The Informal Sector: A Review and Agenda for Management Research

Despite its connotations of non‐compliance, illegality, social exploitation and marginality, the informal sector is a substantial contributor to economic life in developing countries and, increasingly, in more technologically advanced activities. Its prevalence in developed economies has also become more widely recognized. In light of its significance, this paper reviews research on the informal sector from a management and organization scholarship perspective, rather than from an entrepreneurship view, as has been the focus until now. It sets out the atypical management practices that are inherent in the sector, explores the under‐researched relationship between formal and informal firms, and highlights definitional, conceptual and other limitations in extant research. As a step in resolving these issues, the authors present a conceptual model of formality and informality in a three‐dimensional framework that highlights an organizational infrastructure dimension, a view of firms operating along a continuum, and a multi‐level analytical context. Building on this, the authors detail opportunities for enhanced appreciation of in situ management and organizational practices in the informal sector and outline tools for pursuing a management and organization scholarship agenda. Overall, the authors argue that management scholarship has great potential to improve understanding of the informal sector, and that the informal sector provides opportunities to advance management theory, research and practice.     

Strategic Alliance Outcomes: a Transaction‐Cost Economics Perspective

Empirical research on strategic alliances has been limited because previous studies examined alliance outcomes, and the factors associated with them, from a single partner in a manufacturing alliance. Furthermore, many of these studies have been done from a transaction cost perspective and researchers have inferred opportunistic behavior, rather than directly measuring it and observing its actual relationship with alliance performance. Building on previous transaction cost theory and research, this study seeks to address these gaps by analyzing factors associated with both opportunistic behavior and alliance performance within a major service sector, namely the US healthcare industry. After controlling for asset specificity and alliance age, we found that partner trustworthiness and contractual safeguards were negatively related to opportunistic behavior. Furthermore, opportunistic behavior was negatively related to alliance performance, as hypothesized. Interestingly, mutual equity investments were found to be unrelated to opportunistic behavior, counter to transaction‐cost logic. These findings refine and extend the transaction‐cost economics perspective regarding our understanding of strategic alliance behavior and outcomes, and offer executives in service‐based industries some practical ideas for assuring favorable strategic alliance outcomes.     

魏思乐的“两面术”

表面上看来，总资产高达390亿美元的全球药业巨头瑞士诺华的做法似乎令人费解：一方面，这家公司在一些国家免费发送药物，但另一方面，当一些国家允许本国制药商生产诺华专利药的廉价版本的时候，它却又会拼命抗议。为什么会出现这种情况？身为医学博士的诺华CEO丹尼尔·魏思乐在接受《全球商业视角》采访时做出了解释。     

Incentives,Contracts, and Markets: A General Equilibrium Theory of Firms1

This paper takes steps toward integrating firm theory in the spirit of Alchian and Demsetz (1972) and Grossman and Hart (1986), contract theory in the spirit of Holmstrom (1979), and general equilibrium theory in the spirit of Arrow and Debreu (1954) and McKenzie (1959). In the model presented here, the set of firms that form and the contractual arrangements that appear, the assignments of agents to firms, the prices faced by firms for inputs and outputs, and the incentives to agents are all determined endogenously at equilibrium. Agents choose consumption—but they also choose which firms to join, which roles to occupy in those firms, and which actions to take in those roles. Agents interact anonymously with the (large) market, but strategically within the (small) firms they join. The model accommodates moral hazard, adverse selection, signaling, and insurance. Equilibria may be Pareto ranked.     

Complexity and Adaptivity in Supply Networks: Building Supply Network Theory Using a Complex Adaptive Systems Perspective*

Supply networks are composed of large numbers of firms from multiple interrelated industries. Such networks are subject to shifting strategies and objectives within a dynamic environment. In recent years, when faced with a dynamic environment, several disciplines have adopted the Complex Adaptive System (CAS) perspective to gain insights into important issues within their domains of study. Research investigations in the field of supply networks have also begun examining the merits of complexity theory and the CAS perspective. In this article, we bring the applicability of complexity theory and CAS into sharper focus, highlighting its potential for integrating existing supply chain management (SCM) research into a structured body of knowledge while also providing a framework for generating, validating, and refining new theories relevant to real‐world supply networks. We suggest several potential research questions to emphasize how a CAS perspective can help in enriching the SCM discipline. We propose that the SCM research community adopt such a dynamic and systems‐level orientation that brings to the fore the adaptivity of firms and the complexity of their interrelations that are often inherent in supply networks.     

The Role of Behavioral Responses in the Total Economic Consequences of Terrorist Attacks on U.S. Air Travel Targets

U.S. airports and airliners are prime terrorist targets. Not only do the facilities and equipment represent high‐value assets, but the fear and dread that is spread by such attacks can have tremendous effects on the U.S. economy. This article presents the methodology, data, and estimates of the macroeconomic impacts stemming from behavioral responses to a simulated terrorist attack on a U.S. airport and on a domestic airliner. The analysis is based on risk‐perception surveys of these two scenarios. The responses relate to reduced demand for airline travel, shifts to other modes, spending on nontravel items, and savings of potential travel expenditures by U.S. resident passengers considering flying domestic routes. We translate these responses to individual spending categories and feed these direct impact results into a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model of the U.S. economy to ascertain the indirect and total impacts on both the airline industry and the economy as a whole. Overall, the estimated impacts on GDP of both types of attacks exceed $10B. We find that the behavioral economic impacts are almost an order of magnitude higher than the ordinary business interruption impacts for the airliner attack and nearly two orders of magnitude higher for the airport attack. The results are robust to sensitivity tests on the travel behavior of U.S. residents in response to terrorism.     

A Systematic Uncertainty Analysis of an Evaluative Fate and Exposure Model

Multimedia fate and exposure models are widely used to regulate the release of toxic chemicals, to set cleanup standards for contaminated sites, and to evaluate emissions in life-cycle assessment. CalTOX, one of these models, is used to calculate the potential dose, an outcome that is combined with the toxicity of the chemical to determine the Human Toxicity Potential (HTP), used to aggregate and compare emissions. The comprehensive assessment of the uncertainty in the potential dose calculation in this article serves to provide the information necessary to evaluate the reliability of decisions based on the HTP A framework for uncertainty analysis in multimedia risk assessment is proposed and evaluated with four types of uncertainty. Parameter uncertainty is assessed through Monte Carlo analysis. The variability in landscape parameters is assessed through a comparison of potential dose calculations for different regions in the United States. Decision rule uncertainty is explored through a comparison of the HTP values under open and closed system boundaries. Model uncertainty is evaluated through two case studies, one using alternative formulations for calculating the plant concentration and the other testing the steady state assumption for wet deposition. This investigation shows that steady state conditions for the removal of chemicals from the atmosphere are not appropriate and result in an underestimate of the potential dose for 25% of the 336 chemicals evaluated.     

A Note on Air‐Cargo Capacity Contracts

Carriers (airlines) use medium‐term contracts to allot bulk cargo capacity to forwarders who deliver consolidated loads for each flight in the contractual period (season). Carriers also sell capacity to direct‐ship customers on each flight. We study capacity contracts between a carrier and a forwarder when certain parameters such as the forwarder's demand, operating cost to the carrier, margin, and reservation profit are its private information. We propose contracts in which the forwarder pays a lump sum in exchange for a guaranteed capacity allotment and receives a refund for each unit of unused capacity according to a pre‐announced refund rate. We obtain an upper bound on the informational rent paid by the carrier for a menu of arbitrary allotments and identify conditions under which it can eliminate the informational rent and induce the forwarder to choose the overall optimal capacity allotment (i.e., one that maximizes the combined profits of the carrier and the forwarder).     

The Surgical Scheduling Problem: Current Research and Future Opportunities

This paper reviews the general problem of surgical scheduling. We organize the literature based on the time frame or planning horizon of the schedule into six categories: capacity planning, process reengineering/redesign, the surgical services portfolio, procedure duration estimation, schedule construction, and schedule execution, monitoring, and control. We survey past work and suggest topics for potential future research in each of those areas.