Network Parenting in International Service Development

This paper explores theoretical and practical aspects (i.e. resources allocated, activities undertaken, actors/decisions involved) of corporate 'parenting' in the development of international service networks. A review of the relevant corporate strategy, supply-chain, networks and services management literature underpins a preliminary content (capability; market orientation) and process (top-down; bottom-up) typology of network parenting. This provides the structure for discussion of two telecommunications-sector case studies. Analysis of the data acknowledges the influence of generic network mechanisms (e.g. weak and strong social ties) but the parenting typology also highlights other mechanisms, the effectiveness of which appears contingent on specific parenting roles. The paper details these roles (labelled: governing; training; curating; facilitating) and makes some preliminary comments on the role trajectories (e.g. governing ↔ training) observed. The paper concludes with a discussion of possible directions for future work.     

Parenting With Style: Altruism and Paternalism in Intergenerational Preference Transmission

We develop a theory of parent‐child relations that rationalizes the choice between alternative parenting styles (as set out in Baumrind, 1967). Parents maximize an objective function that combines Beckerian altruism and paternalism towards children. They can affect their children's choices via two channels: either by influencing children's preferences or by imposing direct restrictions on their choice sets. Different parenting styles (authoritarian, authoritative, and permissive) emerge as equilibrium outcomes and are affected both by parental preferences and by the socioeconomic environment. Parenting style, in turn, feeds back into the children's welfare and economic success. The theory is consistent with the decline of authoritarian parenting observed in industrialized countries and with the greater prevalence of more permissive parenting in countries characterized by low inequality.     

Unionization Structures in International Oligopoly

We examine how competition in international markets affects a union's choice of wage regime, which can be either uniform or discriminatory. Firms are heterogeneous with regard to international competition. When unions choose their wage regimes sequentially, a discriminatory outcome becomes more likely when international competition increases. However, for intermediate levels a union may stick with a uniform wage regime even if the rival union adopts a discriminatory regime. When competition is sufficiently intense, both unions revert to the discriminatory regime. Paradoxically only in those latter instances all parties (consumers, workers, and firms) may be better off (each in aggregate) if all unions adopt a uniform wage regime. We conclude that union incentives to coordinate their wage regimes should then also become largest.     

Identifying Latent Structures in Panel Data

This paper provides a novel mechanism for identifying and estimating latent group structures in panel data using penalized techniques. We consider both linear and nonlinear models where the regression coefficients are heterogeneous across groups but homogeneous within a group and the group membership is unknown. Two approaches are considered—penalized profile likelihood (PPL) estimation for the general nonlinear models without endogenous regressors, and penalized GMM (PGMM) estimation for linear models with endogeneity. In both cases, we develop a new variant of Lasso called classifier‐Lasso (C‐Lasso) that serves to shrink individual coefficients to the unknown group‐specific coefficients. C‐Lasso achieves simultaneous classification and consistent estimation in a single step and the classification exhibits the desirable property of uniform consistency. For PPL estimation, C‐Lasso also achieves the oracle property so that group‐specific parameter estimators are asymptotically equivalent to infeasible estimators that use individual group identity information. For PGMM estimation, the oracle property of C‐Lasso is preserved in some special cases. Simulations demonstrate good finite‐sample performance of the approach in both classification and estimation. Empirical applications to both linear and nonlinear models are presented.     

Modeling Denomination Structures

Previous work on the denomination structure of currency treats as exogenous the distribution of transactions and the denominations held by people. Here, by way of a matching model, both are endogenous. In the model, trades in pairwise meetings alternate in time with the opportunity to freely choose a portfolio of denominations and there is a trade‐off between the benefits of small‐denomination money for transacting and the costliness of carrying a large quantity of small‐denomination money. For a given denomination structure, a monetary steady state is shown to exist. The model implies that too small denominations are abandoned.     

论管理学复杂性范式

运用复杂性理论分析了组织发展中的复杂性现象.在知识经济社会,组织发展过程中的不确定性和组织经营环境的不稳定性使越来越多的管理学家倾向于将组织系统理解为一个非线性系统和复杂性系统,因而应用非线性系统理论和复杂性系统理论研究组织变革与发展问题、解决和诠释组织变革与发展过程中出现的现象和新问题,成为管理学理论范式发展的一个显著特征.     

Complex Questionnaires

We study a principal–agent model in which the agent is boundedly rational in his ability to understand the principal's decision rule. The principal wishes to elicit an agent's true profile so as to determine whether or not to grant him a certain request. The principal designs a questionnaire and commits himself to accepting certain responses. In designing such a questionnaire, the principal takes into account the bounded rationality of the agent and wishes to reduce the success probability of a dishonest agent who is trying to game the system. It is shown that the principal can construct a sufficiently complex questionnaire that will allow him to respond optimally to agents who tell the truth and at the same time to almost eliminate the probability that a dishonest agent will succeed in cheating.     

Simple Efficient Contracts in Complex Environments

This paper studies a general model of holdup in a setting encompassing the models of Segal (1999) and Che and Hausch (1999) among others. It is shown that if renegotiation is modeled as an infinite‐horizon noncooperative bargaining game, then, with a simple initial contract, an efficient equilibrium will generally exist. The contract is robust in the sense that it does not depend on fine details of the model. The contract gives authority to one party to set the terms of trade and gives the other party a nonexpiring option to trade at these terms. The difference from standard results arises because the initial contract ensures that the renegotiation game has multiple equilibria; the multiplicity of continuation equilibria can be used to enforce efficient investment.     

Sustainability and Business in a Complex World

Sustainability is a topic of growing importance today in all aspects of organizational life. Businesses and managers are increasingly considering ways to incorporate a balance among economic, ecological, social, and cultural value creation into their business models. At the same time, the world is becoming exponentially more complex. Indeed, complexity theory and thinking are now apparent in academic and practice accounts of sustainability in business, as scholars and practitioners recognize the limitations of traditional reductionist approaches to systemic problems. To date, however, a more theoretical framing of sustainability lags behind accumulating practical evidence. The purpose of this article is to address this gap by developing a complexity‐based framework for understanding and managing sustainability in complex adaptive systems. We aim for simplicity, wholeness, and practicality in our approach, taking a qualitative rather than quantitative perspective on complex systems. Using several contemporary case examples, the article describes the important qualities of complex systems and develops them into a working framework that integrates principles and parameters of sustainability. In doing so, we create an approach to sustainability issues and dilemmas called “sustainability thinking.” The article concludes with more generalized sustainability action strategies for managers and recommendations for future researchers.     

Random Pooling Designs Under Various Structures

Balding et al. (1995) showed that randomizing over the k-set space yields much better pooling designs than the random pooling design without the k-restriction. A natural question arises as to whether a smaller subspace, i.e., a space with more structure, will yield even better results. We take the random subset containment design recently proposed by Macula, which randomizes over a subspace of the k-set space, as our guinea pig to compare with the k-set space. Unfortunately the performance of the subset containment design is hard to analyze and only approximations are given. For a set of parameters, we are able to produce either an exact analysis or very good approximations. The comparisons under these parameters seem to favor the k-set space.     

Managerial Delegation under Alternative Unionization Structures

This paper studies the effects of managerial delegation in a duopoly game under alternative unionization structures. Introducing managerial delegation in a framework with centralized unionization leads to incentives for sales, lower profits and higher consumer surplus as well as overall welfare. In contrast, delegating output decisions to managers in the presence of decentralized unionization produces opposite results unless unions are strongly employment‐oriented. Moreover, managerial delegation makes unionization structure neutral in relation to consumer surplus and overall efficiency. Finally, the timing of moves in the three‐stage game proves to be important for obtaining the above qualitative results under decentralized unionization.     

Optimal Fee Structures of Crowdsourcing Platforms

Crowdsourcing platforms specialize in hosting open contests and usually charge a percentage of the prizes as service fees. While prior research has studied the design of contests and the behavior of contestants, the strategy of a crowdsourcing platform has remained largely unexplored. We develop a game‐theoretic model of crowdsourcing services and find the optimal fee structure of a platform. We prove for the case of a single contest that the service fees should be an increasing concave function of task prizes and show that this also holds true for the case of multiple contests. We further find that for a platform with many users and tasks, there is an optimal ratio of the number of contestants and contests. Our research is one of the first to focus on the strategies of crowdsourcing platforms and our results have interesting managerial implications. We show that the linear fee schedule widely used in practice is not optimal and that a platform is better off lowering the fee rate for contests with high prizes. It is also in the best interests of a platform to develop both sides of the crowdsourcing market proportionally and keep the ratio of contestants and contests at the optimal level.      

Risk Analysis of a Gas-Processing Complex in India

ONGC's Hazira Gas-Processing Complex (HGPC) consists of facilities for receiving natural gas along with associated condensate from an off-shore field at a rate of 20 MMN M3 per day. After separating the condensate, which is processed in condensate fractionation units, the gas is processed through various steps to recover LPG and to reduce its dew point to less than 5 degrees C in order to make it suitable for transportation over long distances. The acid gas recovered during the gas-sweetening step is processed to obtain sulphur. The major products manufactured at HGPC therefore are lean sweet gas, LPG, NGL, and sulphur. The Oil and Natural Gas Commission awarded the assignment on Hazard Study and Risk Analysis of their Hazira Gas-Processing Complex (HGPC) to the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in association with the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO). The scope of this assignment covered a number of closely related and fully defined activities normally encountered in this type of work. Identification of hazards through the most appropriate methods, assigning frequency of occurrence of major unwanted incidents, quantification and assessment of probable damage to plant equipment, environment, human and animal life due to an unexpected event, and evaluation of various methods for reducing risk, together constituted the methodology for this assignment. Detailed recommendations aimed at reducing risk and enhancing reliability of plant and machinery were made. This article gives an overview of the assignment.     

Mixed Levels of Uncertainty in Complex Policy Models

The characterization and treatment of uncertainty poses special challenges when modeling indeterminate or complex coupled systems such as those involved in the interactions between human activity, climate and the ecosystem. Uncertainty about model structure may become as, or more important than, uncertainty about parameter values. When uncertainty grows so large that prediction or optimization no longer makes sense, it may still be possible to use the model as a behavioral test bed to examine the relative robustness of alternative observational and behavioral strategies. When models must be run into portions of their phase space that are not well understood, different submodels may become unreliable at different rates. A common example involves running a time stepped model far into the future. Several strategies can be used to deal with such situations. The probability of model failure can be reported as a function of time. Possible alternative surprises can be assigned probabilities, modeled separately, and combined. Finally, through the use of subjective judgments, one may be able to combine, and over time shift between models, moving from more detailed to progressively simpler order-of-magnitude models, and perhaps ultimately, on to simple bounding analysis.     

一类合资企业的最优股权结构

本文研究合资企业与母公司的关系,给出了一个理论模型,解释合资企业最优股权结构及投资结构,以及实现最优结构的前提条件。我们的结论是:在某些假设条件下,最优投资结构为1:1,并给出了在这种情况下的最优股权结构。     

企业员工复杂适应行为的模拟

基于复杂适应性系统理论,利用SWARM平台开发了基于多主体的群体行为模拟系统,应用激励学习算法和遗传算法实现员工在模拟中的学习能力与适应能力。用元胞自动机理论模拟员工的行为,并建立了群体系统模型,模型中的各个主体具有其自身的行为规则和策略,通过主体以及主体与其周围环境之间的相互作用和影响,表明了群体系统涌现出宏观层面上的特征。最后,基于SWARM平台,运用JBu ilder2005软件,开发了系统原型,给定一个初始的群体状态进行模拟,并对实验结果进行分析。