Inducements,Impediments, and Immediacy: Exploring the Cognitive Drivers of Small Business Managers' Intentions to Adopt Business Model Change

Small business managers rely on judgment and heuristics when making critical strategic decisions. We explore this phenomenon, expanding the theory on cognition and strategy to explain the cognitive determinants of strategic decisions leading to small firm business model change. We integrate existing theories (entrepreneurial opportunity exploitation, cognitive resilience, prospect theory, behavioral theory of the firm, threat‐rigidity) into a framework explaining strategic intentions, based on managers' perception of business opportunity interacting with assessment of the external environment, current performance, and prior experience. The framework is empirically tested in the context of Canadian real estate brokerage industry, facing potentially major disruptive change.     

如何在中国汽车市场胜出

汽车制造公司要想在中国成为赢家，应对以下5点给予格外关注：加深对中国消费者对产品需求的理解：建立经济且适用的分销网络；引入先进品牌经验；保持合理成本结构；迅速与适当的伙伴建立相应的业务关系。     

评估“正确”的风险

正董事会会议中经常会传来这样的声音:我们所要冒的险值得吗?尤其是在战略对话中,这个问题看似简单、常见,但答案却不简单无论管理层和董事会是否意识到,风险隐藏于任何组织的战略里,潜伏在你所做的一切决定中:拓展新市场;引进新产品;购买生产线;筹建新厂房;投资未知的研发活动等。一个公司的战略方向和执行战略方向的能力是这次冒险之旅能否成功的关键。因此,风险评估应该是战略制定过程中不可或缺的一部分。     

Latin America after the global crisis: the role of export-led and tradable-led growth regimes

Is the ongoing economic slowdown in industrialized countries likely to impact Latin American growth negatively in the medium- to long-run? This paper considers various transmission channels that work through trade in goods and services, and finds econometric evidence suggesting that shrinking global imbalances may create problems for Latin America. Specifically, using panel data analysis, we find that the trade balance as a proportion of GDP is positively associated with Latin American economic growth over the period 1953–2009. We then develop a simple dynamic model to help explain our main finding through investment and saving behaviour.     

Corporate cash holdings and political connections

We examine the relation between corporate liquidity and political connections measured via lobbying expenditures. This is an interesting question as many of the motives for holding cash should be diminished by political connections. Results indicate a significant and inverse relation between cash levels and lobby expenses and that the marginal value of cash decreases with lobbying. Taken together, these findings suggest firms react optimally to the reduced benefits of cash linked to political connections and that the market recognizes the weakened benefits of cash. Overall, our research shows another way political connections can shape corporate policy.     

Hercules and Penrose

Penrose's The Theory of the Growth of the Firm is one of mostimportant modern contributions to the theory of the firm. Inthis paper we are concerned with her analysis of the HerculesPowder Company published separately in Business History Review.The Hercules paper is important because it provides a uniquecase analysis of Penrosean growth processes, and indeed becausethere is reason to believe that it may have had a strong influenceon the development of the book itself. Since Hercules is stilloperating today, it also constitutes an interesting living laboratorythat may allow us to explore whether it has continued to pursuePenrosean growth processes over the intervening years.     

ASYMPTOTICS OF IMPLIED VOLATILITY IN LOCAL VOLATILITY MODELS

Using an expansion of the transition density function of a one‐dimensional time inhomogeneous diffusion, we obtain the first‐ and second‐order terms in the short time asymptotics of European call option prices. The method described can be generalized to any order. We then use these option prices approximations to calculate the first‐ and second‐order deviation of the implied volatility from its leading value and obtain approximations which we numerically demonstrate to be highly accurate.