On Delegation under Relational Contracts

In this paper, a principal’s decision between delegating two tasks or handling one of the two tasks herself is analyzed. We assume that there exists no objective performance measure so that the principal must solely rely on relational contracts (informal agreements sustained by the value of future relationships) as an incentive device. It is found that the principal can commit herself to honor the relational contract more effectively if she delegates one task only. This kind of job design is therefore optimal unless the available performance information is rather inaccurate and the discount rate is very low.     

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.     

自由人的自由契约--评J.布坎南《自由的限度--在无政府和利维坦之间》

<自由的限度--在无政府和利维坦之间>是1986年度诺贝尔经济学奖得主J.布坎南的一部重要著作,初版于1975年,其中文版即将被介绍给广大的中国读者.本文回顾了这部作品写作的时代背景,探讨了原书作者关于"社会秩序"问题的重要见解,对于理解正处于社会转型期的中国若干现实问题会有所裨益.本文还通过分析这部作品在布坎南整体学术思想中的位置,梳理了布坎南如何从财政学问题入手而走向社会哲学和道德哲学思考的研究路径.这对于全面系统地考察中国当前的公共财政制度建设问题,也有不应被忽略的方法论含义.     

国防经济的地区性和外部性——中国的国防经济如何与经济建设协调发展

在当今国际关系复杂多变的背景下,即使各国间的博弈逐渐变得缓和,也改变不了国防经济在各国至关重要的作用。而对于世界上发展程度不同的国家,国防经济的发展程度也会不同,且不同的国防经济发展也对经济发展带来了不同的外部影响。本文是在综合了时代特征的情况下,探讨不同国家的不同程度的国防经济建设所揭示的地区性和所带来的外部性影响。     

Linking organizational culture, structure, strategy, and organizational effectiveness: Mediating role of knowledge management

Practices of knowledge management are context-specific and they can influence organizational effectiveness. This study examines the possible mediating role of knowledge management in the relationship between organizational culture, structure, strategy, and organizational effectiveness. A survey was conducted of 301 organizations. The results suggest that knowledge management fully mediates the impact of organizational culture on organizational effectiveness, and partially mediates the impact of organizational structure and strategy on organizational effectiveness. The findings carry theoretical implications for knowledge management literature as they extend the scope of research on knowledge management from examining a set of independent management practices to examining a system-wide mechanism that connects internal resources and competitive advantage.     

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.     

Organizational CQ: Cultural intelligence for 21st-century organizations

We live in an age of massive global disruption. Technological advancements threaten century-old business models, globalization is reordering supply chains, and people need to work with colleagues and customers who have vastly different backgrounds. On top of that, we have been in the midst of a global pandemic, and customers, employers, and investors are demanding more than just a Black Lives Matter social media post from organizations that purport to take social justice seriously. Organizations with high cultural intelligence (CQ) are able to navigate this volatility and complexity effectively. Over the last two decades, scholars from across the world have published hundreds of articles on CQ, the capability to relate and work effectively in complex, culturally diverse situations. Most of the work has examined CQ at the individual level. But what about organizations? Can organizations be culturally intelligent? The emerging research on CQ at the organizational level offers leaders and organizations critical insights for navigating today’s diverse, digital world. Organizational CQ is a firm’s capability to function effectively in a complex and unpredictable multicultural world. This article stresses the importance of the culturally intelligent organization and explains how to develop organizational CQ.     

Performance differentials within geographic clusters

Increasing evidence indicates that firms benefit from a location in a geographic cluster of similar firms. The literature is nearly silent, however, on whether agglomeration economies accrue symmetrically across clustered firms. Drawing from the knowledge-based view, we investigate which firms benefit most from agglomeration and discuss how the implications for entrepreneurs are significant if some firms benefit more from geographic agglomeration than others. We investigate three particular firm attributes that may accentuate or mitigate benefits tied to participation in a cluster. We test our hypotheses on a sample of biotechnology firms and find strong evidence that firms benefit asymmetrically. Younger firms and firms with higher knowledge stocks benefit more from agglomeration.     

Estimating the impact of Denison's (1996), “What is the difference between organizational culture and organizational climate? A native's point of view on a decade of paradigm wars”

Denison [Denison, D.R. (1996), What is the difference between organizational culture and organizational climate? A native's point of view on a decade of paradigm wars, The Academy of Management Review, 21 (3), 619-654] offers a paradigm to comprehend the difference between studying organizational culture and organizational climate from a methodological perspective. The present study uses a Scopus analysis to understand the contributions of Denison's work in contemporary research of organization studies, and to recognize benefits of his discussion on organizational culture and organizational climate. The Scopus analysis shows that Denison's article is seminal across academic disciplines from its appearance.     

Commentary on leveraging knowledge based resources: The role of contracts

The commentary first discusses the main argument of Mouzas and Ford. The commentary then addresses how contracts can be understood in business networks by relating the concept to the three main IMP models. The conclusion is that the article is an important step in linking ideas of business contracts and resource interaction in relational settings. Mouzas and Ford examine how contracts are used to leverage knowledge based resources through interaction with other idiosyncratically capable firms. In particular, they empirically investigate the use of umbrella contracts as manifestations of joint consent in manufacturer — retailer relationships as a specific form of contract for this purpose. The authors take an industrial networks perspective, making (forms of) contracts resources within a relational, interactive frame of exchange. This in itself is valuable, as contracts in an industrial networks perspective may easily be viewed as one out of many contextual parameters to transactions carried out within business relationships. There are three general models or frameworks in IMP that may be used to analyse the role of contracts within an interactive and relational frame of exchange. These are the interaction model (Håkansson, 1982), the actors-resources-activities (ARA) model (Håkansson & Snehota, 1995) and the 4 resource model (Håkansson & Håkansson and Waluszewski, 2002).     

Leveraging knowledge-based resources: The role of contracts

Every firm faces the challenge of leveraging valuable resources in the form of the intellectual assets, know-how and expertise of itself and others around it. They can only achieve this through interaction with other idiosyncratically capable firms. But through interaction, resources, activities and actors themselves evolve in relation to each other. In this situation of complex business interaction and uncertainty, the conditions under which the respective knowledge and expertise can be leveraged often need to be expressed and manifested as joint consent between the involved parties. Designing an agreed platform for using knowledge-based resources of others poses a real challenge for many companies because the knowledge that firms need to access is inherently indeterminate and continually evolving. This study addresses this issue by investigating the role of contracts in leveraging knowledge-based resources. The study builds on an interactive view of resource leveraging in general and on ideas on knowledge-based resources in particular (Håkansson et al., 2009). The paper reports on empirical research conducted between 2003 and 2007 that examined real-world contracts in manufacturer-retailer networks. The study draws conclusions on the role of contracts in leveraging knowledge-based resources and more widely on the dialectic nature of resource transformation.     

Performance implications of institutionalization process in family-owned businesses: Evidence from an emerging economy

This paper attempts to understand the role of two highly relevant founder family characteristics, harmony among family members and the degree of democratization in decision-making, in the institutionalization and adaptive capability development processes of family firms in Turkey as an exemplar of an emerging market. The paper examines how institutionalization and adaptability jointly drive firm-level differences in quantitative (i.e., sales growth, market share, and return on investment) and qualitative performance (i.e., quality of goods/services, new product development, employee satisfaction) components. Data were collected from 436 respondents in 132 family firms through structured questionnaires administered to at least three respondents from each firm. Findings indicated that among the institutionalization dimensions, transparency had the strongest effect on both quantitative and qualitative firm performance, whereas adaptability influenced qualitative performance only. Harmony in family relations increased efforts for institutionalization, whereas democracy in decision-making enhanced adaptability. Implications of these findings are discussed and several future research directions are suggested.     

What leaders need to know about organizational culture

A major factor in the success of an organization is its culture. Organizational culture can significantly influence the performance and effectiveness of a company; the morale and productivity of its employees; and its ability to attract, motivate, and retain talented people. Unfortunately, many leaders are either unaware of the significant impact culture can have, are aware but overwhelmed by the extensive and sometimes conflicting information available on culture, or are not well informed about how to build and sustain cultures effectively. This article integrates the most consistent findings that leaders need to know about culture and what they can do to build strong, successful cultures that bring out the best in people. Developing organizational culture requires far more than talk about culture and emphasis on its importance. In order to achieve the best results, culture development requires leaders who see it as one of their key tasks and who understand the importance of aligning organization strategies and decision making with cultural ideals.     

论合同的成立与生效

合同的成立与生效,是合同法律制度中两种不同的制度。《合同法》对此做了一些规定。但在实际中常常会将合同的成立与生效、不成立与不生效及无效相混淆。因此认识和掌握合同成立与生效的概念、构成要件及其联系与区别,对于我们正确认定合同法律关系、合同效力及正确处理合同纠纷具有十分重要的意义。     

起草补偿贸易合同主要条款应当注意的问题

补偿贸易合同是传统的“三来一补”贸易交易方式中的一种,即来料加工、来件装配、来图来样加工和补偿贸易。     

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。     

Productivity, indexation and macroeconomic outcomes: The implications of goods market competition and wage bargaining structure

One strand of the macroeconomics literature explores the extent to which the indexation of nominal wages to a variable in addition to the price level can improve macroeconomic performance. The present paper contributes to this literature by developing a model in which the nominal wage is indexed not only to the price level but also to productivity. Two key features of the framework are a monopolistically competitive goods market and a unionized labor market in which wages are determined by a finite number of unions. A significant finding is that the multiparameter indexation scheme generally outperforms full-information wage setting.     

软件商业模式与操作系统的市场结构——Windows与Linux两种模式的比较研究

本文通过将网络外部性和产品纵向差异化引入传统的豪泰林模型，比较了Linux和Windows两种软件商业模式，进而研究了操作系统市场结构的决定因素和形成机理：在操作系统市场，软件厂商采取不同的商业模式竞争，不同的商业模式内生了软件厂商不同的竞争优势，从而在不同的操作系统市场呈现出双寡头竞争和单寡头垄断两种主要的市场结构。     

Crafting Internal Hybrids: Complementarities,Common Change Initiatives,and the Team-Based Organization

Hybrid governance forms that seek to meld the virtues of both market control and traditional hierarchical control are alluring. Comparatively little research, outside of the M-form literature, has examined internal hybrids - hierarchical forms infused with elements of market control. This paper contends that common change initiatives, such as TQM, re-engineering, autonomous work teams, and group-based rewards, are appropriately viewed as attempts to craft internal hybrids by selectively infusing elements of market control within hierarchy. However, these change initiatives are often implemented in isolation and, as a consequence, violate patterns of complementarity that sustain traditional hierarchy or support the stable infusion of market control.The paper argues that these violations of complementarity often spiral hierarchies toward fundamental transformation. The clear trajectory of these transformations is to quite radically disaggregated organizations structured around teams. The paper presents both theory and evidence supporting the existence of complementarities among these common change initiatives.