Exporting and Environmental Performance: A Firm‐level Productivity Analysis

The objective of this paper is to study empirically the relationship between export orientation and firms’ environmental performance from different perspectives of trade theory. On the one hand, productivity heterogeneity is analysed within the new trade‐theoretical framework. The approach followed is to determine firm‐level productivity components, including an environmental productivity indicator (as a performance measure) and taking as reference the Spanish food industry. On the other hand, from the traditional comparative advantage perspective, this study also develops an export performance model to evaluate the effect of technology, environmental variables and factor endowment on exporting. The results show greater environmental productivity and corporate efficiency for export‐oriented firms. Our findings also determine the positive effect on firms’ export intensity of environmental performance as a factor of specialisation and technology proficiency.     

When culture meets digital platforms: value creation and stakeholders’ alignment in big data use

Research on big data has highlighted that a crucial element to create value from data is the capability of aligning different stakeholders’ interests. However, it has not yet been investigated empirically how this process of alignment can be realized. We conduct a multiple case study on the two leading platforms involved in the online dissemination of cultural heritage – Europeana and Google Arts & Culture. Our findings reveal that a platform overtakes a rival one when it turns on multiple drivers of value creation in such a way that the drivers contribute to realigning the interests expressed by the stakeholders whose strategic objectives and beliefs were formerly divergent – or simply unrelated – to each other. This capability of realigning different stakeholders’ interests is independent of the level of industry-specific knowledge that the platform orchestrator has. The dynamics we document imply that Google has assumed a system integration role in the cultural ecosystem. This generates new trade-offs for museums in the way they generate value for the tourism industry. The paper enriches our understanding of what strategies digital platforms adopt to create value in big data contexts and provides a base to continue the investigation on other ecosystems driven by big data.     

COMPETITION AND THE STRATEGIC CHOICE OF MANAGERIAL INCENTIVES: THE RELATIVE PERFORMANCE CASE

We investigate how market competition affects the incentive to adopt a non‐profit‐maximizing behaviour. The analysis is developed in a strategic delegation framework in which owners delegate output decisions to managers interested in firm's relative performance. We study how the optimal delegation scheme is affected by market concentration and the elasticity of market demand. We prove that the distortion from a profit‐maximizing rule decreases as market becomes less concentrated, while it increases as demand becomes more elastic. Finally, we discuss the impact of market competitiveness on the welfare‐enhancing ability of delegation contracts.     

Cooperation support through the use of group decision systems

This article considers the development of the group decision support system (GDSS) field both from organizational and technological perspectives. The growing importance of teamwork, lateral coordination, and activities integration inside modern business organizations is emphasized. Technological and knowledge specialization, quick transformation of business environments, reduction of response time, and so on, are some of the reasons that can explain the renewed relevance of teamwork. Also, the development of information technology (IT) is analyzed in relation to the role it is assuming in supporting group activities. Research in the GDSS field is then introduced. A proposal concerning the identification of three different phases in GDSS studies is developed, ranging from decision rooms to distributed systems. Each phase shows distinctive research topics and application fields, together with different organizational goals. Results of these developments are the growth of potential application areas of GDSS tools. These theoretical considerations, together with empirical experiences coming from the study of a real manufacturing environment (an IBM plant where group cooperation plays a fundamental role for production efficiency), constitute the basis for a research GDSS prototype (GROUPS). Prototype features are designed to support executives in facing production‐planning problems through an improvement in communications and in knowledge representation.     

Product differentiation,price discrimination and collusion

The existing literature which analyses the relationship between the product differentiation degree and the sustainability of a collusive agreement on price assumes that firms cannot price discriminate, and concludes that there is a negative relationship between the product differentiation degree and the critical discount factor. This paper, in contrast, assumes that firms are able to price discriminate. Within the Hotelling framework, three different collusive schemes are studied: perfect collusion on discriminatory prices; perfect collusion on a uniform price; collusion not to discriminate. We obtain that the critical discount factor of the first and the third collusive scheme does not depend on the product differentiation degree, while the critical discount factor of the second collusive scheme depends positively on the product differentiation degree. Moreover, we show that imperfect collusion is more difficult to sustain than perfect collusion.     

The rise and fall of WebTrust

While prior research mainly focused on the impact of third-party-certified web assurance seals on consumers' perceptions and purchasing behaviors, little research has been conducted on the managerial decision-making process about the selection, implementation, and the abandonment of such seals. Of particular interest here is the WebTrust seal, jointly developed by the AICPA and the CICA. We take a qualitative case study approach to understand the motivations and rationale of a large North American telecommunications firm's management behind the decisions about the selection, implementation, and abandonment of its WebTrust seal. Our case firm was one of the first to obtain the seal on its online shopping website. Semi-structured interview results suggest that the implementation and the subsequent abandonment of WebTrust may be explained by several theoretical frameworks — the managerial accounting perspective, organizational slack theory, innovation theory, and institutional theory. First, the case firm's leader attitude in innovation, its extra resources available, coupled with the endorsement of the accounting profession led to the implementation of WebTrust. Second, when the benefits of WebTrust versus its costs were questioned and other companies increasingly abandoned the seal, our case firm decided to follow this trend.     

R&D intensity of investment across Europe before and after the crisis

In this paper we investigate the comovements between the R&D intensity of private investment and GDP growth in different European Union (EU) areas over the period 1999–2014. Our empirical analysis shows that only core countries display a common countercyclical mechanism leading to an increased intensity of R&D over prolonged downturns. The lack of an effective countercyclical pattern of R&D intensity over the evolution of GDP growth in periphery countries makes this area highly vulnerable to persistent recessions, with potentially harmful consequences for long‐term growth. For recent EU members the evidence of acyclicality should be evaluated in the light of the catching‐up process still at work in this area. Our analysis suggests that any successful EU innovation policy should not disregard the potential divergence in R&D performance due to the dispersion of the countercyclical properties of the investment intensity in productivity enhancing activities in the different EU areas.     

Knowledge misappropriation risks and contractual complexity in entrepreneurial ventures’ non-equity alliances

Small Business Economics - This paper explores the role of anticipated knowledge misappropriation risks in contract design in non-equity alliances involving high-tech entrepreneurial ventures. We...     

Firm Size and Cooperation: The Determinants of Cooperative Agreements in Information Technology Industries

This paper aims to shed light on factors that lead firms to resort to collaborative ventures. Specific attention is devoted to the role of firm size. The study relies on an extensive econometric analysis of a representative sample of firms in three Information Technology industries (semiconductor, data processing, and telecommunications). Data relating to the number and type of agreements concluded by firms, provided by the ARPA database developed at Politecnico di Milano, are correlated with firm–, industry– and country–specific variables. The findings of the econometric estimates point to the importance of firm size, scope of activity within the industries considered, diversification in related industries, and, to a less extent, degree of internationalization in explaining use of agreements. Moreover, the study provides preliminary evidence in support of a complementary relation between interfirm linkages and R&D expenditures. A positive correlation with growth rates also seems to emerge. In contrast, the s regarding the relation between internal capital expenditures and recourse to agreements are mixed.     

Firm size and the adoption of flexible automation

Data on the diffusion of flexible automation systems in the Italian metalworking industry are used to point out the role of size for the adoption of complex, systemic innovations. Plant and firm sizes turn out to be positively correlated to adoption rates. Moreover, adoption is more likely, ceteris paribus, in plants which are part of large industrial groups. This pattern applies in general, and is particularly remarkable for more advanced solutions. In this light, guidelines for industrial policies that focus on financial support, the diffusion of industrial standards, and the correction of asymmetries in the availability of know-how and skills are proposed.Financial support for this paper was provided by the Ministero della Pubblica Istruzione (MPI 40% research funds). Grants from the Fondazione Mauro and the CNR research project Tecnologie Meccaniche are also acknowledged. The research took advantage of the FLAUTO database, set up at the Laboratorio di Economia dei Processi di Automazione, MIP-Politecnico di Milano.