Small Firms and Economic Transformation in Bulgaria

The pace of transition to a market economy has been slower in Bulgaria than in some other east European countries in the 1990s. Output levels in the state owned sector, which has not yet been subject to mass privatisation, have fallen sharply and there has been a dramatic increase in unemployment. There has however also been a rapid growth in the number of small firms, and the ability of this sector to generate new jobs will be an important component of labour market dynamics in the future. Some of the main characteristics of this emergent sector are identified on the basis of a sample survey of nearly 400 small Bulgarian firms, covering competitiveness, entrepreneurship, innovation, networking, labour relations and business performance of the small firms. Key features of a subset of small firms with an orientation towards employment growth are identified.     

Pivotal Buyers and Bargaining Position

Securing sales to a large buyer can be pivotal to a supplier's decision to produce. While conventional wisdom suggests that being pivotal improves a buyer's bargaining position, the opposite is shown in a multilateral bargaining model. If other buyers' payments fall short of costs, a pivotal buyer must cover the shortfall or forfeit consumption. This affords leverage that the supplier lacks when bargaining with non-pivotal buyers. The analysis illuminates contracting in markets with high fixed costs, such as cable television programming, motion pictures, and large-scale project finance, and has implications for the FCC's horizontal ownership limits on cable system operators.     

Developing Countries' Changing Participation in World Trade

Recent years have seen substantial reductions in trade policyand other barriers inhibiting developing country participationin world trade. Lower barriers have contributed to a dramaticshift in the pattern of developing country trade—awayfrom dependence on commodity exports to much greater relianceon manufactures and services. In addition, exports to otherdeveloping countries have become much more important. Thesechanges have profound implications for the role played by developingcountries in the world economy and trade system.      

Asymmetric performance: the market share impact of scale and link alliances in the global auto industry

This study investigates how participating in strategic alliances with rivals affects the relative competitive positions of the partner firms. The paper builds on studies that show significant differences in the outcomes of scale and link alliances. The study argues that the more asymmetric outcomes of link alliances translate into greater changes in the relative market shares of the partner firms, due to unbalanced opportunities for inter‐partner learning and learning by doing. We find support for this argument by examining 135 alliances among competing firms in the global automobile industry, from 1966 to 1995. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

B‐TO‐B E‐COMMERCE: A CONTENT ANALYTICAL ASSESSMENT OF MOTOR CARRIER WEBSITES

An Internet presence is a critical early component in the process of building towards a fully operational and unified e‐commerce strategy. E‐commerce has significantly impacted logistics/supply chain strategies and the development and implementation of a website have become key issues for many firms within the transportation industry. This study provides an overview of website content within the motor carrier industry. Content analysis was used to assess the site design, informational content, and the interactive content of 152 motor carrier websites, and to compare the features offered on the Top 100 motor carrier firm websites with those offered on the sites of smaller carrier firms.     

Web information tracking using ontologies

Bringing knowledge management to practice one typically has to focus on concrete problems that exist in the daily work of the knowledge worker. We consider the task of tracking relevant information on the Web as important and time consuming, and thus as a concrete problem. In this paper we introduce an integrated approach for Web information tracking using ontologies. The overall approach has been implemented within a case study carried out at DaimlerChrysler AG. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Dynamic R&D competition with memory

We consider a differential game of R&D competition and explore the impact of rivalry on the firms' investment behavior over time. Using closed-loop strategies and hence allowing for strategic interactions among rival firms we show that R&D spending by the individual competitor is increased due to competition in the race for priority. This leads us to argue that competitive encounters enhance R&D activities at the same time as increasing efficiency in the race for a technological breakthrough.     

Adolph Lowe's Methodological Alternative for Economic Research and Policy

A bstract . Social scientists and philosophers are engaged in a profound re-examination of the foundations of economic science. Among them the economist, Adolph Lowe , opened a new vista. First, in his Economics and Sociology: A Plea for Cooperation in the Social Sciences (1935) he argued compellingly for a unified social science. Lowe introduced there the concept of " instrumental analysis " which he greatly modified in On Economic Knowledge (1965) and applied to a major issue of contemporary economics in The Path of Economic Growth (1976). Instrumental analysis is intended to achieve a system of " political economics ," a theory for deriving one or more paths—a sequence of positions—over which an initial state of an economy can be transformed into a terminal state—a goal itself stipulated by political decision. Instrumental analysis is also used to determine measures of public control to achieve the behavioral pattern suitable to set and keep the system on the goal-adequate trajectory.     

Some results about averaging in stochastic approximation

The paper presents some results concerning the averaging approach in a general linear regression model in one dimension under suitable conditions about the martingale structure of errors. At first asymptotics of the primary and averaged estimators are discussed. Then it is shown that variances of estimators can be consistently estimated by appropriate integrated squared deviations functionals. Finally applications to the construction of confidence regions are considered.