FIRM AND GOVERNMENT AS ACTORS IN PENROSE'S PROCESS THEORY OF INTERNATIONAL GROWTH: IMPLICATIONS FOR THE RESOURCE-BASED VIEW AND OWNERSHIP–LOCATION– INTERNATIONALISATION PARADIGM

Edith Penrose's The Theory of the Growth of the Firm proposed a process theory of growth based on the pursuit of knowledge by the firm and unconstrained by government. In her subsequent studies of foreign direct investment by large firms in developing countries, Penrose considers the firm and government as actors in the same growth process. This paper explores the development of Penrose's expanded process theory of growth from 1955 to 1973 in which she assumes that neither dual actors nor foreign expansion requires a new or special theory. This finding has implications for the resource-based view and the eclectic ownership–location–internationalisation paradigm interpretations of international business.     

From Experience: The Corporate Black Hole

There is a lot of creative potential lying dormant in corporations because too many managers fail to see innovation as a process to be deliberately managed. C. Joshua Abend sees innovation connected to virtually everything that happens—or doesn't happen—in an organization. He offers in this article ideas that managers can use to remove the impediments to increased innovation and productivity.     

Measuring Conditional Persistence in Nonlinear Time Series*

The persistence properties of economic time series have been a primary object of investigation in a variety of guises since the early days of econometrics. Recently, work on nonlinear modelling for time series has introduced the idea that persistence of a shock at a point in time may vary depending on the state of the process at that point in time. This article suggests investigating the persistence of processes conditioning on their history as a tool that may aid parametric nonlinear modelling. In particular, we suggest that examining the nonparametrically estimated derivatives of the conditional expectation of a variable with respect to its lag(s) may be a useful indicator of the variation in persistence with respect to its past history. We discuss in detail the implementation of the measure and present a Monte Carlo investigation. We further apply the persistence analysis to real exchange rates.     

MIMICKING THE WINNER LEADS TO WAR: AN EVOLUTIONARY ANALYSIS OF CONFLICT AND COOPERATION*

This note applies an evolutionary analysis to Skaperdas's (1992) static model of conflict and cooperation, in which agents are faced with trade‐offs between joint production and share competition. We adopt the stochastic evolution approach, and assume that each agent occasionally mimics the action of the winner of the stage. In contrast to Skaperdas's results that justify full or partial cooperation in productive activity, the long‐run equilibrium must exhibit total conflict; nobody engages in production at all.     

Bertrand versus Cournot revisited

Summary. Bertrand criticized Cournot's analysis of the competitive process, arguing that firms should be seen as playing a strategy of setting price below competitors' prices (henceforth, the Bertrand strategy) instead of a strategy of accepting the price needed to sell an optimal quantity (the Cournot strategy). We characterize Nash equilibria in a generalized model in which firms choose among Cournot and Bertrand strategies. Best responses always exist in this model. For the duopoly case, we show that iterated best responses converge under mild assumptions on initial states either to Cournot equilibrium or to an equilibrium in which only one firm plays the Bertrand strategy with price equal to marginal cost and that firm has zero sales. Received: December 11, 1995; revised version October 2, 1996     

Credible assignments can improve efficiency in laboratory public goods games

This paper reports an experiment investigating how assignments improve economic efficiency in a modified version of the standard voluntary-contributions mechanism. The experiment uses a non-binding message that makes common information assignments in the repeated game. A credible assignment is one actually followed by the participants. It turns out to be difficult to credibly assign the symmetric efficient outcome in four person cohorts, but we did discover one assignment that was credible in the last match of the evolutionary repeated game.     

对“4T1C”管理模式的剖析

文章对江苏油田物探公司创建并形成 4T1C管理模式的基本内涵 ,运作机制 ,实施效果等进行了分析探讨 ,指出建立一套先进的符合行业特点且具有实践基础的管理模式 ,是拓展企业发展空间的必然出路。     

FREE TRADE NETWORKS WITH TRANSFERS*

We investigate the network of bilateral free trade agreements (FTAs) in the context of a network formation game with transfers. In a previous paper we showed that without international transfers countries with different industrialization levels cannot sign an FTA, so that the global free trade network, in which every pair of countries signs an FTA, is not in general pairwise‐stable. In this paper we show that, even if the world consists of fairly asymmetric countries, the global free trade network is pairwise‐stable when transfers between FTA signatories are allowed. Moreover, it is a unique pairwise‐stable network unless industrial commodities are highly substitutable.     

EMERGENCE OF LEADERSHIP IN TEAMS*

This paper provides a simple model to explain the emergence of leadership in an unstructured team. Each agent has partial information about the productivity of the team. Each agent may invest a productive effort in one of two periods. If one agent voluntarily moves first and the other waits for the second period, and if the first‐move action successfully transmits his type, the first mover effectively exercises leadership in affecting the effort choice of the second mover. We prove that, if each agent holds stochastically independent information, leadership emerges with positive probabilities in Cho–Kreps stable outcomes.     

AN EXPERIMENT WITH ULTIMATUM BARGAINING IN A CHANGING ENVIRONMENT*

We present experimental results on the ultimatum bargaining game which support an evolutionary explanation of subjects’ behaviour in the game. In these experiments subjects interacted with each other and also with virtual players, i.e. computer programs with pre‐specified strategies. Some of these virtual players were designed to play the equitable allocation, while others exhibited behaviour closer to the subgame‐perfect equilibrium, in which the proposer's share is much larger than that of the responder. We have observed significant differences in the behaviour of real subjects depending on the type of “mutants” (virtual players) that were present in their environment.