Disentangling the role of knowledge similarity on the choice of alliance structure

This paper examines the effect of knowledge similarity on the choice of alliance structure in the biotechnology industry. Knowledge similarity between two alliance partners has implications for both integrating and protecting knowledge. Alliance partners have incentives to select the alliance structure that maximizes efficiency in integrating knowledge. Likewise, alliance partners have incentives to select the alliance structure that protects appropriable knowledge. We draw upon the arguments of the knowledge accessing theory and causal ambiguity perspectives as well as the transaction cost economics perspective to predict the role of knowledge similarity on the choice of alliance structure. We empirically test the role of technological overlap and technological component on alliance structures-equity based versus non-equity based. The empirical results show that as technological overlap increases and technological component exists, the probability of equity based alliance structure increases.     

我国A股市场的模糊性溢价——基于日内高频数据的分析

基于Izhakian(2020)不确定性概率分布下的预期效用理论框架,本文实证研究了我国A股市场的模糊性溢价问题。利用上证综指的日内高频收益数据估计日收益率分布,以月度内日收益率分布的波动性衡量月度市场模糊性,并对模糊性-风险-收益的权衡关系进行实证检验。结果发现:(1)我国A股市场存在时变的模糊性,其模糊性溢价不总是正数,而是依赖于投资者对市场的预期;(2)模糊性溢价和风险溢价受到市场预期的影响,好的市场预期有正的模糊性溢价(模糊厌恶)和负的风险溢价(风险爱好),不好的市场预期有负的模糊性溢价(模糊爱好)和正的风险溢价(风险厌恶)。这些发现不同于当前文献中的许多结果,可以很好地解释市场中的"追涨杀跌"现象。     

Inventory control under different forms of uncertainty: Ambiguity and stochastic variability

Inventory decision makers routinely face ambiguity due to the psychological awareness that there is unknown information about salient events that is knowable in principle. Researchers on inventory control behavior in the face of uncertainty have primarily focused on uncertainty due to stochastic variability. However, most decision situations in the naturally occurring world involve both forms of uncertainty—ambiguity and stochastic variability. We report the results of two experiments that partial out the effects of ambiguity and stochastic variability by orthogonal manipulation of these two forms of uncertainty in a newsvendor task. Contrary to established mathematical models of decision making under uncertainty, increased ambiguity results in increased mean absolute percentage error, and a corresponding decrease in profit. We also find a systematic bias toward underordering associated with increased ambiguity, which is over and above the bias associated with increased stochastic variability. We do not see evidence for learning with repeated play, so that the effects of induced ambiguity appear to persist. Finally, based on our findings, we suggest measures that managers can use to ameliorate the effects of ambiguity.     

顾客参与服务创新与创新绩效的关系研究——基于顾客知识转移视角的理论综述与模型构建

通过对相关文献的梳理,界定了顾客参与服务创新和知识转移的内涵,并分析了顾客参与知识转移的理论基础。重点对知识转移在顾客参与新服务开发过程和创新绩效之间可能的中介机制进行了文献综述,并探讨了因果模糊性和知识冲突在顾客参与、知识转移以及创新绩效改善关系中的调节作用。最后,基于权变管理的视角,构造了以知识转移为中介机制的顾客参与服务创新和创新绩效关系的理论模型,并指出了研究的不足和未来的研究方向。     

跨国公司全球学习——新角度审视跨国公司

全球经济环境正日益显现出动态、复杂、不确定性特征,顺应这一特征,全球学习能力成为跨国公司赢得竞争优势的关键。全球学习过程主要通过各子公司自主灵活的学习,创造新知识,并迅速有效地在整个跨国公司内部进行传递与整合来实现。本文着重分析了跨国公司海外子公司角色的转变,跨国知识流动的基本模式,以及影响流动的主要因素,进而指出跨国网络结构是支持其全球学习行为的组织选择。本文认为,与传统的跨国公司理论相比,全球学习理论对跨国公司行为的新变化更具解释力,也能够为应对经济全球化的中国企业带来新的启示。     

Enriching Absorptive Capacity through Social Interaction

Absorptive capacity is frequently highlighted as a key determinant of knowledge transfer within multinational enterprises. But how individual behaviour translates into absorptive capacity at the subsidiary level, and how this is contingent on subsidiaries' social context, remains under‐addressed. This not only limits our understanding of the relationship between individual‐ and organizational‐level absorptive capacity, but also hampers further research on potentially relevant managerial and organizational antecedents, and limits the implications we can draw for practitioners who seek to increase their organization's capacity to put new knowledge to use. To address this shortcoming we conduct an in‐depth comparative case study of a headquarters‐initiated knowledge transfer at two subsidiaries of the same multinational enterprise. The findings demonstrate that social interaction is a prerequisite for subsidiary absorptive capacity as it enables employees to participate in the transformation of new knowledge to the local context and the development of local applications. The findings also illustrate how organizational conditions at the subsidiary level can impact subsidiary absorptive capacity by enabling or constraining local interaction patterns. These insights contribute to the absorptive capacity literature by demonstrating the scale and scope of social interaction as a key link between individual‐ and organizational‐level absorptive capacity.     

组织结构对组织学习与知识转化关系影响研究

创新依赖于组织学习。但是,知识如果没有在组织中被充分的分享,那么它的作用是有限的。即,为了实现知识的转化,知识分享的支持系统——有效的组织结构必须存在。本文通过组织学习的角度,探讨组织学习与知识转化的关系,以及组织结构的障碍在其中如何发挥作用。     

Public Perception of Uncertainties Within Climate Change Science

Climate change is a complex, multifaceted problem involving various interacting systems and actors. Therefore, the intensities, locations, and timeframes of the consequences of climate change are hard to predict and cause uncertainties. Relatively little is known about how the public perceives this scientific uncertainty and how this relates to their concern about climate change. In this article, an online survey among 306 Swiss people is reported that investigated whether people differentiate between different types of uncertainty in climate change research. Also examined was the way in which the perception of uncertainty is related to people's concern about climate change, their trust in science, their knowledge about climate change, and their political attitude. The results of a principal component analysis showed that respondents differentiated between perceived ambiguity in climate research, measurement uncertainty, and uncertainty about the future impact of climate change. Using structural equation modeling, it was found that only perceived ambiguity was directly related to concern about climate change, whereas measurement uncertainty and future uncertainty were not. Trust in climate science was strongly associated with each type of uncertainty perception and was indirectly associated with concern about climate change. Also, more knowledge about climate change was related to less strong perceptions of each type of climate science uncertainty. Hence, it is suggested that to increase public concern about climate change, it may be especially important to consider the perceived ambiguity about climate research. Efforts that foster trust in climate science also appear highly worthwhile.     

Productive organizational energy mediates the impact of organizational structure on absorptive capacity

The ability of an organization to cope with radical technological change is regarded to be heavily dependent on its ability to absorb and apply knowledge from its environment. This study investigates the role of organizational structure in driving absorptive capacity and uncovers the role of the emergent phenomenon of organizational energy as the enabler of this relationship. A field study was conducted among firms that are challenged by the disruptive nature of Cloud computing. Our results show that organizational design affects the degree of mobilization of an organization's affective, cognitive and behavioral resources, which in turn influence the effectiveness of learning processes related to the absorption and exchange of knowledge within the organization. Furthermore, they reveal the positive relationship between the enactment of absorptive capacity and the successful adoption of Cloud technology for incumbent firms. The findings contribute to our understanding of the micro-foundations of absorptive capacity and how positive organizational phenomena facilitate effective adoption and implementation of emerging technologies.     

An Examination of the Relationship Between Absorptive Capacity and Organizational Learning,and a Proposed Integration

Since its inception, the concept of absorptive capacity has been closely linked with notions of organizational learning. Yet the precise nature of the relationship between these two concepts has never been established. This relationship is examined in a variety of ways, and it is suggested that the literature on these two concepts shares a conceptual affinity which needs to be delineated. It is suggested that absorptive capacity (a dynamic capability) is a concrete example of organizational learning that concerns an organization's relationship with new external knowledge. Using the 4I Model for organizational learning ( Crossan, M.M., Lane, H.W. and White, R.E. (1999 ). An organizational learning framework: from intuition to institution. Academy of Management Review, 24, 522–537) and Zahra and George's conceptualization of absorptive capacity ( Zahra, S.A. and George, G. (2002 ). Absorptive capacity: a review, reconceptualization, and extension. Academy of Management Review, 27, 185–203), this paper proposes an integration of the two concepts.     

Management illusions and biases: Their impact on strategic decisions

Strategic decision-making often involves a great deal of uncertainty and ambiguity. Because managers are subject to ‘bounded rationality’ their cognitive processes may result in systematic decision biases. This paper summarizes research in the areas of cognitive psychology and behavioural decision theory dealing with human cognitive biases which may influence strategic decision-making. Examples of the probable operation of these biases in strategy formulation are given and conjectures about specific decision errors resulting from the biases are offered.     

On the Smooth Ambiguity Model: A Reply

We find that Epstein's (2010) Ellsberg‐style thought experiments pose, contrary to his claims, no paradox or difficulty for the smooth ambiguity model of decision making under uncertainty developed by Klibanoff, Marinacci, and Mukerji (2005). Not only are the thought experiments naturally handled by the smooth ambiguity model, but our reanalysis shows that they highlight some of its strengths compared to models such as the maxmin expected utility model (Gilboa and Schmeidler (1989)). In particular, these examples pose no challenge to the model's foundations—interpretation of the model as affording a separation of ambiguity and ambiguity attitude or the potential for calibrating ambiguity attitude in the model.     

Dein Markt,das unbekannte Wesen: Zum Umgang mit Marktunsicherheit als Kern des Entrepreneurial Marketing

Even if marketing in the entrepreneurial context has been regarded as a central issue, knowledge about the characteristics of marketing in venture and growth phases of firms is still scarce in both the entrepreneurship and the marketing literature. With regard to current research results on market uncertainty in the entrepreneurial context, this article proposes a characteriziation of entrepreneurial marketing as a management function that has the task of coping with and thereby controlling uncertainty in entrepreneurial situations. To this end the discussion draws on the cognition-based concept of effectuation in order to show how this control-based logic adds value in coping with liabilities of new firms as opposed to its complement, prediction-based causal logic.     

Task partitioning in new product development teams: A knowledge and learning perspective

R&D alliances and outsourcing elements of the new product development process are now commonplace practices among many firms. However, little previous work has examined how these organizational choices influence project knowledge and learning. Based on a comparison of three new product development projects in the software industry, this paper examines how task partitioning in the project influences learning and knowledge development within the firm. The paper suggests that internal development projects encourage synthetic learning and development of architectural and tacit knowledge; in contrast, outsourcing and joint ventures encourage analytic learning and development of component and explicit knowledge.     

Overcoming Learning Aversion in Evaluating and Managing Uncertain Risks

Decision biases can distort cost‐benefit evaluations of uncertain risks, leading to risk management policy decisions with predictably high retrospective regret. We argue that well‐documented decision biases encourage learning aversion, or predictably suboptimal learning and premature decision making in the face of high uncertainty about the costs, risks, and benefits of proposed changes. Biases such as narrow framing, overconfidence, confirmation bias, optimism bias, ambiguity aversion, and hyperbolic discounting of the immediate costs and delayed benefits of learning, contribute to deficient individual and group learning, avoidance of information seeking, underestimation of the value of further information, and hence needlessly inaccurate risk‐cost‐benefit estimates and suboptimal risk management decisions. In practice, such biases can create predictable regret in selection of potential risk‐reducing regulations. Low‐regret learning strategies based on computational reinforcement learning models can potentially overcome some of these suboptimal decision processes by replacing aversion to uncertain probabilities with actions calculated to balance exploration (deliberate experimentation and uncertainty reduction) and exploitation (taking actions to maximize the sum of expected immediate reward, expected discounted future reward, and value of information). We discuss the proposed framework for understanding and overcoming learning aversion and for implementing low‐regret learning strategies using regulation of air pollutants with uncertain health effects as an example.     

Understanding innovation performance and its antecedents: A socio-cognitive model

Little attention in the previous literature has been paid to understanding employees’ factors that drive customer development knowledge and performance from the perspective of social psychology. Drawing on social cognitive theory, this study validates a research model that examines the above issue. In the setting of new product development across high-tech firms in Taiwan, this study postulates that innovation self-efficacy, role conflict, and role ambiguity influence innovation performance directly and indirectly via the mediation of customer knowledge development and innovation outcome expectation. This study contributes to the social science literature by applying social cognitive theory to the rarely explored area of innovation performance and by presenting an operationalization of role stressors (i.e., role ambiguity and role conflict) in the area. Lastly, managerial implications and limitations from the empirical findings are provided.     

企业知识内部转移:模式、影响因素与机制分析

知识是企业的核心资源,它只有在企业内部不断转移才能产生更大的价值。本文分析了企业知识转移的三种理论模式,以及影响企业知识内部转移的因素,并探讨了如何建立企业知识内部转移的机制。     

Brokering knowledge: Linking learning and innovation

This paper presents a model of innovation, knowledge brokering, that explains how some organizations are able to routinely innovate by recombining their past knowledge in new ways. While existing theories of organizational learning and innovation are useful, the links between them are crucial for understanding how existing knowledge becomes the raw materials from which individuals in organizations construct innovative solutions. This model develops these links by grounding processes of learning and innovation in the larger social context within which they occur. Using a microsociological perspective, this article draws together research spanning levels of analysis to explain innovation as the dissembling and reassembling of extant ideas, artifacts, and people. Previous research has suggested that firms spanning multiple domains may innovate by moving ideas from where they are known to where they are not, in the process creating new combinations of existing ideas. This paper more fully develops this process by linking the cognitive, social, and structural activities it comprises. Knowledge brokering involves exploiting the preconditions for innovation that reside within the larger social structure by bridging multiple domains, learning about the resources within those domains, linking that knowledge to new situations, and finally building new networks around the innovations that emerge from the process. This article also considers the origins of knowledge brokers as firms committed to this innovation strategy, the structural and cultural supports for the knowledge brokering process, and several obstacles to the process that these firms experience. Finally, I discuss the implications of this model for further research on innovation and learning, and the implications for other organizations seeking to establish their own capabilities for brokering knowledge.     

团队内社会网络质量、工作竞争对团队成员知识转移的影响研究

本研究以团队为对象,考察了在正式的工作关系背景下,当团队成员间存在工作竞争时,团队内社会网络对知识转移的影响.研究认为,反映社会网络质量的网络信任会促进团队内知识转移,而网络认知信任和网络情感信任对团队内知识转移具有不同的作用,其中网络情感信任的影响要强于网络认知信任.工作竞争具有调节这种影响的作用,并且对网络认知信任和情感信任的调节程度会有所不同.研究对所提假设进行了实证检验,并对结果进行了进一步解释,旨在进一步剖析知识活动的规律,从而为企业有效的管理知识提供指导.     

企业内部知识转移中个体中心度、吸收能力对绩效的影响

以往关于社会资本对企业内部知识转移影响的研究,通常提取一些基本的人口统计学特征作为控制变量,考察联系特征和结构特征对知识转移的影响,而对吸收能力的讨论却较少。本文将个体在社会网络中的结构特征和个体吸收能力结合起来,分别考察在情感网络和咨询网络中,个体的中心度以及中心度与吸收能力的交叉对个体绩效的影响。结果发现情感网络对个体绩效没有显著影响。在咨询网络中,个体出度对绩效有正作用,而且该作用依赖于个体吸收能力。