the education and development of managers for future decades a major report managers for the xxi century their education and development emanated from a landmark international conference in paris in june 1980 sponsored jointly by the american assembly of collegiate schools of business aacsb and the european foundation for management development efmd 1 the report was published in the fall of 1981 but thus far has received little notice from academicians although it culminated a 3 year effort management and management education in a world of changing expectations by the aacsb and the efmd to establish a frame work to prepare managers better for the forthcoming decades 2 in this article we present a personal interpretation of the ideas on management education that emerged from the paris meeting the various ideas on changes in the direction of management education are certainly worthy of widespread analysis discussion and consideration on the part of teachers researchers and educators in management a response that has not occurred up to this time

maritime oil freight flows to 2050 delphi perceptions of maritime specialists abstract this paper aims to synthesise maritime specialists perceptions of changing patterns of maritime oil freight flows to 2050 debate spans published maritime oil flows globally diverse drivers of future flows including economic growth shipping market changes and haul lengths a classic delphi study to explore the perceptions of likely trends and flows to 2050 recruited a panel of early career and established maritime specialists many with long term career commitments to this industry underpinned by market volatility and legislative uncertainty the perceptions of both groups coincided and were conservative local sourcing new arctic seaways and fossil fuel intolerance will tend to reduce oil freight work but perceptions of ship re routing to avoid for example emission control areas and piracy would tend to lengthen hauls in advanced industrial nations reducing energy intensities and diminishing social tolerance of fossil fuels imply gradually reducing maritime oil shipments however to achieve radical national commitments to carbon emissions reductions will necessitate specialist education for naturally conservative maritime professionals and vigorous oil import reduction policies to curtail domestic demand for oil shipments

optimal retail contracts with asymmetric information and moral hazard constrained joint profit maximizing retail contracts are derived when the dealer is privately informed about demand conditions before contracting with the manufacturer demand is increased by dealer promotion which is unobservable by the manufacturer consequently the manufacturer does not know whether to attribute a low level of sales to a decline in demand or to a lack of promotion we show that in general the optimal contract exhibits some form of resale price maintenance and quantity fixing the type of resale price maintenance and quantity fixing depends on how price and quantity affect the link between sales and promotion

a global survey of international business education in the 1990s this article presents the major findings of the fifth global curriculum survey of the academy of international business aib an examination of the status and trends in international business education around the world as of the early 1990s the survey s findings based on responses from more than 500 business schools encompass different goals and methods of internationalization international linkages and experiential activities organizational issues amounts of internationalization progress achieved and degrees of administrative satisfaction with progress achieved the overall conclusion is that considerable progress has been made but much more remains to be accomplished

the role of wages and auditing during a crackdown on corruption in the city of buenos aires abstract we study the prices paid for basic inputs during a crackdown on corruption in the public hospitals of the city of buenos aires argentina during 1996 97 we find a well defined negative effect on the measures used to capture corruption prices paid by hospitals for basic homogeneous inputs decrease by 15 percent during the first 9 months of the crackdown after this period prices increase but they are still 10 percent lower than those prevailing before the crackdown relative to the precrackdown period higher wages play no role in inducing lower input prices when audit intensity can be expected to be maximal during the first phase of the crackdown but have a negative and well defined effect when audit intensity takes intermediate levels the last phase of the crackdown controlling for fixed effects we find that the wage elasticity of input prices exceeds 20 these results are consistent with the standard model of bribes of gary becker and george stigler

resale price maintenance and collusion the article revisits the conventional wisdom according to which vertical restrictions on retail prices help upstream firms to collude we analyze the scope for collusion with and without resale price maintenance rpm when retailers observe local shocks on demand or retail costs in the absence of rpm retail prices react to retailers information and deviations from collusive behavior are thus difficult to detect by eliminating retail price flexibility rpm facilitates the detection of deviations but reduces profits and thus increases the short run gains from a deviation overall rpm can facilitate collusion and reduce total welfare when firms adopt it

competition risk and managerial incentives this paper examines how the degree of competition among firms in an industry affects the optimal incentives that firms provide to their managers a central assumption is that there is free entry and exit in the industry which implies that changes in the nature of competition lead to changes in the equilibrium market structure the main result is that as the intensity of product market competition increases as a result of greater product substitutability or greater market size principals unambiguously provide stronger incentives to their agents to reduce costs at the same time more intense competition also leads to more volatile firm level profits consequently managers incentives are positively correlated with firm level risk consistent with empirical evidence a decrease in the cost of entering the market has the opposite effect on incentives but still induces a positive correlation between risk and incentives

experiential knowledge and cost in the internationalization process using a behavioral approach this study identifies and delineates components of experiential knowledge in the internationalization process three hypotheses are developed and tested they center ar

vertical contracts in the video rental industry a large body of theoretical work has explored the channels through which vertical contracts can induce efficiency improvements however it is also important to study vertical contracts empirically in order to gain insight into the relative size of different types of efficiency gains in this paper i empirically analyse a contractual innovation in the vertically separated video rental industry prior to 1998 video stores obtained inventory from movie distributors using simple linear pricing contracts in 1998 revenuesharing contracts were widely adopted i investigate the effect of the introduction of revenue sharing contracts on firms profits and consumer welfare i analyse a new panel data set of home video retailers that includes information on individual retailers contract and inventory choices as well as rentals and contract terms for 246 movie titles and 6137 retailers in the u s during each week of 1998 and 1999 and the first half of 2000 a structural econometric model of firms behaviour is developed that describes the nature of firms contract choices estimates from this model indicate that both upstream and downstream profits increase by 10 under the revenue sharing contract for popular titles for less popular titles the effects can be even larger i also estimate that consumers benefit when revenue sharing contracts are adopted

the principal agent relationship with an informed principal ii common values in many circumstances a principal may have relevant private information when she proposes a contract to an agent we analyze such a principal agent relationship as a noncooperative game the principal proposes a contract which is accepted or rejected by the agent who for most of our analysis has no private information the contract is executed if accepted otherwise the reservation allocation takes effect this allocation may be determined by a pre existing contract which the principal by her proposal is attempting to renegotiate or it may simply be the no trade point in this paper we assume that the principal s information directly affects the agent s payoff before solving the game we discuss pareto efficiency with asymmetric information we define an incentive compatible allocation to be weakly interim efficient wie if there exists no alternative incentive compatible allocation that both parties prefer for all possible beliefs that the agent might have about the principal s private information type we show that any wie allocation is interim efficient ie for some beliefs the rothschild stiglitz wilson rsw allocation relative to the reservation allocation l is the allocation that maximizes the payoff of each type of principal within the class of incentive compatible allocations that guarantee the agent at least the utility he gets from a irrespective of his beliefs about the principal s type the equilibrium set of the contract proposal game consists of the allocations that weakly pareto dominate the rsw allocation thus there is a unique equilibrium outcome if and only if the latter is ie and the equilibrium outcome is the rsw allocation itself after characterizing the equilibrium allocations we study those that are renegotiation proof when either the principal or the agent leads the renegotiation we then compare our contract proposal game which is a signaling model with its screening counterpart we conclude by extending our results to the case in which the agent as well as the principal has private information under the assumption of quasi linear preferences

the role of exclusive territories in producers competition reprinted in cartels stephen salant ed the international library of critical writings in economics edward elgar reference collections

the principal agent relationship with an informed principal the case of private values we analyze the principal agent relationship when the principal has private information as a three stage noncooperative game contract proposal acceptance refusal and contract execution we assume that the information does not directly affect the agent s payoff private values equilibrium exists and is generically locally unique moreover it is pareto optimal for the different types of principal the principal generically does strictly better than when the agent knows her information equilibrium allocations are the walrasian equilibria of an economy where the traders are different types of principal and exchange the slack on the agent s individual rationality and incentive compatibility constraints

is there a relationship between a geocentric mind set and multinational strategy this paper operationalizes and tests relationships between a geocentric managerial mind set geographic scope and the structural and strategic characteristics of firms and industries relationships are tested using data from a survey of senior corporate international hrm managers of large u s based manufacturing multinationals an index of a geocentric mind set is found to correlate with geographic scope and various aspects of ihrm policy and practice however no relationship is found with measures of multinational strategy or organizational structure the paper concludes with a speculative hypothesis development of a geocentric mind set may relate to the information or knowledge intensity of the firm rather than its position on the strategic continuum

on credible delegation by oligopolists a discussion of distribution channel management several papers in the recent marketing literature have suggested that delegation in distribution e g the use of independent middlemen helps manufacturers to precommit strategically to profit enhancing competitive actions further the literature suggests that the profitability of such actions depends on market structure we challenge these conclusions here this is done in two steps first we perform an analysis of the entire class of models which have been used in the literature using internally consistent assumptions about market structure and contracting the only subgame perfect equilibrium is one in which all distribution channels have infinitely many levels of delegation obviously this is not what we see in the real world next we relax a key hidden assumption namely that all intra channel agreements are observable to competitors without this assumption the usual results unravel unless channel members can offer credible guarantees that unobservable agreements do not exist the strategic effects of delegation disappear since these guarantees are virtually impossible to maintain credibly we would expect to reject the hypothesis in the earlier literature relating channel structure to competition in an empirical study controlling for observability we conclude that mechanisms other than strategic ones must be responsible for the existence of delegated channels and make some suggestions about promising avenues for future theory research in channel structure

deliberate indiscretion how political corruption encourages discretionary policy making this article reports the first empirical evidence that politicians delegate to trusted bureaucrats to diminish political responsibility for policy political science has been perennially concerned with why political leaders delegate authority to bureaucrats but this work s focus on advanced democracies has overlooked how corruption and political influence over bureaucrats can turn delegation into a means of obfuscating responsibility using a measure that differentiates political corruption from corruption at lower levels of government and a new data set of policy making on more than 600 european commission directives in the 10 former communist european union eu member states i show that political level corruption is associated with increased delegation to bureaucrats this relationship between political corruption and bureaucratic discretion is conditional upon the political independence of the bureaucracy such that politicians engaged in corruption delegate more to reduce clarity of responsibility

the importance of international business to the strategic agenda of u s ceos the growth of international business ib and concerns about the relevance of ib research indicate the need for managerial input on the topic a survey of 108 u s ceos reveals that ib issues are an important part of their strategic agenda four types of ib issues are identified which reveal that american ceos appear to be taking a proactive stance regarding the international arena the ceos were also found to hold diverse perceptions of ib issues the implications of these findings are discussed

spatial competition with heterogeneous firms i model endogenous horizontal and vertical product differentiation with arbitrarily many heterogeneous firms firms are asymmetric in that they differ in their marginal costs i prove that under an equilibrium refinement all economically relevant firm outcomes are uniquely determined across all strict subgame perfect nash equilibria there are two central results first a firm s price market share and profit are independent of its neighbors marginal costs conditional on the average marginal cost in the market second more productive firms are more isolated all else equal in particular the distance between two firms is strictly decreasing in their average marginal cost

contracting with endogenous entry we analyze entry in markets where a principal contracts with a privately informed agent before learning his production cost the agent knows his probability of having a low cost his ex ante type and decides whether to pay an entry fee to contract with the principal there are two cut off equilibria that determine the possible types of an agent who actually enters the market and neither equilibrium can be discarded by standard selection criteria contrasting with standard intuition in the equilibrium with the highest cut off an increase in the entry fee reduces the marginal type of the agent who enters thus increasing entry and the expected cost of an entrant this equilibrium is selected by a criterion based on robustness to equilibrium risk even though the equilibrium with the lowest cut off is pareto dominant for the agent public policies that increase entry barriers may be welfare improving

competition and outsourcing with scale economies scale economies are commonplace in operations yet because of analytical challenges relatively little is known about how firms should compete in their presence this paper presents a model of competition between two firms that face scale economies i e each firm s cost per unit of demand is decreasing in demand a general framework is used which incorporates competition between two service providers with price and time sensitive demand a queuing game and competition between two retailers with fixed ordering costs and pricesensitive consumers an economic order quantity game reasonably general conditions are provided under which there exists at most one equilibrium with both firms participating in the market we demonstrate in the context of the queuing game that the lower cost firm in equilibrium may have a higher market share and a higher price an enviable situation we also allow each firm to outsource their production process to a supplier even if the supplier s technology is no better than the firms technology and the supplier is required to establish dedicated capacity so the supplier s scale can be no greater than either firm s scale we show that the firms strictly prefer to outsource we conclude that scale economies provide a strong motivation for outsourcing that has not previously been identified in the literature

free entry and social efficiency under vertical oligopoly we analyze a successive vertical oligopoly model that incorporates vertical relationships between industries and demonstrate that free entry in an industry that produces a homogeneous product can lead to a socially insufficient number of firms this is in contrast with the proevious findings that under cournot oligopoloy with fixed set up costs level of entry in the free entry equilibrium is socially excessive it has often been argued that this result can provide a justification for apparently anticompetitive entry regulations our finding yields an important policy implication that such a justification is not necessarily valid when vertical relationships ar taken into account

international experience in the executive suite the path to prosperity attention is increasingly focused on the potential individual career and firm level benefits of international experience for upper level executives this research examines the relationships between ceo international experience ceo tenure firm internationalization succession events and corporate financial performance results indicate a significant interactive effect between ceo tenure and outside succession on ceo international experience in addition to a relationship with ceo international experience there are two additional interactive effects in the examination of corporate financial performance 1 ceo international experience and the degree of firm internationalization and 2 ceo international experience and ceo succession these interactive effects are evident in accounting and market indicators of corporate financial performance copyright 2000 john wiley sons ltd

emerging themes in international business research this study is motivated by two research questions 1 which recent contributions have been driving the research agenda in international business 2 which emerging themes in the literature are likely to set the stage for future work to examine these questions the study examined scholarly work in international business over the time period 1996 2006 in six leading international business journals journal of international business studies management international review journal of world business international marketing review journal of international marketing and international business review next a delphi study of the most prolific authors in these journals over the same time period was conducted to delineate a future research agenda in international business addressing these two research questions provides us with a more complete understanding of the progress made to date in international business research and provides a glimpse of the future

the impact of strategy on conflict a cross national comparative study of u s and japanese firms an empirical test of 290 u s and 653 japanese managers using the miles and snow typology provides a cross national examination of strategy s impact on conflict results substantially support the study s predictions and indicate that firms should 1 monitor their conflict handling mechanisms 2 emphasize integrative approaches and 3 appropriately use formalization for conflict handling despite a convergence of management practices globally findings indicate that considerable differences still exist between u s and japanese firms

reappraising the eclectic paradigm in an age of alliance capitalism this article discusses the implications of the advent of alliance capitalism for our theorizing about the determinants of mne activity in particular it argues that due to the increasing porosity of the boundaries of firms countries and markets the eclectic or oli paradigm of international production needs to consider more explicitly the competitive advantages arising from the way firms organize their inter firm transactions the growing interdependencies of many intermediate product markets and the widening of the portfolio of the assets of districts regions and countries to embrace the external economies of interdependent activities

a bargaining theory of distribution channels abstract a critical factor in channel relationships between manufacturers and retailers is the relative bargaining power of both parties in this article the authors develop a framework to examine bargaining between channel members and demonstrate that the bargaining process actually affects the degree of coordination and that two part tariffs will not be part of the market contract even in a simple one manufacturer one retailer channel to establish the institutional and theoretical bases for these results the authors relax the conventional assumption that the product being exchanged is completely specifiable in a contract they show that the institution of bargaining has force and it affects channel coordination when the complexity of nonspecifiability of the product exchange is present the authors find that greater retailer power promotes channel coordination thus there are conditions in which the presence of a powerful retailer might actually be beneficial to all channel members the authors rec

successive oligopolies with differentiated firms and endogeneous entry we develop a model of successive oligopolies with endogenous entry allowing for varying degrees of product differentiation and entry costs in both markets we show that downstream conditions dominate the overall profitability of the two tier structure while upstream conditions mainly affect the distribution of profits we analyze how two part tariffs and resale price maintenance shape the endogenous market structure and study their welfare effects in contrast to previous literature we find that welfare under linear prices can be larger than under twopart tariffs although the latter avoids double marginalization this is because linear prices induce more downstream market entry

international trade and business in the late 1980s an integrated u s perspective much of the current research and teaching in international business and trade is not part of a concerted effort in a given direction this is the result of a lack of adequate information about what the major issues will be and a lack of adequate communication between the academic business and policymaking communities this article presents the findings of a delphi study conducted with academicians business executives and policymakers involved in international trade the most crucial issue identified by that research is the current challenge to the multilateral trade framework this challenge emanates from such new factors as trade in services subsidization high technology transfer countertrade and orderly marketing agreements after discussing these and other newly emerging issues in international business and trade recommendations are made to encourage a better focus for future research and teaching in the international business and trade arena

an analysis of cooperative research and development i analyze the effects of cooperative research whereby member firms agree to share the costs andfruits of a research project before they undertake it in this model industrywide agreements tend to have socially beneficial effects when the degree ofproduct market competition is low when there are r d spillovers in the absence of cooperation when a high degree of sharing is technologically feasible and when the agreement concerns basic research rather than development activities i show that a royalty free cross licensing agreement among any number offirms lowers the equilibrium level of innovation even though it increases the efficiency of r d through sharing

trends in international business research twenty five years later international business ib research has made enormous strides in the quarter century since jibs was inaugurated this article reflects upon the development of ib research during that period it first reviews the findings and recommendations of a comprehensive survey of the embryonic field of ib research conducted twenty five years ago several early trends identified then are discussed the astonishing acceleration in the pace of ib research the broadening of research activity across a greater range of functional areas and an expanding geographic base of research outside of north america especially in europe we then discuss the evolution of ib research since that formative period growing breadth and diversity greater methodological sophistication a move toward research transcending traditional functional boundaries development of new research areas such as management information systems and international coalitions and alliances research on the phenomenon of transnational firms as complete systems and the continued broadening of the geographic base of research emerging research areas such as international entrepreneurship and small business and the greening of business are identified the article concludes with calls for more research collaboration across national boundaries and for greater synthesis of research into broader more integrative frameworks

international multilateral negotiations and social networks compared to their bilateral counterparts multilateral negotiations in an international setting present an extremely complex set of negotiation phenomena this paper proposes a model of negotiations that examines how national culture organization specific factors and individual characteristics of the negotiators impact the multilateral negotiation process in a cross national context specifically social network theory and tools are utilized to examine how coalitions form and roles emerge among participants the model also posits the effect of social network activity on negotiation outcomes research propositions are forwarded in hopes of setting an agenda for the research stream implied by the model methods for testing the model and implications for academics and managers are also discussed

symmetric equilibrium existence and optimality in differentiated product markets abstract equilibrium existence and optimality are analysed in a market for products differentiated by their variety a game of three stages is analysed firms enter in the first stage choose varieties in the second stage and choose prices in the third stage the existence of subgame perfect equilibria is established at equilibrium products are symmetrically located in the space of characteristics and are offered at equal prices the surplus maximizing solution is characterized and it is shown that surplus maximizing product diversity is lower than the equilibrium one

vertical separation with private contracts we consider a manufacturer s incentive to sell through an independent retailer rather than directly to final consumers when contracts with retailers cannot be observed by competitors if retailers conjecture that identical competing manufacturers always offer identical contracts symmetric beliefs manufacturers choose vertical separation in equilibrium even with private contracts vertically separated manufacturers reduce competition and increase profits by inducing less aggressive behaviour by retailers in the final market manufacturers profits may be higher with private than with public contracts our results hold both with price and with quantity competition and do not hinge on retailers beliefs being perfectly symmetric we also discuss various justifications for symmetric beliefs including incomplete information

relevance in international business research a need for more linkages the bi annual presentation by the outgoing aib president has become traditional it is not only an honor but also an unusual opportunity to address an audience composed of international experts in all areas relating to international business it is also a perplexing challenge to choose a topic that should be of general interest without departing too much from one s own field of specialized interest fortunately the aib officers agreed on a theme for this year s meeting relevance in international business research which presented me a topic to discuss

corruption institutions and economic development many scholarly articles on corruption give the impression that the world is populated by two types of people the sanders and the greasers the sanders believe that corruption is an obstacle to de velopment while the greasers believe that corruption can in some cases foster development this paper takes a critical look at these positions it concludes that the evidence supporting the greasing the wheels hypothesis is very weak and shows that there is no cor relation between a new measure of managers actual experience with corruption and gdp growth instead the paper uncovers a strong negative correlation between growth in genuine wealth per capita a direct measure of sustainable development and corruption while corruption may have little average eect on the growth rate of gdp per capita it is a likely source of unsustainable development

the economics of product variety a survey demand for variety may arise from a taste for diversity in individual consumption and or from diversity in tastes even when each consumer chooses a single variant the full degree of variety potentially demanded will not in general be supplied because scale economies even to a small degree mean that the potential welfare or revenue gain from greater variety must be balanced against the lower unit production costs with fewer variants the economics of product variety consists essentially in analysing the effect of this balance in different situations and comparing the degree of product variety for different market structures with each other and with the optimum the survey commences with the work on market structures with single product firms generalized monopolistic competition tracing modern developments in both the chamberlinian and hotelling traditions the latter has been particularly fruitful due to the expansion of the original locational ideas into virtual spaces in product characteristics the emphasis in recent work on product variety has been on multiproduct firms in both monopolistic and oligopolistic structures including strategic market preemption although most work has been in a full information context there have been advances in product variety under imperfect information either by consumers to properties of the firms products or firms as to consumers demands

retail contracting theory and practice we summarize a number of regularities that arise in the empirical literature on contractual relationships between manufacturers and their exclusive resellers we do this using studies of traditional and business format franchise relationships as well as studies of salesforce integration decisions some of the patterns that we uncover are consistent with a standard incentive cum insurance theory of organization while others are not we brie y review some theoretical extensions that seem promising in terms of reconciling seeming con icts between theory and practice i introduction manufacturers of retail products must decide whether to sell their products to consumers themselves vertical integration or to sell via independent retailers vertical separation when manufacturers do not perform the sales function internally but want exclusive retailers they usually choose some form of franchising 1 many theories attempt to explain the choice of retail organizational form moreover a considerable body of empirical evidence concerning this choice is accumulating we attempt to evaluate this econometric evidence and relate it to the theories to accomplish this task we assess studies of franchising arrangements as well as studies of sales force organization in industrial settings the paper is organized as follows in the next section we highlight a number of regularities that arise in the empirical literature on retail contracting in particular we nd that i risk is positively related to the use of high powered incentives vertical separation ii the importance of the agent s eiort in production is positively related to the use of high powered incentives

host country environment and subsidiary competence extending the diamond network model we extend the centers of excellence concept to address the diversity and multidimensionality of subsidiary competence using rugman and verbeke s diamond network model we hypothesize the contingencies influencing the links between host country environments and subsidiary competence configuration and provide evidence from more than 2000 subsidiaries in seven european countries our results provide new insights into how multinational enterprises can overcome unbalanced national diamonds by acquiring complementary capabilities across borders

vertical integration or separation of the sales function as implied by competitive forces abstract in the present paper we link the decisions concerning the sales strategies that are made by competing firms we demonstrate that when the demand schedules facing competing firms are moderately correlated asymmetric equilibria may arise where only one firm decides to establish its own sales force while its competitor sells its product through an independent sales agency when demand schedules are highly correlated however only symmetric equilibria can arise since firms derive greater benefits from imitating rather than contradicting their rivals choices we demonstrate that vertical separation of its sales function is more likely than vertical integration when firms produce products that are highly substitutable

working to improve the consumer price index he recent report of the advisory commission appointed by the u s senatefinance committee begins with one overarching recommendation thebls should establish a cost of living index coli as its objective in mea suring consumer prices u s senate 1996 p 2 this seems basically right to us indeed the bls has long said that the cost of living framework guides operationaldecisions about the construction of the index gillingham 1974 u s bureau oflabor statistics 1984 1988 1992 1997a putting things slightly differently if thebls staff or other technical experts knew how to produce a true cost of living indexon a monthly production schedule that would be what we would produce althoughwe have no fundamental disagreement with the commission about what the objec tive of the cpi program ought to be we may disagree to some extent about theapproaches and methods that are appropriate and feasible in working toward thatobjective this is a point to which we will return below our rst purpose in the present paper is to comment on the advisory com mission s report and the recommendations it contains

continuity in mechanism design without transfers we adopt a mechanism design approach to model communication between a principal and a privately informed agent in the context where monetary incentives are not available we provide a simple condition on the distribution of the agent s type which ensures that the optimal mechanism is continuous with strict log concavity of the distribution there exists a unique optimal mechanism that is characterized

the views of american multinational ceos on internationalized business education for prospective employees for some time a number of industry leaders have been exhorting american business schools to train their students in the aspects of international business as late as 1987 a group of prominent leaders from business labor academia and government issued a report that stated that business schools must internationalize the entire course of study and should include comparative business practices foreign languages and analyses of other countries and cultures

vertical relationships between manufacturers and retailers inference with limited data in this paper different models of vertical relationships between manufacturers and retailers in the supermarket industry are compared demand estimates are used to compute price cost margins for retailers and manufacturers under different supply models when wholesale prices are not observed the purpose is to identify the set of margins compatible with the margins obtained from estimates of cost and to select the model most consistent with the data among non nested competing models the models considered are 1 a simple linear pricing model 2 a vertically integrated model and 3 a variety of alternative strategic supply scenarios that allow for collusion non linear pricing and strategic behaviour with respect to private label products using data on yogurt sold in several stores in a large urban area of the u s the results imply that wholesale prices are close to marginal cost and that retailers have pricing power in the vertical chain this is consistent with non linear pricing by the manufacturers or high bargaining power of the retailers

entry and product variety with competing supply chains we study a model where an endogenous number of competing manufacturers located around a circle contract with exclusive retailers who are privately informed about their costs the number of brands in the market determined by the manufacturers zero profit condition depends on the presence of asymmetric information and on the types of contracts between manufacturers and retailers with two part tariffs wholesale prices fully reflect retailers costs with linear contracts wholesale prices are constant and independent of retailers costs the number of brands is lower resp higher with asymmetric information than with complete information when contracts are linear resp with two part tariffs moreover although the number of brands is always higher with linear contracts than with two part tariffs joint profits of manufacturers and retailers are higher with linear prices we also discuss manufacturers incentives to choose different contract forms and analyze the effects of endogenous entry on welfare

price discrimination in input markets we analyze the short and long run implications of third degree price discrimination in input markets in contrast to the extant literature which typically assumes that the supplier is an unconstrained monopolist in our model input prices are constrained by the threat of demand side substitution in our model the more efficient buyer receives a discount a ban on price discrimination thus benefits smaller but hurts more efficient larger firms it also stifles incentives to invest and innovate with linear demand a ban on price discrimination benefits consumers in the short run but reduces consumer surplus in the long run which is once again the opposite of what is found without the threat of demand side substitution

spatial models of delegation canonical assumptions this approach may be justified on grounds of tractability but the failure to grasp the significance of different assumptions and push beyond specific models has limited our understanding of the incentives for delegation consequently the justifications for delegation that have received recent scrutiny and testing differ from some of the more plausible justifications offered by informal studies of delegation we show that surprisingly few results in the literature hinge on risk aversion and surprisingly many turn on the ignored though equally canonical technological assumption that uncertainty is fixed relative to policies relaxing the key assumptions about dimensionality and functional forms provides a clearer intuition about delegation one that is closer to classical treatments the theory allows us to relate different institutional features commitment specialization costs monitoring multiple principals to delegation s observable properties lthough the practice of delegation dates back to antiquity the book of exodus refers to itonly in the last century has much scholarship examined its causes and effects and only recently has research focused on developing and testing formal theories that explore the logic of delegation 1 despite this recent surge in formal work on delegation scholars have failed to generalize several important properties of the early pathbreaking models instead of revisiting assumptions that were initially imposed for the sake of convenience recent papers tend to maintain and reinforce the cannonical assumptions applying these limited models to ever richer institutional settings although the breadth of understanding about delegation across various settings is impressive this approach has come at a price it has produced an understanding that only partly captures delegation s informational rationale in even the simplest contexts the literature is rich in predictions about delegation in complicated institutional settings when stylized foundational assumptions are satisfied but poor in explanations for and intuitions about why a poorly informed boss chooses to delegate to subordinates with different preferences moreover we lack an understanding of what basic features drive the boss s choice of which agent is given control of policy for example scholars have provided detailed explanations about how separation of power systems affect delegation by legislatures to agencies but the basic question does the informational rationale for delegation hinge on the boss s risk preferences has been ignored despite the analysis of complicated signaling and screening games between bosses with ex post controls and their subordinates we do not yet understand when or why the ally principle the boss picks the most ideologically similar agent as delegatee fails in simple settings we try to put models of delegation on more solid footing by examining a larger more general set of environments we eschew the canonical assumptions of quadratic utility or even risk aversion unidimensional outcome spaces and additive and homogeneous random shocks to policy our analysis focuses first on two basic questions when does delegation occur and to whom does the boss delegate we then consider richer institutionally driven extensions e g the role of commitment and monitoring devices the impact of multiple bosses and the institution in which their preferences are aggregated through a sequence of nested models with varying levels of abstraction the analysis isolates the relations between various assumptions and different findings

an analysis of twenty five years of research in the journal of international business studies the article analyzes the twenty five years of research published in the journal of international business studies jibs since its inception in 1970 the article reviews the authors their institutional affiliations and the discipline content of the published articles

vertical restraints with incomplete information when a firm contracts with a privately informed retailer vertical restraints may be insufficient to eliminate distortions arising from having to induce truthful reporting with franchise fee contracts which are equivalent to any other quantity forcing contract two distortions arise the first is the need to transfer surplus to the retailer and the second is a reduction in the marginal return to production with rpm contracts the first best outcome of vertical integration is obtainable if the retailer observes private information only about the state of demand if the retailer observes also private information about retailing costs both distortions persist in an earlier paper rey and tirole 1986 r t compare various forms of vertical restraints in a stochastic environment where retailers have superior private information than the firm about the uncertain state of the world they demonstrate that with asymmetric information vertical restraints may be insufficient in order to reproduce the first best outcome of vertical integration in r t contingencies are not feasible in the contracts since there are multiple retailers who can arbitrage in particular the wholesale price and the franchise fee under franchise fee contracting ff or the retail price imposed upon the retailer under retail price maintenance rpm cannot be selected contingent upon any future communication with the retailers in contrast in the present paper we assume that the firm is served by a single retailer which then facilitates consideration of contingent contracts the reason we make this different assumption is in order to investigate whether more sophisticated contracts can resolve the agency problem we still obtain similar negative results to the ones obtained by r t specifically vertical integration cannot generally be reproduced by appropriate contracting if retailers can observe private information about demand or retailing costs there is another characteristic of the class of contracts considered in r t that we modify in the present analysis while in r t the agent agrees to serve the firm as long as its ex ante expected payoff is nonnegative in the present paper we require that the ex post profits of the agent are nonnegative irrespective of how unfavorable is the realization of the state of nature this

profiling managers to improve export promotion targeting one of the major criticisms of government export promotion schemes in many countries is that they tend to be poorly targeted awareness levels about export schemes among managers of companies at exporting or pre exporting stages of internationalization are often quite low and the perceived usefulness of schemes may decline as companies internationalize and their needs become more specific one solution may be to develop a better understanding of the needs of managers who make export market development decisions and to target segments of managers rather than companies who share similar strengths and weaknesses this study attempts to address these concerns by devising a typology of senior international marketing managers the most senior marketing decisionmakers in a broad multi industry sample of new zealand exporting firms were surveyed the results of the cluster analysis suggest that groups of managers who share similar characteristics can be identified and profiled based on shared international business attitudes and similar levels of knowledge and skills this appears to be a useful method of segmenting international marketing managers to determine what sort of educational and export assistance particular groups may require

international business education a corporate view as a preliminary step in the internationalization of business school curricula 122 major canadian corporations were surveyed for their views on the importance of various management skills and international courses as well as their opinion on the mechanisms institutions and academics for delivering them this article reports on the responses obtained and suggests methods for improving the overall effectiveness of international business education

competing vertical structures precommitment and renegotiation we consider a model where two agents privately informed about their own characteristics play a normal form game on behalf of two uninformed principals we analyze the existence of precommitment effects through public announcements of contracts in a model where agency contracts designed ex ante can always be secretly renegotiated at the ex ante and interim stages we show that the existence of precommitment effects depends both on the strategic complementarity of the agents actions and on the direct effect of the opponents actions on each principal s welfare in our model the possibility of renegotiation is crucial for the existence of precommitment effects the results are introduced through an example of cournot and bertrand competition between firms viewed as vertical structures

competition and cooperation in marketing channel choice theory and application this paper discusses the problem of choosing a vertical marketing channel in a product differentiated duopolistic market firms choose product price and the form of the marketing channel to maximize profits it is shown that integration of the marketing function results in greater price competition and lower prices than does the use of independent marketing middlemen the profitability of reducing price competition by using such middlemen is investigated two hypotheses that integration is negatively associated with the products substitutability and that symmetric channel structures are stable are tested in a preliminary way and supported with survey data from the international semiconductor industry

international business and trade in the next decade report from a delphi study the globalization of business causes major changes in the business environment and in business practices forecasting such changes is crucial for the preparation of responses to them this article reports on a delphi study conducted with a global set of experts drawn from the policy business and academic communities over three rounds of mailings these experts analyzed and debated the likelihood of changes in the international business environment over the next decade and the impact of these changes on corporate practices the findings identify key geographic areas of business growth major sectoral transformations shifts in the trade framework and its institution and strategies for corporate adjustment

the internationalization of the curriculum this note reviews the results of four surveys related to the efforts of the aacsb to internationalize the curriculum of the business schools the first a survey of the 1071 participants in the 30 workshop seminars which have been organized by the aacsb showed that the workshops have been very beneficial for the participants and affected the courses they teach the second survey of all aacsb member schools showed that most of them plan to internationalize their curriculums by introducing an international dimension into the core courses but this raises the question of whether the faculty members are trained or prepared to do this the third survey found that only 64 out of 564 aacsb member schools have one or more exchange programs with foreign business schools and that only about 125 professors go overseas each year under the aegis of these programs finally a fourth survey of the 53 largest doctoral programs indicated that only 17 of the graduates of our doctoral programs study any international courses during their graduate masters and doctoral studies thus the next generation of faculty members will have difficulty in introducing any international content into the courses they teach