‘Joined-Up’ Policy-Making: Group Decision and Negotiation Practice

Creating public value is problematic in a world of austerity. Joint private and public, and public-public, projects are now an established way of creating public value. Establishing joint goals within a context of different ‘own goals’ is important and difficult. A particular issue facing many organisations in seeking to negotiate joint goals in a collaborative project is that of getting all the key managers from both organisations together over enough of a sequence of meetings for agreements to be meaningful and owned by those who will deliver the project. The development of such goals can be significantly enhanced by (1) using a Group Decision Support System (GDSS) and (2) using a powerful conceptualisation of a goals framework comprising: a goals system; ‘core goals’; ‘meta-goals’; ‘negative’ goals; and ‘above and beyond’ goals. In the case of negotiating joint goals the use of a GDSS has increased productivity to such an extent that powerful negotiated agreements can be achieved with all key managers in the room in as little as one meeting. The combination of high productivity, anonymity, and the structuring of the data has also facilitated the uncovering of ‘negative goals’, and the development of ‘meta-goals’ and ‘above and beyond’ goals. This paper uses three real cases to illustrate the significance of a Group Support System’s contribution and to illustrate the different types of goals. In doing so the paper suggests that facilitating such outcomes requires a carefully designed strategic conversation necessarily supported by a GDSS to enable group decision and negotiation in practice. Two of the cases are from public-public collaboration in the health field, and the other from a private-public setting.     

Are maximizers blind to the future? When today’s best does not make for a better tomorrow

A number of studies have demonstrated that a maximizer’s tendency to settle for only the best choice option leads them to discard the past and feel dissatisfied in the present. The current study, however, investigates whether maximizers’ quests for perfection blinds them toward the future. A study of 522 respondents drawn from a probabilistic sample of the US population examines a series of hypotheses related to how a maximizer views the future. Consistent with the resource slack theory (i.e., the overestimation of the amount of time that will be available in the future), maximization tendencies diminish the consumer’s ability to look ahead to the future, both directly and indirectly, through the intervening roles of both regret and polychronicity (i.e., multitasking). Maximizers do not estimate future task demand accurately as they associate strong feelings of regret with their previous choices and dismiss them as poor decisions. Additionally, low polychronicity hinders their capacity to set aside sufficient time resources to be devoted to future tasks when engrossed in a current task. Implications for managers and researchers are discussed before concluding with further research avenues and limitations.     

Internet Tool Use and Virtual Co-Creation in the Brazilian Construction Industry: Organizational Practices and Consumers' Personal Values

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes the use of Internet tools and virtual co-creation initiatives of firms ranked among the top 100 in the Brazilian building industry. The research was based on observation of the companies' websites and of 200 posts written by participants in a collaborative building project. Websites were observed for the way online interaction tools were aligned to their declared goals. Posts were analyzed using discourse analysis and coded on the basis of the list of values. Results show that only three companies use online tools for the purpose of co-creation and that customer enjoyment is the primary driver of co-creation.     

Technology transfers and optimal entry strategies for the multinational firm

This paper analyses the choice of full versus shared ownership of the production affiliate made by Italian multinationals in Asia, based on an entirely new firm-level dataset, constructed by the author. The decision to internalise production, rather than relying on a local partner, is driven by the threat of Dissipation of Intangible Assets, both at a theoretical and an empirical level. In particular, we show that full ownership is more likely to emerge in Asia for Italian firms endowed with better technology and human capital, or belonging to high tech sectors.     

The Effects of Team Flexibility and Emotional Intelligence on Software Development Performance

As both business and technological environments change at an increasing rate, flexibility and emotional intelligence have become critical issues for project management. Even though previous research has examined the relationship between team flexibility and team performance and that between the emotional intelligence of teams and team outputs, there remains a gap in literature in respect to a holistic model. Accordingly in this paper, we examine the relationships among software team flexibility, emotional intelligence, and software project outputs (market success, speed to market, and the functionality of the new software product) using survey data from 86 software development projects. The results reveal positive a relationship between the diversity dimension of software project team flexibility and emotional intelligence. The first dimension of software team flexibility, team autonomy, positively affected market success, speed to market, and software functionality, whereas the second dimension, team diversity, positively affected only speed to market and software functionality. The emotional recognition of team members for both themselves and their teammates appears to be another important factor affecting the speed to market and functionality of the new software products. Managerial and theoretical implications of the study are discussed.     

Breakthrough innovation in international business: The impact of tech-innovation and market-innovation on performance

The literature suggests that the greater the perceived novelty of a firm’s products and markets, the greater the potential value to the user (Lepak et al., 2007). In this study we analyze the extent to which breakthrough innovation (both tech-innovation and market-innovation) has a positive impact on both economic and strategic export performance. Tech-innovation incorporates technological developments to improve customer benefits versus existing alternatives in the market. Our findings reveal that tech-innovation has a positive impact on the economic and strategic export performance of firms. This relationship becomes stronger when more human resources are available and the exporter becomes more oriented toward the importer. In less competitive markets, the positive relationship between tech-innovation and both types of export performance becomes even stronger.Market-innovation occurs when the product concept or benefits depart from serving existing or conventional markets. Market-innovation was found to be negatively associated with strategic export performance, as it requires major learning effort by importers. This suggests that to create value, exporters need to develop solutions jointly with importers. Overall, these findings suggest that value creation in terms of both tech-innovation and market-innovation needs to involve importers to achieve expectations, thereby leading to improvement in a firm’s short-term and long-term export performance.     

Narrow Replication of Yogo (2004) Estimating the Elasticity of Intertemporal Substitution when Instruments are Weak

This narrow replication exercise of Yogo (Review of Economics and Statistics 2004; 86 (3): 797–810) finds results identical to the original paper, and provides results on overidentification tests for specifications that do not suffer from the weak instruments problem. The null hypothesis of the Sargan test is rejected in several cases, in particular for US and UK quarterly data. When other combinations of instruments are used the null of the Sargan test is rejected again in several cases. These rejections cast doubts on either instrument validity or model specification. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Problem of the Monetary Realization of Profits in a Post Keynesian Sequential Financing Model: Two solutions of the Kaleckian option

In a Post Keynesian theoretical framework with sequential financing, two solutions to the problem of the monetary realization of profits are presented. Both of these are consistent with the Kaleckian view, according to which actual profits arise from the present expenditure of their anticipated amount. These two solutions form the basis for a theoretical reconsideration of the relationships among the creation of money, consumption, savings and investment.