Overall corporate strategies for new product programs

The strategy an industrial firm elects for its product development program is increasingly viewed as a critical element of the firm's total corporate strategy. New product development and technology bear an integral relationship to an industrial company's strategic direction by helping to define the range of its possibilities [13]. This article reports the results of an empirical study whose purpose was to identify the major types of innovation strategies that firms pursue—strategy scenarios. A second purpose was to assess which strategies yield the best results.     

Commitment and the adoption of a common currency*

In contrast to Mundell's inquiry on the optimality of currency areas, this article aims to understand under what circumstances a Pareto‐dominant monetary union will be established. Using a multicountry overlapping generations model, we highlight gains from monetary union arising from reduced transactions costs and lower inflation. Despite these gains, countries acting independently will impose barriers to exchange through local currency restrictions, thereby creating transactions costs and providing an incentive for inflation. Therefore, the gains from monetary union are most likely to be lost without collective effort.     

Evidence on the equivalence of the strategic and extensive form representation of games

Our experiment tests whether strategically equivalent representations of games produce equivalent behavior when actually played. We examine representative members of the class of generic 2×2 extensive form games of perfect information and the equivalent strategic form games. Systematic differences exist between subjects’ choices in the strategic and extensive form representations. These differences cannot be attributed to differences in subjects’ ability to do backwards induction, in the salience of interpersonal preferences, or in optimization premiums between the two game forms. Instead, subjects in the extensive form are consistently more likely to allow the other player to make a meaningful choice.     

Sustaining Cooperation with Joint Ventures

Antitrust agencies and courts have expressed concerns that jointventures and strategic alliances between firms that competein other markets might serve to reduce the vigor of their competition.This article explores a mechanism through which a joint venturebetween two (or more) firms in one market can serve to facilitatecollusion in another market—even one unconnected verticallyor horizontally by costs or demand. In the models studied here,play in one market has the effect of altering players' beliefsabout their rivals' play in the second market. A joint venturein one market may provide a credible punishment mechanism forfirms colluding in another market. The joint venture may alsoprovide a vehicle for the transmission, between players, ofinformation in a way that helps cooperative types find eachother and collude in other markets. (JEL L12, L41, K21)     

Language and tourism

The sociolinguistic study of verbal encounters in touristic situations provides an opportunity to exanine communication between different linguistic groups under unusual circumstances: the high temporariness of the foreigners and the high degree of linguistic accommodation of the locals to them. This state of affairs stands in marked contrast to the tendency of guestworkers and immigrants who are less temporary and usually of lower status, to accommodate linguistically to the locals. While accommodation by locals is common to virtually all touristic situations, the degree of proficiency of locals in the tourists' language varies considerably and hence also the extent to which tourists are forced to accommodate linguistically. In an effort to organize the linguistic variation in tourism, a typology of tourist roles is used as the principal framework. The notion of “language brokerage” is introduced. The integration of sociological and sociolinguistic analyses is illustrated by incidental data from the literature on tourism and from fieldwork in Thailand.     

Trust in management: the role of employee voice arrangements and perceived managerial opposition to unions

This study examines the relationship between employee voice arrangements and employees' trust in management using data from the 2007 Australian Worker Representation and Participation Survey of 1,022 employees. Drawing on social exchange theory and employee relations literature, we test hypotheses concerning the relationships between direct and union voice arrangements, perceived managerial opposition to unions and employees' trust in management. Consistent with our predictions, after controlling for a range of personal, job and workplace characteristics, regression analyses indicated that direct voice arrangements were positively related to employees' trust in management. Union voice arrangements and perceived managerial opposition to unions were negatively related to trust in management. The article concludes by highlighting the study's implications for management practice and avenues for further research.     

HR practices from the perspective of managers and employees in multinational enterprises in China: Alignment issues and implications

China's significance as a destination for foreign direct investment (FDI) is a major factor in Asia-Pacific economic growth. This paper identifies important yet unexplored matters of human resource management (HRM) in multinational enterprise (MNE) subsidiaries in China. Specifically, the study explores the alignment issues between managers and employees with respect to their knowledge of HR practices, their experience of HR practices, and their perceived effectiveness of HR practices. Both interviews and a survey covering seven MNE subsidiaries operating in China finds a lack of alignment between managers and employees in each instance, for example, in their views of intended and actual HR practices and perceived effectiveness of these practices in the areas of performance assessment, recruitment and selection and career development. The implications of the differences for managers of MNEs operating in China are identified and discussed. The limitations of the study are acknowledged and areas for further study are also suggested.