dynamic pricing of perishable assets under competition we study dynamic price competition in an oligopolistic market with a mix of substitutable and complementary perishable assets each firm has a fixed initial stock of items and competes in setting prices to sell them over a finite sales horizon customers sequentially arrive at the market make a purchase choice and then leave immediately with some likelihood of no purchase the purchase likelihood depends on the time of purchase product attributes and current prices the demand structure includes time variant linear and multinomial logit demand models as special cases assuming deterministic customer arrival rates we show that any equilibrium strategy has a simple structure involving a finite set of shadow prices measuring capacity externalities that firms exert on each other equilibrium prices can be solved from a one shot price competition game under the current time demand structure taking into account capacity externalities through the time invariant shadow prices the former reflects the transient demand side at every moment and the latter captures the aggregate supply constraints over the sales horizon this simple structure sheds light on dynamic revenue management problems under competition which helps capture the essence of the problems under demand uncertainty we show that the equilibrium solutions from the deterministic game provide precommitted and contingent heuristic policies that are asymptotic equilibria for its stochastic counterpart when demand and supply are sufficiently large this paper was accepted by yossi aviv operations management

foreign locals a cautionary tale on the culture of mnc local employees multinational corporations mncs rely heavily on local employees when conducting their international operations yet the international business literature provides few instances of true focus on these employees the commonly used label host country nationals hcns confers them an identity strongly related to the culture of their country prompting both researchers and practitioners to know them through the knowledge about the local culture this paper provides evidence that a more sophisticated view of the culture of hcns is needed through an ethnographic exploration of hcns working in local subsidiaries of american mncs in romania i reveal that hcns are not always culturally interchangeable with the rest of the host country population hcns can display a variety of cultural profiles more or less reflective of the national culture depending on their enacted stance towards the native culture and the cultural landscape of the mncs themselves the findings call for further specification of theories relying on the assumed localness of hcns and should contribute to the ongoing conversation on the interplay between the cultures specific to the mnc and its host countries

quality and competition in recent years the practitioner literature in operations management has seen a dramatic surge in articles on quality management it reflects the increased emphasis on quality by u s firms which has been attributed largely to increased competition faced by them the question of how quality is influenced by competitive intensity however has not received much attention either in the practitioner or the academic research literatures the notion of competitive intensity itself has not been defined precisely in this paper we develop formal models of oligopolistic competition to investigate whether equilibrium levels of quality increase as competition intensifies we consider three different competitive settings i asymmetric duopolistic competition where the dominant firm s intrinsic demand potential decreases ii a symmetric duopoly where the firms are precluded from cooperating in setting quality levels and iii symmetric oligopolistic competition where the number of firms increases we find that the relation between equilibrium quality and competitive intensity depends on what is understood by increased competition and in addition the relation is contingent on the values of parameters describing the cost and demand structure for the industry

multinomial logit market share models equilibrium characteristics and strategic implications we specify and analyze the conditions under which the mnl market share models are appropriate for equilibrium analysis our results show that a linear price response function as is often used in empirical research in conjunction with the typical concavity assumed in a large range of marketing response functions would yield an interior equilibrium solution we then consider the optimal reactions on pricing and marketing spending to entry and potential market expansion in the context of the mnl models we demonstrate that the entry of a new brand evokes a decrease in the equilibrium prices of the existing brands as a defensive reaction this is true in both an expanding market as well as a fixed market however while new entry into a fixed market would trigger the incumbents to lower the marketing expenditure we show that firms tend to raise marketing activities as they experience market expansion consequently there exist distinct possibilities that marketing efforts for the existing brands increase in view of entry in an expanding market further managerial and marketing implications for endogeneity of the number of firms are explored

endogeneity in brand choice models applications of random utility models to scanner data have been widely presented in marketing for the last 20 years one particular problem with these applications is that they have ignored possible correlations between the independent variables in the deterministic component of utility price promotion etc and the stochastic component or error term in fact marketing mix variables such as price not only affect brand purchasing probabilities but are themselves endogenously set by marketing managers this work tests whether these endogeneity problems are important enough to warrant consideration when estimating random utility models with scanner panel data our results show that not accounting for endogeneity may result in a substantial bias in the parameter estimates

the effects of selling packaged goods on inventory decisions in this paper we study within a newsboy type modeling framework the common business practice of retail firms to sell products not only as independent items but also as part of multiproduct packets packaged goods our emphasis is on understanding the effects of such practices on the inventory decisions of the firm we provide insights on the resulting level of suboptimality when inventory decisions are made with demand information only on the independent items and without accounting for the demand substitution structure induced between independent items and packaged goods our stylized model studies an environment with two products that are not direct substitutes for each other sold either independently or as part of a packet that contains one unit of each we provide necessary and sufficient optimality conditions for this model and suggest an efficient numerical search for obtaining the optimal stocking levels an extensive computational study allowed us to provide insights on the nature of the optimal stocking policies the suboptimality of independent newsboy policies the effects of demand correlation among individual products and multiproduct packets and the determining role of induced substitution structure among products during stockout occasions on the profitability of the inventory system

manufacturer incentives to improve retail service levels in this paper we provide a solution to the problem of how a manufacturer can provide an incentive to a separately owned retailer to raise its service level above the level it would choose on its own we analyze the effects the manufacturer s incentive has on the individual profits of the retailer and manufacturer as well as their joint profits our work is an application of game theory in which we tackle the problem posed by separate ownership of the two firms and the resulting conflict over the gains from cooperation we utilize a plausible model of service sensitive demand one which is relatively free of ad hoc assumptions our approach has the strength that it proposes a credible solution to the problem of manufacturer retailer cooperation when profits are sensitive to retail service levels our results indicate that the optimal level of incentive for the manufacturer and the resulting shares of the manufacturer and retailer in increased profits are particularly sensitive to the underlying variability of demand and to the relative variability of additional demand induced by higher service levels

one more time international business in a global economy this paper seeks to redirect the debate on the past present and future of international business ib it sets out to dispel prevailing myths pertaining to the field s disciplinary roots its domain and underlying bases of theory and knowledge ib is positioned as an integrative field whose competitive advantage and added value lie in the synergetic combination of global and local knowledge that is unavailable to and not imitable by its major competitors in particular economics and strategy

the choice theory approach to market research this paper surveys economic choice theory stressing developments that permit use of data from psychometric and conjoint experiments to produce market demand forecasts alternatives to the widely used multinomial logit model are summarized and a new method for estimating multinomial probits is described an integration of choice models with attitudinal scaling and perceptual mapping within a latent variable system is described estimation of such systems under either random effects or fixed effects descriptions of heterogeneity across individuals is discussed issues in the use of choice models to describe responses from conjoint experiments are presented new regression diagnostic tests for the consistency of multinomial logit representations are discussed

note the newsvendor model with endogenous demand this paper considers a firm s price and inventory policy when it faces uncertain demand that depends on both price and inventory level the authors extend the classic newsvendor model by assuming that expected utility maximizing consumers choose between visiting the firm and consuming an exogenous outside option the outside option represents the utility the consumer forgoes when she chooses to visit the firm before knowing whether or not the product will be available the authors investigate both the case in which the firm s price is exogenous and the case in which price is chosen optimally the paper makes two contributions first the authors show that the firm holds more inventories provides a higher fill rate attracts more customers and earns higher profits when it internalizes the effect of its inventory on demand second the authors show that in the endogenous price case the firm s two dimensional decision problem can be reduced to two sequential single variable optimizations as a result the endogenous price case is as easy to solve as the exogenous price case

on sales effort and pricing decisions under alternative risk criteria abstract in the literature different risk criteria are proposed for risk averse decision making but it is often unclear which risk criteria should be used and what their differences may be this study investigates this problem when a risk averse make to order firm decides its pricing and sales effort two factors affecting demand we consider alternative risk criteria commonly used in the literature namely expected utility theory eut mean variance mv mean semideviation ms value at risk var conditional value at risk cvar and loss aversion la we find that all of these criteria lead to similar qualitative behaviors regarding how risk loss averse decisions deviate from risk neutral ones a particularly interesting result is that the form of demand randomness i e additive or multiplicative can completely reverse the effect of risk loss aversion in certain cases we also find that the risk aversion models i e eut mv ms var and cvar are essentially equivalent in inducing the same set of optimal solutions under adverse market states however loss aversion is a mild version of risk aversion in that the la model can only lead to a subset of the solutions generated by other models these results may not be valid for other applications such as the newsvendor pricing problem so we can conclude that the relationship between alternative risk criteria is case sensitive and should be evaluated more carefully

culture and international business recent advances and their implications for future research the paper provides a state of the art review of several innovative advances in culture and international business ib to stimulate new avenues for future research we first review the issues surrounding cultural convergence and divergence and the processes underlying cultural changes we then examine novel constructs for characterizing cultures and how to enhance the precision of cultural models by pinpointing when cultural effects are important finally we examine the usefulness of experimental methods which are rarely used by ib researchers implications of these path breaking approaches for future research on culture and ib are discussed

cooperation among competitors a comparison of cost sharing mechanisms abstract in this paper we investigate the consequences of using outcome based versus ex ante based cost sharing mechanisms in terms of competing firms profitability and total welfare we consider two firms making a joint expenditure which can positively affect firms demand and or unit operating costs while competing in the final market by setting either price or quantity we compare two outcome based cost sharing mechanisms i e quantity proportional qp and total margin proportional tm with the more competitive fixed share fs mechanism where cost sharing is set up on an ex ante basis we show that outcome based mechanisms and even a fully collusive behavior induced by the optimal cost sharing mechanism might actually enhance total welfare as compared with the more competitive fs mechanism we also find that although the fs mechanism is never more preferable than the tm mechanism it can lead to higher profits than the qp mechanism when competition is mild these results can support firms cooperating with competitors in the choice of the cost sharing mechanism as well as provide important implications to policy makers

statistical learning of service dependent demand in a multiperiod newsvendor setting we study an inventory system wherein a customer may leave the seller s market after experiencing an inventory stockout traditionally researchers and practitioners assume a single penalty cost to model this customer behavior of stockout aversion recently a stream of researchers explicitly model this customer behavior and support the traditional penalty cost approach we enrich this literature by studying the statistical learning of service dependent demand we build and solve four models a baseline model where the seller can observe the demand distribution a second model where the seller cannot observe the demand distribution but statistically learns the demand distribution a third model where the seller can learn or pay to obtain the exact information of the demand distribution and a fourth model where demand in excess of available inventory is lost and unobserved interestingly we find that all four models support the traditional penalty cost approach this result confirms the use of a state independent stockout penalty cost in the presence of demand learning more strikingly the first three models imply the same stockout penalty cost which is larger than the stockout penalty cost implied by the last model

stochastic trends and economic fluctuations are business cycles mainly the result of permanent shocks to productivity this paper uses a long run restriction implied by a large class of real business cycle models identifying permanent productivity shocks as shocks to the common stochastic trend in output consumption and investment to provide new evidence on this question econometric tests indicate that this common stochastic trend cointegration implication is consistent with postwar u s data however in systems with nominal variables the estimates of this common stochastic trend indicate that permanent productivity shocks typically explain less than half of the business cycle variability in output consumption and investment copyright 1991 by american economic association

technical note robust newsvendor competition under asymmetric information we generalize analysis of competition among newsvendors to a setting in which competitors possess asymmetric information about future demand realizations and this information is limited to knowledge of the support of demand distribution in such a setting traditional expectation based optimization criteria are not adequate and therefore we focus on the alternative criterion used in the robust optimization literature the absolute regret minimization we show existence and derive closed form expressions for the robust optimization nash equilibrium solution for a game with an arbitrary number of players this solution allows us to gain insight into the nature of robust asymmetric newsvendor competition we show that the competitive solution in the presence of information asymmetry is an intuitive extension of the robust solution for the monopolistic newsvendor problem which allows us to distill the impact of both competition and information asymmetry in addition we show that contrary to the intuition a competing newsvendor does not necessarily benefit from having better information about its own demand distribution than its competitor has

inter organizational trust and the dynamics of distrust early research on inter organizational trust drew on theories about social ties among individuals for example duration of ties and amount of interaction yet these proved inadequate to explain the diverse arrangements arising in international business dyer and chu s award winning jibs paper demonstrated that trust was best predicted by organizational processes that developed positive expectations of predictability reliability and competence not only within national boundaries but also in cross national relationships this review of recent trust research building on dyer and chu draws attention to six themes 1 new conceptualizations that explore identity roles and rules as foundations of presumptive trust at the organizational level 2 dynamics of trust and distrust over time how violations of trust are interpreted and what affects ease of repair 3 pendulum swings in inter organizational relationships arising from plural governance and alternation between modes but also resulting in the continuous coexistence of positive and negative states 4 the impact of intra organizational conflict and inter organizational coalitions on the establishment and maintenance of trust 5 the relative impact of nation level vs organization level differences in culture as influences on trust and 6 whether intermediate modes of exchange in between transactional and relational modes are unstable transitional hybrids or embody complementarities that yield both value and stability

new frontiers in international strategy this paper studies a new frontier in the understanding of international strategy is to explore it we propose the analogy of the ecology of firms and places as a way to emphasize that the real problem is the colocation of different places with different types of firms locations are in fact the distinctive content of international business strategy we deal with this problem with four different perspectives first differences across countries must be addressed with integrative frameworks able to represent the multidimensionality of semiglobalization or intermediate states between total localization and total integration second differences in the development of intermediary markets in a particular place influence firm positioning and industry structure in that place but their impact also crosses different places and it is endogenous to the ecology of places and firms in a systemic integrative way that makes simplifications extremely risky in the design of competitive strategy in an international context third places firms and strategies form a complex ecology that can be studied with a framework focused in understanding the geography strategy link that incorporates different levels of analysis new economic actors and a set of primitives finally firms around the ecology of places face the challenge of developing strategies and business models to serve the majority of humanity today excluded from world trade it is a fundamentally different way to think about the ecology of places and firms overall we present an intriguing new frontier with the capacity to impact both research and practice in the field of international strategy based in understanding the interplay among firms and places

competition under generalized attraction models applications to quality competition under yield uncertainty we characterize the equilibrium behavior in a broad class of competition models in which the competing firms market shares are given by an attraction model and the aggregate sales in the industry depend on the aggregate attraction value according to a general function each firm s revenues and costs are proportional with its expected sales volume with a cost rate that depends on the firm s chosen attraction value according to an arbitrary increasing function whereas most existing competition papers with attraction models can be viewed as special cases of this general model we apply our general results to a new set of quality competition models here an industry has n suppliers of a given product who compete for the business of one or more buyers each of the suppliers encounters an uncertain yield factor with a given general yield distribution the buyers face uncertain demands over the course of a given sales season the suppliers compete by selecting key characteristics of their yield distributions either their means their standard deviations or both these choices have implications for their per unit cost rates

internationalization and the performance of born global smes the mediating role of social networks this paper offers a social network explanation for the purported relationship between internationalization and firm performance in the context of born global small and medium enterprises smes we argue that home based social networks play a mediating role in the relationship between inward and outward internationalization and firm performance the mediating mechanism is attributed to three information benefits of social networks 1 knowledge of foreign market opportunities 2 advice and experiential learning and 3 referral trust and solidarity using survey data from smes in the largest emerging economy of china we found some support for this mediating role of social networks in the form of guanxi the results imply that international business managers should consider social networks as an efficient means of helping internationally oriented smes to go international more rapidly and profitably

the thick description and comparison of societal systems of capitalism critiques of international business theory have recently pointed to weaknesses in the handling of context of culture and of policy implications it is contended that the origins of such failings lie in the discipline s commonly accepted methodologies and in turn that they have epistemological roots as a route out of the dilemmas faced a proposal is made to adopt more complete ways of handling determinacy including the influences of history culture and the societal emergence of institutions business systems theory is drawn upon and a model proposed developed from the work of whitley in this culture is seen as underpinning formal institutions which in turn underpin societal business systems the use of the model relies on the ideas of geertz on thick description and of ragin on holistic analysis it is illustrated with a comparison of the american and french socio economic systems seen historically findings in strategy research about the geographically defined nature of firm supremacy in many industries are brought into the account using the business systems literature consistent patterns of determinacy as well as distinct and contrasting trajectories of business system evolution are noted a more complete and multidisciplinary form of explanation grounded in socio economics is advocated as a means of meeting the challenges both of understanding and of policymaking at several levels

estimating demand by using sales information inaccuracies encountered abstract demand data is integral to a company s overall information requirement this is particularly true for manufacturers and retailers with regard to capacity production and inventory planning notwithstanding the implicit inaccuracies encountered companies are predisposed to employ sales data as a primary source of information for estimating future demand in this paper by adopting a two product setting we measure inventory cost inaccuracies that arise from using sales data in estimating demand by analyzing these costs we also explore the conditions under which the resulting inaccuracies are either lessened or become acute in this context the determining rule of an induced substitution structure between the two products during stockout occasions is explicitly analyzed we use a newsboy framework in a two product environment wherein one product may be taken as a direct substitute for the other we provide necessary and sufficient optimality conditions and an extensive computational study to illustrate and support our findings and to provide additional insights on the conditions characterizing optimal stocking policies

inventory decisions for substitutable products with stock dependent demand abstract we study a retailer s inventory policy for two products the products are substitutable and have inventory dependent demand so a higher inventory level of a product increases its sales we model the joint effect of demand stimulation and product substitution on inventory decisions by considering a single period stochastic demand setting we provide the first order optimality conditions for the profit maximizing order quantities and interpret them using marginal analysis we also consider two heuristic solutions that separately account for either demand stimulation or product substitution our numerical analysis reveals that the optimal policy by appropriately using sales information that quantifies substitution and demand stimulation can produce significantly higher profits the profit benefits are lessened under certain circumstances such as when the two products have similar critical fractile values suggesting that in such instances the heuristics may be used effectively

the role of inventory in delivery time competition the paper operationalizes the notion of shortage cost by considering the behavior of customers and competing firms and examines the role of inventory in response time competition we start with a single firm production control model in which customers are characterized by their preferences of price quality and delivery time the optimal production inventory policy and the optimal choice between make to order and make to stock operations are determined in simple newsboy like formulas the basic model is then extended to an n firm market game in which firms compete for orders from the aspect of early delivery one could think of this setting as an oligopoly racing market the analysis shows that competition can breed a demand for produce to stock just as other economic phenomena such as economies of scale uncertainty or seasonality can induce make to stock and that delivery time competition increases the buyer s welfare while decreasing the producer s welfare

sequential correlated equilibria in stopping games in many situations such as trade in stock exchanges agents have many opportunities to act within a short interval of time the agents in such situations can often coordinate their actions in advance but coordination during the game consumes too much time an equilibrium in such situations has to be sequential in order to handle mistakes made by players in this paper we present a new solution concept for infinite horizon dynamic games which is appropriate for such situations a sequential normal form correlated approximate equilibrium under additional assumptions we show that every such game admits this kind of equilibrium

asymmetric consumer learning and inventory competition we develop a model of consumer learning and choice behavior in response to uncertain service in the marketplace learning could be asymmetric that is consumers may associate different weights with positive and negative experiences under this consumer model we characterize the steady state distribution of demand for retailers given that each retailer holds a constant in stock service level we then consider a noncooperative game in steady state between two retailers competing on the basis of their service levels the demand distributions of retailers in this game are modeled using a multiplicative aggregate market share model in which the mean demands are obtained from the steady state results for individual purchases but the model is simplified in other respects for tractability our model yields a unique pure strategy nash equilibrium we show that asymmetry in consumer learning has a significant impact on the optimal service levels market shares and profits of the retailers when retailers have different costs it also determines the extent of competitive advantage enjoyed by the lower cost retailer

a general equilibrium model for industries with price and service competition this paper develops a stochastic general equilibrium inventory model for an oligopoly in which all inventory constraint parameters are endogenously determined we propose several systems of demand processes whose distributions are functions of all retailers prices and all retailers service levels we proceed with the investigation of the equilibrium behavior of infinite horizon models for industries facing this type of generalized competition under demand uncertainty we systematically consider the following three competition scenarios 1 price competition only here we assume that the firms service levels are exogenously chosen but characterize how the price and inventory strategy equilibrium vary with the chosen service levels 2 simultaneous price and service level competition here each of the firms simultaneously chooses a service level and a combined price and inventory strategy 3 two stage competition the firms make their competitive choices sequentially in a first stage all firms simultaneously choose a service level in a second stage the firms simultaneously choose a combined pricing and inventory strategy with full knowledge of the service levels selected by all competitors we show that in all of the above settings a nash equilibrium of infinite horizon stationary strategies exists and that it is of a simple structure provided a nash equilibrium exists in a so called reduced game we pay particular attention to the question of whether a firm can choose its service level on the basis of its own input characteristics i e its cost parameters and demand function only we also investigate under which of the demand models a firm under simultaneous competition responds to a change in the exogenously specified characteristics of the various competitors by either i adjusting its service level and price in the same direction thereby compensating for price increases decreases by offering improved inferior service or ii adjusting them in opposite directions thereby simultaneously offering better or worse prices and service

combined pricing and inventory control under uncertainty this paper addresses the simultaneous determination of pricing and inventory replenishment strategies in the face of demand uncertainty more specifically we analyze the following single item periodic review model demands in consecutive periods are independent but their distributions depend on the item s price in accordance with general stochastic demand functions the price charged in any given period can be specified dynamically as a function of the state of the system a replenishment order may be placed at the beginning of some or all of the periods stockouts are fully backlogged we address both finite and infinite horizon models with the objective of maximizing total expected discounted profit or its time average value assuming that prices can either be adjusted arbitrarily upward or downward or that they can only be decreased we characterize the structure of an optimal combined pricing and inventory strategy for all of the above types of models we also develop an efficient value iteration method to compute these optimal strategies finally we report on an extensive numerical study that characterizes various qualitative properties of the optimal strategies and corresponding optimal profit values

values schemas and norms in the culture behavior nexus a situated dynamics framework international business ib research has predominantly relied on value constructs to account for the influence of societal culture notably hofstede s cultural dimensions while parsimonious the value approach s assumptions about the consensus of values within nations and the generality and stability of cultural patterns of behavior are increasingly challenged we review two promising alternatives the constructivist approach centering on schemas and the intersubjectivist approach centering on norms and the evidence that demonstrates their usefulness in accounting for international differences in the behavior of managers employees and consumers we propose a situated dynamics framework specifying the role of values schemas and norms in accounting for cultural differences and delineating conditions under which each causal mechanism is operative values play a more important role in accounting for cultural differences in weak situations where fewer constraints are perceived schemas play a more important role when situational cues increase their accessibility and relevance and norms play a more important role when social evaluation is salient directions for future research based on this integrative framework and its implications for the measurement of culture and application in ib are discussed

logit demand estimation under competitive pricing behavior an equilibrium framework discrete choice models of demand have typically been estimated assuming that prices are exogenous since unobservable to the researcher product attributes such as coupon availability may impact consumer utility as well as price setting by firms we treat prices as endogenous specifically prices are assumed to be the equilibrium outcomes of nash competition among manufacturers and retailers to empirically validate the assumptions we estimate logit demand systems jointly with equilibrium pricing equations for two product categories using retail scanner data and cost data on factor prices in each category we find statistical evidence of price endogeneity we also find that the estimates of the price response parameter and the brand specific constants are generally biased downward when the endogeneity of prices is ignored our framework provides explicit estimates of the value created by a brand i e the difference between consumers willingness to pay for a brand and its cost of production we develop theoretical propositions about the relationship between value creation and competitive advantage for logit demand systems and use our empirical results to illustrate how firms use alternative value creation strategies to accomplish competitive advantage

the effect of cultural distance on entry mode choice international diversification and mne performance a meta analysis although a growing literature indicates that cultural distance that is differences between national cultures is an important determinant of organizational actions and performance both empirical and theoretical concerns abound in this study the relationships of cultural distance with entry mode choice international diversification and mne performance are examined by meta analyzing data from 66 independent samples with cumulative sample sizes ranging from 2 255 to 24 152 regression results failed to provide statistical evidence of significant relationships between cultural distance and entry mode choice international diversification and mne performance the examination of moderator effects however yielded important results we found a strong negative association between cultural distance and entry mode choice for us based mnes the cultural distance international diversification relationship was negative for high technology industries while it was positive for other industries cultural distance also had a strong positive effect on mne performance for developed country investments a similar strong positive relationship was found between cultural distance and international diversification in studies with more recent samples results of this study indicate that substantial additional research is needed before the role of cultural distance is fully understood

optimal inventory policies under service sensitive demand the service level provided by a retailer influences demand and sales in several ways in the short run sales can fall short of demand when customers experience stockouts and choose not to backorder in the long run demand itself may decline as customers who experience excessive stockouts shift permanently to more reliable sources the traditional approach to determining inventory policies assumes a fixed stockout cost attributable to each stockout occasion in practice stockout costs are difficult to determine at least in part because they reflect the long term loss of demand due to inadequate service in this paper we model the response of long run demand to the service level of the retailer and determine optimal order up to inventory policies in the presence of service sensitive demand we show under what conditions inventory policy is sensitive to both the mean and the variance of long run demand

mapping world cultures cluster formation sources and implications this paper extends and builds on ronen and shenkar s synthesized cultural clustering of countries based on similarity and dissimilarity in work related attitudes the new map uses an updated dataset and expands coverage to world areas that were non accessible at the time cluster boundaries are drawn empirically rather than intuitively and the plot obtained is triple nested indicating three levels of similarity across given country pairs also delineated are cluster adjacency and cluster cohesiveness which vary from the highly cohesive arab and anglo clusters to the least cohesive confucian and far eastern clusters exploring predictors of cluster formation we draw on the ecocultural perspective and other inputs and examine the combined role of language religion and geography in generating cluster formation we find that these forces play a prominent yet complex role for instance the religion and language brought by the spanish fail to create a singular cohesive latin american cluster akin to the anglo cluster the role of economic variables is similarly considered finally comparing the current map with that of 1985 we find strong support for the divergence vs convergence argument implications for international business are delineated

an empirical analysis of the demand for commercial television advertising the purpose of this paper is to provide an empirical analysis of the demand for commercial television advertising in the sydney metropolitan market as a case study using unpublished quarterly data though the focus of the paper is empirical in nature prior to this a simple oligopolistic framework is used to examine the influence of competition on tv advertising prices particular attention is paid to justifying the use of both short and long run time series modelling techniques in order to derive respective short and long run price elasticities of demand results seem to suggest that the price elasticity of demand is robust in terms of theoretical expectation in sign and statistical significance but substantially less than unity in the short run and neighbouring unity in the long run these results seem to be consistent with the findings of cave and swann report of committee on financing the bbc 1986 and tavakoli swann and cave mimeo brunel university 1989 for the british tv market but differ

analysis of an inventory system under backorder correlated deterministic demand and geometric supply process abstract in this article we propose a single item periodic review model that investigates the effects of changes in the demand process that occur after stockout realizations we investigate a system where the demands in successive periods are deterministic but affected by the backorder realizations in order to capture the effects of changes in the demand process we use a geometric type supply availability we analytically derive the necessary components for obtaining profit related performance measures and provide computational analysis

beyond national culture and culture centricism a reply to gould and grein 2009 leung bhagat buchan erez and gibson provide a review of several advances in research on culture and international business ib which is criticized by gould and grein as overemphasizing the national culture nc approach this reply clarifies the misinterpretation of leung et al by gould and grein and affirms its pluralistic and inclusive position in response to their critique we discuss the complex meaning of culture address the dynamic processes of culture change in a globalizing world and substantiate the pivotal role of nc in ib research we encourage diverse perspectives that complement rather than compete against each other and advocate a dual perspective approach that integrates positivist and interpretative frameworks for theoretical innovation

backorder penalty cost coefficient b what could it be abstract the classical economic order quantity eoq model with planned penalized backorders pb relies on postulating a value for the backorder penalty cost coefficient b which is supposed to reflect the intangible adverse effect of the future loss of customer goodwill following a stockout recognizing that the effect of the future loss of customer goodwill should be not a direct penalty cost but a change in future demand schwartz 1966 a new approach to stockout penalties management science 12 12 b538 b544 modified the classical eoq pb model by eliminating the backorder penalty cost term from the objective function and assuming that the long run demand rate is a decreasing strictly convex function of the customer s disappointment factor defined as the complement of the demand fill rate following a stockout which in turn is an increasing strictly convex function of the demand fill rate he called the new model a perturbed demand pd model schwartz provided convincing justification for his pd model and presented several variations of it in a follow up paper but he did not solve any of these models in this paper we solve schwartz s original pd model and its variations and we discuss the implications of their solutions thus filling a gap in the literature left by schwartz moreover having been convinced that schwartz s approach is more valid than the classical approach for representing the effect of the loss of customer goodwill following a stockout but also recognizing that the classical approach is far more popular than the pd approach because of its simplicity and because of tradition we use the solution of the pd model to infer the value of b in the classical model thus providing one possible answer to the question what could b be a noteworthy implication of the solution of schwartz s original pd model is that the optimal fill rate is always 0 or 1 rendering the inferred value of b in the classical model 0 or respectively suspecting that the property of the pd function which is most likely responsible for producing this bang bang type of result is strict convexity we show that for the case where the pd function is proportional to an integer power say n of the fill rate the optimal fill rate is always 0 or 1 if and only if n 1 in which case the pd function is strictly convex in the fill rate

multiculturalism from a cognitive perspective patterns and implications multiculturalism the internal representation of multiple cultural meaning systems has critical implications for global managers and multinational corporations mncs understanding multiculturalism is becoming increasingly important given that the locations within which mnc activity resides and the composition of the workforce even within a given location are more diverse building on the connectionism perspective we offer a novel cognitive conceptualization of multiculturalism that incorporates the individual s multicultural cognitive content and structure based on that we explain how specific sociocultural experiences interact with existing individual cognitions to form different patterns of multiculturalism specifically we propose five stylized patterns compartmentalization integration inclusion convergence and generalization and explain how they are developed through specific sociocultural experiences we discuss how different patterns of multiculturalism influence specific capabilities of multicultural mnc managers and their effectiveness in a variety of critical mnc tasks we believe the cognitive connectionist perspective which has not been brought before into international business discussions of culture and cultural capabilities holds great promise for better understanding global managers capabilities and development

leading cultural research in the future a matter of paradigms and taste the styles and approaches used in cross cultural organizational research are nearly as varied as the cultures under study we see two variations of one dominant style in the work of hofstede and the globe research consortium in this commentary i shall place these approaches in context and discuss alternatives that seem to be highly promising but largely overlooked based on this analysis i conclude that it may well be time that this form of large scale multi country survey be set aside for the development of alternative mid range theories having a more direct application and explanation for organizational phenomena in a cultural and national context

optimal and approximate policies in multiperiod multilocation inventory models with transshipments this paper examines the effects on the optimal ordering policy and its cost of allowing for interactions among retail outlets specifically transshipments are allowed as recourse actions occurring after demands are realized but before they must be satisfied the resultant savings in holding and shortage costs are balanced against the costs of transshipment a base stock ordering policy is optimal for this model if the final period base stock order up to point is nonnegative then it will be the base stock order up to point for all periods unfortunately it can be found analytically only for two special cases where either the cost parameters are equal at every outlet or there are only two outlets these two special cases are used to validate a heuristic solution technique employing monte carlo integration which is then compared to an easily calculated base policy in order to gauge the contribution of this model the additional savings from using this heuristic policy are significant particularly for problems with many retail outlets and low transshipment costs

price versus production postponement capacity and competition this article presents a comparative analysis of possible postponement strategies in a two stage decision model where firms make three decisions capacity investment production inventory quantity and price typically investments are made while the demand curve is uncertain the strategies differ in the timing of the operational decisions relative to the realization of uncertainty we show how competition uncertainty and the timing of operational decisions influence the strategic investment decision of the firm and its value in contrast to production postponement price postponement makes the investment and production inventory decisions relatively insensitive to uncertainty this suggests that managers can make optimal capacity decisions by deterministic reasoning if they have some price flexibility under price postponement additional postponement of production has relatively small incremental value therefore it may be worthwhile to consider flexible ex post pricing before production postponement reengineering while more postponement increases firm value it is counterintuitive that this also makes the optimal capacity decision more sensitive to uncertainty we highlight the different impact of more timely information which leads to higher investment and inventories and of reduced demand uncertainty which decreases investment and inventories our analysis suggests appropriateness conditions for simple make to stock and make to order strategies we also present technical sufficiency and uniqueness conditions under price postponement these results extend to oligopolistic and perfect competition for which pure equilibria are derived interestingly the relative value of operational postponement techniques seems to increase as the industry becomes more competitive

conceptualizing and measuring culture in international business and management from challenges to potential solutions understanding the influence of culture on business operations has been one of the most enduring components of international business ib and international management im theorizing and empirical investigation while several critiques and debates questioned the significant progress made in this domain the special issue we introduce here is meant to demonstrate that further advancement on how we conceptualize and measure culture is not only needed but also possible we provide an overview of past and current approaches in the measurement of culture in ib im and the challenges associated with these approaches and emphasize the important yet insufficiently acknowledged link between the theoretical conceptualization of culture and its measurement we then introduce the four articles included in the special issue and highlight how they break away from the addiction to approaches that have been very useful in getting where we are today but that might not always be useful in advancing knowledge beyond what we already know last but not the least we offer our own perspective on promising directions in conceptually and methodologically rethinking the study of culture in ib and im

rationalizability learning and equilibrium in games with strategic complementarities we study a rich class of noncooperative games that includes models of oligopoly competition macroeconomic coordination failures arms races bank runs technology adoption and diffusion r d competition pretrial bargaining coordination in teams and many others for all these games the sets of pure strategy nash equilibria correlated equilibria and rationalizable strategies have identical bounds also for a class of models of dynamic adaptive choice behavior that encompasses both best response dynamics and bayesian learning the players choices lie eventually within the same bounds these bounds are shown to vary monotonically with certain exogenous parameters we study the class of noncooperative supermodular games introduced by topkis 1979 and further analyzed by vives 1985 1989 who also pointed out the importance of these games in industrial economics supermodular games are games in which each player s strategy set is partially ordered the marginal returns to increasing one s strategy rise with increases in the competitors strategies so that the game exhibits strategic complementarity 2 and if a player s strategies are multidimensional marginal returns to any one com ponent of the player s strategy rise with increases in the other components this class turns out to encompass many of the most important economic applications of noncooperative game theory in macroeconomics diamond s 1982 search model and bryant s 1983 1984 rational expectations models can be represented as supermodular games in each of these models more activity by some members of the economy raises the returns to increased levels of activity by others in oligopoly theory some models of bertrand oligopoly with differentiated products qualify as supermodu lar games in these games when a firm s competitors raise their prices the marginal profitability of the firm s own price increase rises a similar structure is present in games of new technology adoption such as those of dybvig and spatt 1983 farrell and saloner 1986 and katz and shapiro 1986 when more users hook into a communication system or more manufacturers adopt an interface standard the marginal return to others of doing the same often rises similarly in some specifications of the bank runs model introduced by diamond and dybvig 1983 when more depositors withdraw their funds from a bank it is more worthwhile for other depositors to do the same in the warrant exercise

estimating long run economic equilibria with stochastic trends an asymptotic theory is provided to analyze a menu of currently existing estimators of cointegrated systems we study in detail the single equation ecm seecm approach of hendry our theoretical results lead to prescriptions for empirical work such as specifying seecm s nonlinearly and including lagged equilibrium relationships rather than lagged differences of the dependent variable as covariates simulations support these prescriptions and point to problems of overfitting not encountered in the semiparametric approach of phillips and hansen 1990

think glocally act glocally a culture centric comment on leung bhagat buchan erez and gibson 2005 culture is a critical variable in international business ib and leung bhagat buchan erez and gibson 2005 enrich our understanding of its role however that said their framing of this variable conflates the role of national culture nc a particular form of culture with culture itself a more pivotal holistic and central construct this paper by commenting on and critiquing their approach seeks to shift the theoretical center of gravity from a nc centric paradigm to a culture centric constructivist one and from a top down bottom up view to a flatter glocalized one implications are provided which suggest that research should address cultural processes of patterning and production as well as cultural forms such as global communities and global culture gc which share with or even capture the spotlight from nc as a focus for studying and developing ib cultural theory journal of international business studies 2009 40 237 254 doi 10 1057 palgrave jibs 8400410

when is servitization a profitable competitive strategy abstract although servitization has emerged as a new competitive strategy for manufacturers there has been little research about product level servitization we investigate the competition between two channels one separately providing both goods and services and the other providing inseparable servitized goods through a game theoretic approach two critical parameters to understand competition between the two channels will be proposed 1 service dependency a degree of dependency of physical goods upon services and 2 channel substitutability a degree of substitution between conventional channels and servitized one the study reveals that the servitization strategy is a better choice for a manufacturer selling physical goods only when the goods require a higher level of service i e high service dependency and when the competition between the two channels is more severe i e high channel substitutability in addition obtaining cost efficiency is found to be an important factor to achieve higher competitive advantage over the other channel