An empirical investigation of technology strategy in computer software initial public offering firms

Strategic management of technological resources plays a significant role in the success of firms in computer-related industries. To expand the literature on technology management in growing organizations, this paper presents a study of the relationships among select technology strategy dimensions and perceived performance of initial public offering (IPOs) computer software firms. Using content analysis, technology strategy data were collected from the prospectus of 31 computer software firms who committed IPOs in 1996. Empirical analysis shows support for propositions that a firm's technology posture and executive level technology experience influence investor reactions to IPOs.     

Stock screening with use of multiple criteria decision making and optimization

A new method for the stock ranking based on the multiple criterion decision making and optimization is proposed. Two general criteria are used in the analysis. The first of them is based on the financial indices and may be treated as the criterion of firm's “health” or its financial performance. The second one is the two-criteria performance of firm based on the stock prices. It represents the firm's market success. The method rests on the selection of the stocks with a great correlation of the firm's financial performance and its market success. The local criteria are built in the form of the membership function of corresponding fuzzy subsets. Two different strategies for stock ranking and three most popular methods for local criteria aggregation are compared. As the example the values of financial rations and prices from database comprising the data of 162 firms from subsector of the biotechnology of US economy were used. It is shown that the proposed method makes it possible to select a small group of “good” stocks characterized by a great coincidence of firm's financial performance and its market success. The method rejects from the consideration all the “unsafe” firms, i.e., such ones that their market success is based rather on the public relations, rumors and other rather unreliable information. The method is addressed to those who prefer to select for a portfolio only the firms which demonstrate the closeness of their overall financial performance in the past year and success in the Stock Exchange in the following year.     

应计信息、机构投资者反应与股票错误定价

利用日内交易数据构建订单流不平衡指标,考察机构投资者对上市公司应计信息的即时反应情况及对股票价格产生的影响.结果表明,机构投资者在公司意外盈余为正的前提下,根据应计利润水平采取反转交易策略,买入(卖出)低(高)应计公司股票;受机构投资者交易行为的影响,低应计(高应计)公司股价在盈余公告后短期内上涨(下跌),在公告后长期则下跌(上涨),股价在整个区间内经历反转;通过构建套利组合研究发现,公司应计对股票盈余公告后长期收益的正向预测能力,不能完全被基于风险的资产定价模型所解释,说明机构投资者的交易行为造成股价过度反应,导致市场对公司应计项目错误定价.     

Survival and the introduction of new technology: A patent analysis in the integrated circuit industry

Utilizing a database containing all US patents issued to integrated circuit (IC) manufacturers from 1975 to 1994 we analyze a firm's decision to pursue a technology across varying levels of technological turbulence. We examine the effects of the value of a firm's technological advancement, the newness of its technology, and industry turbulence on the probability of failure. We find during periods of low technological turbulence, firms utilizing new technologies to create significant technological advances, face a higher probability of failure. During periods of high technological turbulence, firms using older technology to develop significant technological advancements face lower probabilities of failure.     

Technology Learning, Technology Strategy and Competitive Pressures

This paper develops some hypotheses concerning technological learning in firms. The hypotheses are examined using a detailed study of Europe's leading dedicated biotechnology firm, Celltech Ltd. It relates how the competitive pressures facing the company, and similar US companies, have changed over the past decade, and how Celltech's technology strategy has placed considerable emphasis on technological learning in order to maintain its competitive position compared with large, multinational pharmaceutical companies. Some of the features of technological learning are examined, including: its purposive character; its differential and complex nature; its internal and external components; the complementary nature of the company's technology and human resource development strategy; and the importance of organizational considerations.     

How Opportunistic Culture Affects Financial Performance in Outsourcing Relationships: A Meta-Analysis

Although a substantial body of research has analyzed the overall impact of outsourcing on firm performance measured in shareholder value, a major portion of the between-study variance remains unexplained. Asset specificity related to the outsourcing category (e.g., a business process versus information technology) alone can explain only some of the observed differences in stock market reactions. By integrating insights from transaction cost economics and outsourcing research, we first explain how expected buyer opportunism negatively affects the overall performance of the outsourcing relationship and ultimately, the buyer's own shareholder value. We further argue that this opportunism can be predicted by national culture. We test this hypothesis by applying meta-analytic techniques to compare 4216 outsourcing announcements of firms from 19 cultural backgrounds. The results reveal that an opportunistic culture, represented by a high level of assertiveness combined with a low level of institutional collectivism, is a highly statistically significant predictor of stock market reactions to outsourcing announcements. When further integrating the outsourcing category, the meta-analytic weighted least squares regression becomes a strong predictor of stock market reactions to an outsourcing announcement.     

公司证券投资、所有权类型与资本结构决策关系研究

考察了股市收益波动与公司资本结构决策之间的关系,以此分析上市公司是否存在违规举债炒股行为。研究发现:股市收益波动与公司负债水平正相关,即上市公司会根据市场收益情况举债进行证券投资决策,这种正相关关系在非国有企业更为显著;政府的监管政策效果不明显。研究结果证实了上市公司存在违规举债炒股行为,检验了政策效果并明确了监管的重点与方向。     

Trading on Twitter: Using Social Media Sentiment to Predict Stock Returns

Decision making is often based on the rational assessment of information, but recent research shows that emotional sentiment also plays an important role, especially for investment decision making. Emotional sentiment about a firm's stock that spreads rapidly through social media is more likely to be incorporated quickly into stock prices (e.g., on the same trading day it was expressed), while sentiment that spreads slowly takes longer to be incorporated into stock prices and thus is more likely to predict stock prices on future days. We analyzed the cumulative sentiment (positive and negative) in 2.5 million Twitter postings about individual S&P 500 firms and compared this to the stock returns of those firms. Our results show that the sentiment in tweets about a specific firm from users with less than 171 followers (the median in our sample) had a significant impact on the stock's returns on the next trading day, the next 10 days, and the next 20 days. Interestingly, sentiment in tweets from users with fewer than 171 followers that were not retweeted had the greatest impact on future stock returns. A trading strategy based on these findings produced meaningful economic gains on the order of an 11–15% annual return.     

Acquisition as a means for external technology sourcing: Complementary, substitutive or both?

This paper addresses the question of how a target firm's innovation activities relate to the acquiring firm's R&D characteristics, and more specifically, if the former substitute for, or complement the acquirer's activities. It investigates this question in three narrowly defined high technology industries by analysing the association of three R&D characteristics of acquiring firms with different measures of acquisition extent and content. The R&D characteristics referred to are: addressing R&D efforts, R&D outputs and absorptive capacity. Data was collected in each case for those firms whose combined sales revenue makes up 80% of the industry total and is used to test a set of hypotheses derived from extant literature. The findings confirm a substitutive relationship between acquisitions and acquirer research efforts as well as between acquirer and target patent output, whereas absorptive capacity is complementary to acquisition activities. The results reveal that acquirers target firms that hold a large number of patents in the fields where acquirer patenting is weak, and so address weaknesses in their own R&D output. This finding extends the extant literature on the role of external technology sourcing in the high technology context. Research findings are presented along with their implications and directions for future research.     

Product Design Awards and The Market Value of The Firm

Product design has increasingly been recognized as an important source of competitive advantage. This study empirically estimates the impact of effective design on the market value of the firm. We use a firm's receipt of a product design award as a proxy for its design effectiveness. Based on data from 264 announcements of design awards given to commercialized products between 1998 and 2011, we find that award announcements are associated with statistically significant positive stock market reactions. Depending on the benchmark model used to estimate the stock market reaction, the market reaction over a two‐day period (the day of announcement and the preceding day) ranges from 0.95% to 1.02%. The market reaction is more positive for smaller firms and for firms whose award winning products are consumer goods. However, a firm's growth potential, industry competitiveness, and whether a firm is a first time or repeated award winner do not significantly affect the market reaction.     

技术独立董事可以提高R&D产出效率吗?——来自中国证券市场的研究

与以往大量探讨研发投入影响因素的文献不同,本文从R&D产出效率视角,考察了技术独立董事制度对其的影响。结果发现,我国上市公司增加研发投入并未带来创新水平的显著提高。而聘请技术独立董事的公司能够提升R&D产出效率,并且当上市公司同时设置技术执行董事和技术独立董事时,R&D产出效率更高,但本文没有发现技术独立董事薪酬对R&D产出效率起到激励作用。本文的结论为我国政府和公司制定创新战略以及独立董事制度建设提供了参考价值。     

Addressing Supply–Demand Imbalance: Designing Efficient Remanufacturing Strategies

The management of remanufacturing inventory system is often challenged by mismatched supply (i.e., returned units, called cores) and demand. Typically, the demand for remanufactured units is high and exceeds the supply early in a product's lifetime, and drops below the supply late in the lifetime. This supply–demand imbalance motivates us to study a switching strategy to facilitate the decision‐making process. This strategy deploys a push mode at the early stage of a product's lifetime, which remanufactures scarce cores to stock to responsively satisfy the high demand, and switches to a pull mode as the product approaches obsolescence to accurately match the low demand with supply. In addition, the strategy further simplifies the decision‐making process by ignoring the impact of leftover cores at the end of each decision period. We show that the optimal policy of the switching strategy possesses a simple, multi‐dimensional base‐stock structure, which aims to remanufacture units from the i best‐quality categories up to the ith state‐independent base‐stock level. An extensive numerical study shows that the switching strategy delivers close‐to‐optimal and robust performance: the strategy only incurs an average profit loss of 1.21% and a maximum of 2.27%, compared with the optimal one. The numerical study also shows when a pure push or pull strategy, a special case of the switching strategy, delivers good performance. The study offers the managerial insight that firms can use simple, easy‐to‐implement strategies to efficiently manage the remanufacturing inventory system.     

Determinanten der Vorstandsvergütung

Using a novel, hand-collected data set covering all German non-financial firms listed in the Prime Standard of FWB (Frankfurt Stock Exchange), we examine determinants of executive compensation in German listed firms. We distinguish three potential determinants: firm characteristics, firm performance, and corporate governance characteristics. While we find that simple firm characteristics like size and industry affiliation together with time effects explain more than 60 % of variation in overall compensation, performance characteristics are economically inconsequential for the explanation of compensation levels. When we distinguish between widely held firms and firms with a large blockholder, we find that the latter grant compensation packages that are smaller, less sensitive to the firm’s stock market performance but more sensitive to the firm’s operating performance. Finally, we confirm that supervisory board characteristics also affect the level of executive compensation in German firms. Overall, our findings suggest that although the corporate governance environment in Germany has changed dramatically during the last decade, German listed firms are still exposed to high agency costs.     

The Effect of Product Development Restructuring on Shareholder Value

This article examines the effect of product development restructuring (PDR) on shareholder value. The results are based on a sample of 165 announcements made during 2002–2011. PDR announcements are associated with an economically and statistically significant positive stock market reaction. Over a two‐day period (the day of the announcement and the day preceding the announcement), the mean (median) market reaction is 1.63% (0.87%). The market reaction is generally positive regardless of the PDR purpose or action. Although the market reaction is more positive for higher R&D intensity firms, it is not directly affected by the firm's prior financial performance or whether the firm's primary PDR objective is to increase revenues or cut costs. However, the interaction between the firm's prior financial performance and its primary PDR objective is significant. For firms that are financial outperformers, the market reaction is more positive if the firm's primary PDR objective is to increase revenues. For financial underperformers, the market reaction is more positive if the firm's primary PDR objective is to cut costs.     

A motivation and ability perspective on engagement in emerging digital technologies: The case of Internet of Things solutions

In this study, we advance two mechanisms that lead firms to engage in emerging digital technologies, namely, the dominant coalition's motivation and its ability to deploy the resources needed to pursue such motivation. Building on the performance and strategic development, and on board capital literature streams, we construe prior economic performance as a proxy of the firm's motivation, and human and social board capital as proxies of the firm's ability, analyzing their effect on adding emerging digital technologies, such as Internet of Things solutions, to the firm's resource base. Longitudinal analyses on a panel of Fortune 500 manufacturing firms between 2002 and 2012 reveal that these mechanisms highlight two important aspects of firm influence that can shape its digital technology behavior, explaining the heterogeneity and variability in firms engaging in emerging digital technologies.     

Heterogeneous Firm Responses to Rising Teenage Wages

Substantial youth minimum wage changes in New Zealand between 2000 and 2007 raised teenage average wages by 5–10 per cent relative to those for adults. We use Statistics New Zealand's Linked Employer–Employee Database (LEED) to examine whether firms' teenage labour demand responses to these changes are greater for firms with higher teenage‐employment share. We find evidence that high teen‐employers reduced their teen employment relative to other firms and had lower survival rates over the period. However, firms that entered the main teen‐employment industries had higher teen‐employment shares than continuing firms. The results are consistent with endogenous technology adoption in response to non‐marginal changes in relative wages.     

Firms' R&D Cooperation Behavior in a Supply Chain

This study investigates firms' R&D cooperation behavior in a supply chain where two firms first cooperate in R&D investments and then decide the production quantity according to a wholesale price contract. By using a concept named contribution level that measures a firm's technological contribution to the R&D cooperation in the supply chain, we show that both firms can achieve win–win via cartelization only if their contribution levels are Pareto matched, i.e., when each firm's contribution level is comparable to its partner's. When spillovers are endogenized, we further establish that an increasing spillover always benefits both firms without any R&D cooperation, but only benefits the firm whose contribution level is relatively low when under R&D cartels. Finally, we show that the path of first increasing spillovers to be perfect and then forming a cartel has a higher chance of achieving the best mode in terms of profitability.     

股票市场中的外来者劣势研究

作为一个重要的研究主题,外来者劣势已经吸引了学者和实践者的广泛关注。但是,关于外来者劣势的研究大多集中于产品市场,而关于股票市场中外来者劣势的研究较缺乏。鉴于外来者劣势会影响公司在股票市场中的绩效,因而有必要理解并克服股票市场中的外来者劣势。因此,选取股票市场中的外来者劣势作为研究对象,以期在某种程度上丰富已有研究。 基于信息不对称理论和合法性理论,检验信息缺失和合法性缺失对外来者劣势的直接影响。借鉴已有研究,探讨制度质量、行业类型和交叉上市对信息缺失和合法性缺失与外来者劣势关系的调节效应。依据理论分析,提出研究假设并建立概念模型。选取2005年至2013年在海外上市的145家中国公司为样本,通过SPSS软件对相关假设进行实证检验。 研究结果表明,信息缺失和合法性缺失对外来者劣势产生显著的正向影响,即当在海外证券交易所缺失信息和合法性时,公司会遭遇外来者劣势;制度质量显著减弱合法性缺失对外来者劣势的正向影响,行业类型对合法性缺失与外来者劣势的正向关系具有显著的强化作用,而对信息缺失与外来者劣势的正向关系具有显著的弱化作用,交叉上市显著增强信息缺失和合法性缺失对外来者劣势的正向影响。 根据研究结果从弥补信息缺失和合法性缺失两方面给出降低外来者劣势的策略指导,建议选择制度质量较高的东道国和高科技公司聚集的交易所来弱化外来者劣势,研究结果对在海外上市时遇到外来者劣势的公司管理者具有一定的指导借鉴意义。     

The Economic Value of a Sustainable Supply Chain

The economic rationale to operate a global supply chain in a sustainable manner is developed. Arguments are made based on marketing, finance, and production theories that by engaging in socially responsible behavior the firm will increase sales, decrease costs, reduce financial risk, and increase profits, which will ultimately increase returns to the firm's shareholders. A model is developed of the mechanism by which modern production methods such as lean production and quality management result in sustainable corporate behavior that, in the long run, translates into higher stock valuations. The production effects cause marketing and financial risk effects that are complementary, and all three channels of influence synergistically result in higher stock values in the model. These effects also provide important benefits to other stakeholders of the firms including employees, customers, the environment, and the community. An important ethical issue in global supply chains is working conditions in foreign plants often leading to allegations of sweatshop labor conditions. This issue is used to illustrate how lean production practices can affectconsumers, employees, and financial risk. Conclusions from the sweatshop labor issue are shown to apply to other sustainability issues as well.     

Innovativeness as an Unintended Outcome of Franchising: Insights from Restaurant Chains

A growing trend in improving innovation outcomes is to go outside the firm's boundaries. One mechanism by which firms extend organizational boundaries is through franchising their channels. Yet, the effects of franchising on innovation outcomes have been overlooked in the literature. We propose that a firm's emphasis on franchising will affect its organizational innovativeness, conceptualized as product and process innovativeness, independently and with other firm characteristics—franchising experience, firm size, financial leverage, and slack resources. We find support for our hypotheses using a nonlinear seemingly unrelated regression model estimated using panel data from 38 U.S. restaurant chains between 1992 and 2005. The positive effect of the emphasis on franchising on product innovativeness is stronger for firms with high financial leverage, but weaker for firms with high slack resources. For process innovativeness, the effect is stronger for firms with high financial leverage but weaker for large firms, and for firms with high franchising experience and high slack resources. The findings indicate that a firm's emphasis on franchising has contingent effects on product and process innovation outcomes. Thus, franchising emerges as a competing mechanism (to alliances and joint ventures) that extends organizational boundaries and affects organizational innovativeness.