a proper evaluation must rely on an explicit welfare criterion, and we use a general model of economic integration in order to identify the principalchannels through which aggregate welfare of an incumbent country is affected by an enlargement of the EU. We address traditional effects of trade creation and trade diversion, as well as growth effects arising from an abolition of trade barriers. In addition, we ask how enlargement affects foreign direct investmentand labor migration, and what this implies in welfare terms for an incumbent western European country. Taken together, these effects generate a certain presumption of integration gains, which need to be set against the fiscal burden. However, a final judgement requires a case-by-case approach, based on empirical implementations of enriched and parameterized models for specific countries. The companion paper, therefore, uses a suitably specified, calibrated dynamic equilibrium model, in order to take a closer look at the Austrian case.     

Corporate taxation, incumbency advantage and entry

It is the purpose of this paper to show that corporation tax may affect industrial structure. Analyzing the effects of corporation tax, we demonstrate that it tends to favour incumbents over entrants. We further show that the effect of this advantage on an incumbent's output depends on his profit or loss history. An incumbent with a past profit is likely to produce a greater output, thereby partially or fully crowding out an entrant's output. In contrast, an incumbent with a past loss is more likely to produce a smaller output, making entry easier.     

商业模式创新与技术创新匹配性对后发企业绩效的影响——来自年报文本分析的实证研究

以2014—2019年沪深A股成长期上市公司作为后发企业代表，借助Word2Vec的文本分析方法，基于公司年度财务数据度量后发企业商业模式创新水平，实证研究后发企业追赶过程中商业模式创新、技术创新以及二者匹配性与企业绩效间的作用机理。结果发现：商业模式创新对后发企业绩效具有显著正向影响；技术创新对后发企业绩效具有显著正向影响；商业模式创新和技术创新的平衡性与后发企业绩效正相关；商业模式创新和技术创新的组合性与后发企业绩效正相关。结果表明，对于后发企业而言，商业模式创新与技术创新为互补关系，而非互替关系，二者间的匹配性对后发企业绩效提升具有增强型交互作用。     

Electoral manipulation via voter-friendly spending: Theory and evidence

We present a model of the political budget cycle in which incumbents try to influence voters by changing the composition of government spending, rather than overall spending or revenues. Rational voters may support an incumbent who targets them with spending before the election even though such spending may be due to opportunistic manipulation, because it may also reflect sincere preference of the incumbent for types of spending voters favor. Classifying expenditures into those which are likely targeted to voters and those that are not, we provide evidence supporting our model in data on local public finances for all Colombian municipalities. Our findings indicate both a pre-electoral increase in targeted expenditures, combined with a contraction of other types of expenditure, and a voter response to targeting.