highly skilled and well connected migrant inventors in cross border m as based on a relational view of international business we investigate the role of migrant inventors in cross border mergers and acquisitions undertaken by r d active firms we hypothesize that the migrant inventors international social networks can be leveraged by their employers in order to identify and or integrate relevant knowledge bases of acquisition targets in the inventors home country we nuance our hypothesis by means of several conditional logistic regressions on a large matched sample of deals and control cases the impact of migrant inventors increases with the distance between countries and for targets located in countries with weak administrative legal systems as well as when targets are either innovative or belong to high tech sectors or to the same sector as the acquirer and for full versus partial acquisitions

standardization preferences a function of national culture work interdependence and local embeddedness both theoretical and empirical studies of professional service employee standardization preferences are relatively scarce using responses from 398 employees of an international public relations firm this study finds that employees from high power distance high uncertainty avoidance and high context cultures prefer greater standardization whereas employees from high individualism cultures prefer less standardization additionally work interdependence is positively associated with standardization preferences whereas local embeddedness is negatively associated with standardization preferences

the role of equity royalty and fixed fees in technology licensing to university spin offs we develop a model based on asymmetric information adverse selection that provides a rational explanation for the persistent use of royalties alongside equity in university technology transfer the model shows how royalties through their value destroying distortions can act as a screening tool that allows a less informed principal such as the university s technology transfer office tto to elicit private information from the more informed spin off we also show that equity royalty contracts outperform fixed fee royalty contracts because they cause fewer value destroying distortions furthermore we show that our main result is robust to problems of moral hazard beside the coexistence result the model also offers explanations for the empirical findings that equity generates higher returns than royalty and that ttos willing to take equity in lieu of fixed fees are more successful in creating spin offs this paper was accepted by david hsu entrepreneurship and innovation

foreign entry cultural barriers and learning this paper examines the longevity of foreign entries hypotheses are developed on the mode start ups vs acquisitions and ownership structure wholly owned vs joint ventures in relation to cultural distance the hypotheses are tested within a framework of organizational learning using data on 225 entries that 13 dutch firms carried out from 1966 onwards results show that the presence of cultural barriers punctuates an organization s learning cultural distance is a prominent factor in foreign entry whenever this involves another firm requiring the firm to engage in double layered acculturation we also identify locational paths of learning the longevity of acquisitions is positively influenced by prior entries of the firm in the same country similarly the longevity of foreign entries in which the firm has a majority stake improves whenever the expanding firm engaged in prior entries in the same country and in other countries in the same cultural block

an empirical test of the asymmetric models on innovative activity who invests more into r d the incumbent or the challenger the theoretical discussion concerning the question whether the incumbent or the potential entrant invests more into r d has attracted considerable interest this paper reports the results of an empirical study on this question using data of about 3500 german firms over the years 1992 to 1995 the survey explicitly asks the firms for their motives to undertake innovative activity it is thus possible to take account of intended not just completed market entry it turns out that the challenger invests more into r d in order to enter a new market than the incumbent thus the patent racing model by reinganum and others seems to characterize innovative activity more accurately than the competing auction model of gilbert and newbery we use a heteroscedastic tobit as well as a tobit model with selectivity in order to deal with the econometric problems of double censoring

nationality and subsidiary ownership patterns in multinational corporations this paper examines the notion that the multinational s nationality influences its foreign subsidiary ownership decisions it identifies theoretically meaningful constructs to represent nationality and examines under carefully controlled conditions their influence on subsidiary ownership preferences in american and european multinationals the paper concludes that there are indeed significant differences in ownership preferences among various nationalities that can be explained using cultural as well as economic variables but that these differences may become weaker in larger multinationals

patent strength and optimal two part tariff licensing with a potential rival we investigate a two part tariff licensing contract that enables an incumbent innovator to license the technology for a new product to a potential rival who may alternatively develop a compatible technology for an imperfectly substitutable product we identify the optimal two part tariff licensing contract based on the development cost incurred by the rival the market parameter and the substitution coefficient

the impact of culture on the strategy of multinational enterprises does national origin affect ownership decisions this paper tests the proposition that national origin affects the strategies of multinational enterprises by looking at the determinants of the choice they make between entering the united states through partially versus wholly owned subsidiaries we pool entries into the united states made by firms based in two countries japan and finland which differ both in their cultural characteristics and in their cultural distance to the united states after carefully controlling for the known firm and industry level determinants of subsidiary ownership strategies we find that cultural distance between the home base of the investor and the target country or perhaps political risk exerts a powerful influence on ownership of subsidiaries but cultural characteristics of the home base do not

licensing in the theory of innovation this article analyzes licensing in a noncooperative r d game we ask two questions what are the incentives for licensing a production technology and what is the impact of licensing on the pattern of innovation and the consequent evolution of industry costs and market structure the gainsfrom trading information through licensing contracts are achieved through the replacement of inefficient production techniques the ex post incentive and the elimination of inefficient research expenditures the ex ante incentive in a duopoly the availability of licensing encourages research when the firms initial production technologies are close in costs and discourages research when initial costs are asymmetric

drastic innovations and multiplicity of optimal licensing policies abstract considering the licensing of a drastic cost reducing innovation by an outside innovator in an n firm cournot oligopoly we show that when the innovator uses combinations of fees and royalties there are either n 1 or n optimal licensing policies

deterrence by market sharing a strategic incentive for licensing the potential of an incumbent firm to retain its dominant position in a market is a focal point of the modem theory of industrial organization a recent literature examines this issue for markets in which challengers threaten an incumbent s position by engaging in research for a new technology richard gilbert and david newbery 1982 show that an incumbent firm with a firstmover advantage will preempt potential entrants by inventing a new technology slightly earlier than would its rivals in a stochastic r d therefore its introduction does not alter the decision to research when the pre innovation market is characterized by an incumbent and potential entrants stephen salant 1984 shows that licensing ex post to innovation can alter the research decision as anticipation of the returns from future licensing encourages research by the entrant as a counterpoint to the salant result i find that licensing ex ante to research may discourage further research by the entrant indeed this strategic incentive for licensing may be so strong as to persuade the incumbent as well as the entrant to terminate research activity to isolate this incentive for licensing from the one discussed by salant a simple model is constructed in which licensing of future technologies is not desirable anecdotal evidence suggests that the strategic incentive does lead innovators in some markets to license their technologies examples of this information sharing are prevalent in markets where technological change is rapid in the 1940 s standard oil of new jersey discovered a process for synthetic rubber it traded patent rights on this process for a synthetic oil production process discovered by farben a german rubber company in both the synthetic oil and synthetic rubber markets rival companies were department of economics scarsborough college university of toronto toronto ontario canada m5s lal i thank jon cohen and ron saunders for discussions that inspired this paper i am also grateful to yehuda kotowitz andy mclennan jennifer reinganum ralph winter myma wooders two anonymous referees and seminar participants at the university of toronto for helpful comments on earlier drafts

state ownership effect on firms fdi ownership decisions under institutional pressure a study of chinese outward investing firms this study investigates the effect of state ownership on chinese firms foreign direct investment fdi ownership decisions it adopts a political perspective to extend the application of institutional theory in international business research specifically it examines firms heterogeneous responses to external institutional processes during foreign market entry while taking into consideration the political affiliation of firms with the external institutions we argue that state ownership creates the political affiliation of a firm with its home country government which increases the firm s resource dependence on home country institutions while at the same time influencing its image as perceived by host country institutional constituents such resource dependence and political perception increase firms tendency to conform to rather than resist isomorphic institutional pressures we tested our hypotheses using primary data for 132 fdi entries made by chinese firms during 2000 2006 and we found that the effects of home regulatory host regulatory and host normative pressures on a firm to choose a joint ownership structure were stronger when the share of equity held by state entities in the firm was high

technology transfer under asymmetric information licensing contracts for newly patented innovations are observed to vary along several dimensions including the form and size of the payment to the inventor fixedfee versus some output based royalty the degree of exclusivity and the division of rents in this article we show that theform of the contract can be explained by two problems in technology exchange the superiority of a licensor s precontractual information about the economic value of the innovation and thefact that sharing this information with the licensee mayfacilitate imitation we show that a licensor signals her technology type with an output based payment or royalty and may leave some of the rents with the licensee conditions under which exclusive license contracts linear and nonlinear and nonexclusive linear contracts are used to transfer technology are identified

fee versus royalty licensing in a cournot duopoly model abstract this paper finds that royalty licensing can be superior to fixed fee licensing for the patent holding firm when the cost reducing innovation is non drastic the reason for this result is that the patent holding firm enjoys a cost advantage over the licensee under royalty licensing while the two firms compete on equal footing under fixed fee licensing

the effects of double counting and expensing on the measured returns to r d this article focuses on the effects of double counting and expensing on the measured returns to r d the contribution of research and development r d to economic growth has been measured in two general ways the first is to compute total factor productivity in a growth accounting framework and to attribute this residual growth to r d the prevailing view is that in the presence of double counting the measured contribution of r d represents the return above and beyond the normal remuneration to traditional capital author demonstrate that this excess returns interpretation eri is essentially correct in the growth accounting framework and that the resulting bias in the measured contribution of r d to growth is large in postwar u s manufacturing the measured residual is biased downward by as much as 30 the expensing bias is downward and reinforces the excess returns bias in this case and the total bias is large in both the growth accounting and econometric contexts the magnitude of the biases may vary across samples and over time there is simply no substitute for properly measured variables

the choice between mergers acquisitions and joint ventures the case of japanese investors in the united states this paper investigates the determinants of the choice between two alternative methods of pooling similar and complementary assets the merger acquisition and the greenfield equity joint venture two theories of the determinants of that choice are tested on a sample of japanese investments in the united states the results show that equity joint ventures are preferred over acquisitions when the desired assets are linked to nondesired assets because the u s firm owning them is large and not divisionalized when the japanese investor has little previous experience of the american market and hence seeks to avoid postmerger integration problems when the japanese investor and the u s partner manufacture the same product and when the industry entered is growing neither very rapidly nor very slowly

equity joint ventures and the theory of the multinational enterprise this paper extends the internalization approach to the theory of the multinational enterprise mne to include an expanded role for equity joint ventures using the transaction cost paradigm of williamson this paper explains why joint ventures may sometimes be preferred over wholly owned subsidiaries also presented is empirical work on joint venture performance in developing countries which demonstrates that under certain conditions joint ventures can be the optimal mode of foreign direct investment

on a non cooperative theory of technology transfer abstract this paper shows that it might be profitable for a firm with advanced technology to sell the knowledge to a competing firm with less efficient technology and still remain in the business a non corperative equilibrium with technology transfer may pareto dominate the initial equilibrium without technology transfer in this paper it is shown that technology agreement is likely to occur between firms which are reasonably close in terms of their initial technologies such an equilibrium is an interesting possibility in the absence of credibly sustainable collusive outcomes

the transaction costs theory of joint ventures an empirical study of japanese subsidiaries in the united states this paper offers the first large sample empirical study of the factors which influence the choice of japanese firms between full or partial ownership of their u s manufacturing subsidiaries it studies for the first time the ownership policies of investors of a single home country in a single host country thus keeping variations within home and host countries constant one methodological improvement over previous studies is the use as independent variables of the relevant characteristics of the investing firms these had been proxied in previous studies by data on u s industries entered the results suggest that the degree of ownership taken by japanese manufacturing investors in their american subsidiaries is driven by the same general transaction costs variables that determine the choices made by their u s counterparts japanese parents joint venture when they need to combine with other firms intermediate inputs which are subject to high market transaction costs an intriguing result however is the lack of significance of two variables which in the u s case strongly push towards full control of foreign subsidiaries in this study neither the japanese parent s r d nor its advertising intensities had any significant impact on their ownership policies

choosing an appropriate alliance governance mode the role of institutional cultural and geographical distance in international research development r d collaborations we identify a variety of r d alliance modes in a knowledge intensive industry e g pharmaceuticals and classify them into four ordered categories which go beyond the traditional binary equity vs non equity alliance classification this enriches our understanding of alliance governance structures and broadens the application of alliance modes in what is today a more complicated international r d collaboration setting we then explore national industry and firm factors that determine the selection of an appropriate r d alliance governance mode using a sample of 237 international alliance deals the likelihood of using a more integrated alliance governance mode decreases as the difference or distance between nations of the partner firms increases in terms of human capital and cultural distance on the other hand a greater geographic and institutional difference is positively associated with the selection of more integrated alliance governance modes furthermore firms in the research stage are more likely to use a more integrated governance mode as opposed to firms in the development stage these findings advance research on alliance governance structure they reveal the factors affecting the r d alliance governance mode choice

fee versus royalty reconsidered for an outsider innovator in a cournot oligopoly royalty licensing could be superior to both fixed fee and auction the result depends on a simple fact that has been overlooked in the existing literature namely the number of licenses can take only integer values

r d rivalry with licensing or imitation the authors study the rivalry between two firms to develop an innovation in a dynamic setting that allows for post development dissemination of the innovation such as licensing or imitation this dissemination may cause the noninnovating firm to benefit from the discovery when this occurs conventional results in the economics of r d no longer need apply they find that industry leaders will tend to develop minor innovations but will develop major innovations only if imitation is difficult copyright 1987 by american economic association

confirmation bias in individual level perceptions of psychic distance an experimental investigation in this article we draw from social cognition theory to explore the influence of confirmation bias on perceptions of psychic distance despite the prominence of psychic distance and other forms of distance as potential predictor variables in international business ib research very little work has been done exploring the factors and processes that shape a decision maker s perceptions of distance we argue in this article that social cognition theory can help fill that void specifically we hypothesize that confirmation bias may influence managers processing of information concerning differences between cultures such a bias may cause managers to attend more to information that confirms pre existing beliefs and discount information that contradicts pre existing beliefs thus biasing their perceptions of psychic distance using an experimental approach the impact of confirmation bias on perceptions of psychic distance is confirmed in a sample of 200 australian managers the observed changes in perceptions are also associated with changes in perceptions of risk and preferences for entry modes in a hypothetical business scenario as a result this article demonstrates how the application of social psychology theories and methods can provide new theoretical perspectives to explain when how and why individual level perceptions of psychic distance might diverge from national level averages

greenfield vs acquisition the strategy of japanese investors in the united states multinational firms can enter a foreign market by taking over existing local firms acquisitions or by setting up new ventures greenfield investments surprisingly there has been limited empirical work on this topic this paper examines the determinants of this choice by looking at japanese entries into the united states by focusing on firms of one country entering a single market we are able to separate the impact of a firm s strategy from that of the characteristics of the target industry or country this paper tests simultaneously a number of competing hypotheses the results suggest that acquisitions are used by japanese investors with weak competitive advantages while investors with strong advantages find that greenfield investments are a more efficient way to transfer these advantages to the u s acquisitions are also chosen to enter industries with either very high or very low growth rates when entry is at a scale that is large relative to the parent and when entry is into a different industry the japanese investor s previous experience of the u s market its financial situation and its status as a follower in an oligopolistic industry have no statistically significant impact on the entry mode neither do u s stock market conditions

national culture transaction costs and the choice between joint venture and wholly owned subsidiary transaction cost theory posits that culture plays a limited role in the choice between jv and wos in contrast research suggests that firms preferred level of ownership in their foreign subsidiaries is influenced primarily by cultural traits this study provides additional evidence in this ongoing debate by replicating hennart s transaction cost model of entry mode choice in two different national contexts japanese firms investing in the u s and the u s firms investing in japan the results suggest that the transaction cost explanation for the ownership choice holds in the both national contexts yet the propensity to choose jv or wos significantly varied between japanese and the u s firms

what makes and what does not make a real option a study of equity shares in international joint ventures this paper examines the boundaries of real options logic with an application to joint ventures jvs we distinguish between forms of uncertainty that are resolved endogenously and those that are resolved exogenously and theorize that only exogenous uncertainty will have the impact predicted by real options theory on a foreign investor s choice of how large an equity share to take in a jv we theorize that macroeconomic and institutional variables generate exogenous uncertainty whereas by contrast cultural distance and choices pertaining to corporate scope and product or process development activities involve endogenous sources of uncertainty that investors can both assess and act upon without having to wait and see using a sample of 6472 sino foreign jvs we find support for our predictions we discuss and implement proper methods to test for the existence of null effects as is relevant to establish the boundaries of a theory such as real options theory we draw implications for research and practice on jvs specifically equity share decisions which deserve more attention and real options including suitable uses and desirable extensions of the concept

fees versus royalties and the private value of a patent we compare how much profit an owner of a patented cost reducing invention can realize by licensing it to an oligopolistic industry producing a homogeneous product by means of a fixed fee or a per unit royalty our analysis is conducted in terms of a noncooperative game involving n 1 players the inventor and the n firms in this game the inventor acts as a stackelberg leader and it has a unique subgame perfect equilibrium in pure strategies it is shown that licensing by means of a fixed fee is superior to licensing by means of a royalty for both the inventor and consumers only a drastic innovation is licensed to a single producer

on licensing policies in bertrand competition abstract three licensing policies the auction the fee and the royalty are studied in a bertrand type duopoly with differentiated goods the analysis is conducted in terms of a multistage noncooperative game involving an external patentee and two firms each producing a differentiated good in bertrand price competition a principal finding is that for a patentee the royalty may be superior to the other two policies journal of economic literature classification numbers 026 611 621

how to license intangible property we examine the optimal licensing strategy of a research lab selling to firms who are product market competitors we consider an independent lab as well as a research joint venture we show that 1 demands are interdependent and hence the standard price mechanism is not the profit maximizing licensing strategy 2 the seller s incentives to develop the innovation may be excessive 3 the seller s incentives to disseminate the innovation typically are too low 4 larger ventures are less likely to develop the innovation and more likely to restrict its dissemination in those cases where development occurs and 5 a downstream firm that is not a member of the research venture is worse off as a result of the innovation

an institutional approach to cross national distance cross national distance is a key concept in the field of management previous research has conceptualized and measured cross national differences mostly in terms of dyadic cultural distance and has used the euclidean approach to measuring it in contrast our goal is to disaggregate the construct of distance by proposing a set of multidimensional measures including economic financial political administrative cultural demographic knowledge and global connectedness as well as geographic distance we ground our analysis and choice of empirical dimensions on institutional theories of national business governance and innovation systems in order to overcome the methodological limitations of the euclidean approach we calculate dyadic distances using the mahalanobis method which is scale invariant and takes into consideration the variance covariance matrix we empirically analyze four different foreign expansion choices of us companies to illustrate the importance of disaggregating the distance construct and the usefulness of our distance calculations which we make freely available to managers and scholars

general licensing schemes for a cost reducing innovation optimal combinations of upfront fees and royalties are considered for a cost reducing innovation in a cournot oligopoly for both outside and incumbent innovators it is shown that for any nondrastic innovation a the license is practically sold to all firms ensuring full diffusion of the innovation b consumers are better off firms are worse off and the social welfare is improved c the optimal licensing policy involves positive royalty for relatively significant innovations d compared to an incumbent firm an outsider invests more in r d and has higher incentive to innovate and e as a function of the magnitude of the innovation the industry size that provides the highest incentive to innovate is u shaped

optimal patents with compulsory licensing this paper examines the use of compulsory lincensing as a policy to combat the monopoly problem associated with the patent system it introduces the notion of an optimal patent one where the patent life and the licensing royalty rate are both determined optimally under certain simplifying assumptions it is shown that the optimal patent will have an indefinite life for both process and product innovations some preliminary calculations suggest that the use of compulsory licensing may lead to substantial welfare improvements even if the patent life is left unchanged at 17 years

conceptualizing and measuring distance in international business research recurring questions and best practice guidelines distance is a central concept in international business research yet there is debate about the construct as well as its operationalization in this editorial we address three of the most important recurring questions posed by authors editors and reviewers by examining the theory methods and data of distance research we discuss 1 how to theorize on distance and 2 what method and 3 what data to use when constructing a distance index we develop practical recommendations grounded in theory illustrating and supporting them by calculating cross country distance indices for all available country pairs and two of the most used distance indices cultural and institutional we show that whereas a specific method to calculate distance may matter to some extent the choice for a specific cultural or institutional framework to measure cultural or institutional distance has a major impact on country pair distances overall this editorial highlights the importance of matching data and method to the theoretical argument

alliances in international governmental organizations regional trade agreement formation and multinational enterprise regionalization strategy abstract drawing from political science alliance theories we explain why countries are likely to enter regional trade agreements we argue that the probability that this will happen is higher if the countries are allies in the same international governmental organizations igos as such alliances can help build trust and reduce political risk our results show that igo scope and also partner reliability and influence in the igo network play important roles our findings provide guidance to multinational enterprises in formulating regionalization strategies

the evolution and internalization of international joint ventures in a transitioning economy although international joint ventures ijvs may mature over time and develop competitive viability they maintain some risk of instability owing to their shared ownership such instability can ultimately lead to their internalization by one of the partners in this study we consider factors that influence 1 whether ijvs evolve toward becoming a wholly owned subsidiary and 2 which parent foreign or local gains ownership of the venture we use a sample of hungarian joint ventures and find that only when there is both a power imbalance between the parents and high levels of conflict is the likelihood that the joint venture converts to a wholly owned subsidiary enhanced the extent to which the joint venture has learned from the foreign parent indirectly determines which parent gains full ownership extensive knowledge transfer to a joint venture in a transitioning economy combined with high levels of conflict increases the likelihood of the foreign parent gaining full ownership in contrast when there is extensive knowledge transfer and low conflict between the parents the local parent is more likely to internalize the venture our results suggest that the relationship between partner power and outcomes in ventures is more complex than originally believed and is contingent upon the level of conflict between the parents of the ijv