Knowledge, internationalization of the firm, and inward-outward connections

Even though outward operations such as exports and foreign investment have received most of the attention so far, the internationalization of businesses also includes activities that are inwardly oriented. Inward activities like purchases of machinery, the procurement of raw materials and semifinished goods provide opportunities for building relations with foreign actors. They also offer opportunities to learn about foreign trade techniques and ways of using various operation modes, and by active use of such knowledge companies should be in a better position to start or extend outward foreign operations. This paper presents a case study of the Norwegian company Moelven Industrier ASA and its operations in the Russian market. It shows that the creation and utilization of knowledge through inward-outward connections face many obstacles and that, in Moelven's case, the full potential of such connections was seldom realized.     

Customer satisfaction in European food retailing

Customer satisfaction and customer loyalty is becoming an increasingly important factor in modern retailing—a market characterized by slow growth and intense competition. Big non-European chains such as Walmart are already present in some countries and consider buying some of the retail chains in other countries, e.g. in the Scandinavian countries. This development will demand even more focus on customer satisfaction and customer loyalty in order to stay in business and may also demand that existing actors on the market place form new coalitions. Promising new partners may be identified, partly based upon measures identifying how potential partners are perceived by the customers. Based on results from the European Customer Satisfaction study, a comparative analysis of customer satisfaction in Europe is conducted. Some specific Danish results are shown and the relationship between customer loyalty, supermarket type and ownership structure is studied. The relationship between results after taxes and customer loyalty is documented.     

Einzelbesprechungen

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

On the Consistency of Merger Policy

This paper presents a way to get around the information problem facing outside analysts who want to scrutinize competition authorities' decisions. A formal model of how decisions are taken is applied to infer information that is available to the authorities but not to the outside analyst. If the information thus inferred from several decisions is incompatible, it is claimed that the policy executed by the competition authorities is inconsistent. A case study is presented of two recent decisions by the Norwegian Competition Authority on proposed mergers in the Norwegian insurance industry, indicating they most likely were mutually inconsistent.     

Why Give up Money for the Baltic Sea? – Motives for People's Willingness (or Reluctance) to Pay

A contingent valuation survey about a reduction of the eutrophication of the Baltic Sea provided data about respondents' motives for their answers to the willingness to pay question. A categorization of the motives allowed an identification of protesters against the valuation scenario. The categorization also illustrated that a teleological ethical perspective is not shared by all respondents and that some respondents perceive human indirect use of ecosystems.     

Wage Formation and Bargaining Power during the Great Depression*

We present an econometric analysis of wage behaviour in Norway during the interwar years. The analysis is based on a panel of manufacturing industry data using GMM estimation methods. Our empirical analysis shows that wage formation in the interwar period can be understood with the help of modern bargaining theory and well‐established wage equations. We estimate a long‐run wage curve that has all the standard features of being homogeneous in prices, proportional to productivity, and with a negative unemployment elasticity. We also present some new Monte Carlo evidence on the properties of the estimators used.     

Anchoring and cognitive ability

We find that the actual willingness to pay for various consumer goods can be manipulated by an uninformative anchor, replicating Ariely et al. (2003). We furthermore demonstrate that the anchoring effect decreases but does not vanish with higher cognitive ability.     

Is There a Hold‐up Problem?

We report on a hold‐up experiment in which unilateral investment is followed by bilateral bargaining according to Nash’s demand game. Without communication, investment is low and coordination is poor. Unilateral communication facilitates coordination, but not perfectly. Successful coordination predominantly entails “fair” outcomes. Perhaps surprisingly, sellers (investors) do at least as well under buyer communication as under seller communication.