Designing management control in hybrid organizations: The role of path creation and morphogenesis

Path-creating change in organizational form is proposed as an important element in achieving management control in hybrid organizations. Using case examples from large-scale projects in the architectural, engineering, and construction industry, as well as from joint ventures in the oil and gas industry, we highlight the role of mindfully synthesizing new organizational forms in the design of management control systems. A series of paradoxes is disclosed, in which attempts to achieve control through mimetic adoption of established management control techniques lead to reduced control. On the other hand, path-creating deviations from institutionalized practices, resulted in improved project and venture performance. It has been argued that the design of inter-organizational management control systems seeks to enable organizations to compete for resources and efficiency, and also to obtain institutional legitimacy. Institutional theory proposes that isomorphism permits organizations to obtain that legitimacy and explains their design. In this paper, we propose that path creation and morphogenesis, which deviates from isomorphism, is an additional consideration in explaining management control system design.     

Subordinate board structures

The board of directors is a flat governance structure where each director has an equal vote in determining the collective actions taken by the group. Yet, some boards choose to delegate authority for specific tasks to numerous committees, while others choose to create relatively few subcommittees of the board. We investigate the determinants of subordinate board structures, exploring both their benefits and costs. Using a sample of the S&P 1500 we find that subordinate board structures are positively related to board size and the proportion of outside directors, even after controlling firm characteristics such as complexity and ownership structure. Further tests indicate that these board structures can offset the negative associations that board size and the proportion of outsiders can have with firm performance. Yet, in firms with relatively small or insider oriented boards, where co-ordination problems among directors or social loafing may be less pronounced, we find that subordinate board structures are negatively related to firm performance. Categorizing committees as either monitoring or advisory, we find that both types of committees appear related to firm performance. Taken as whole, these results are consistent with the idea that subordinate board structures can be a costly remedy to alleviate problems that arise with larger, more outsider dominated boards.     

A framework for offshoring marketing processes in business-to-business marketing relationships

Outsourcing has been a prominent aspect of business strategies in the last three decades. Outsourcing of manufacturing processes is now complemented with outsourcing of various marketing process as well. More importantly, outsourcing to foreign locations — offshoring — has increased for marketing processes in recent years. In this context, the present paper develops a model that identifies the types of marketing interactions and processes that can be offshored in business-to-business markets. We suggest that the decision to offshore marketing processes and interactions depend upon the interaction process that is preferred and the importance of interaction process itself. Marketing interactions that are not critically important and/or those that can be performed through technology can be easily offshored. However, other marketing processes need to be examined in depth before being offshored. Implications for research and practice in the area of offshoring, as well as in the broader area of outsourcing, are also highlighted.     

Stochastic reaction functions in 2 × 2 duopoly

A reaction function is a contingency plan that specifies how a firm will react to a move made by its competition. This includes the classical Cournot reaction function. Our stochastic reaction functions are the rules by which firms revise their prior distributions on their competitors' sets of actions. The asymptotic stability of a class of stochastic reaction functions is examined in this paper. It is shown that there exists a class of reaction functions that are either asymptotically stable in the Cournot-Nash sense or asymptotically Pareto optimal. Our analysis does not rely on differentiability and other assumptions traditionally imposed in the literature.     

Unglittering Gold Schemes in India

International Advances in Economic Research -     

Does knowledge of finance mitigate the gender difference in financial risk-aversion?

We investigate the gender difference in financial risk aversion using a survey of finance professors from universities across the United States. We compare their actual portfolio allocations to that of respondents in the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF). We find that among highly educated individuals, women are significantly more risk averse than men. However, we find that when men and women have both attained a high level of financial education, they are equally likely to invest a significant portion of their portfolio in risky assets, suggesting that financial education mitigates the gender difference in financial risk aversion.