trade interdependence the international financial institutions and the recent evolution of sovereign debt renegotiations abstract this paper analyzes the effect of a debtor country s pattern of trade with commercial creditors home countries on the outcome of debt rescheduling negotiations the analysis reveals that a debtor country with more market power has greater leverage in a three way debt rescheduling negotiation that includes the debtor country its creditors and the international financial institutions ifis the paper also considers the effects of the ifi sovereign debt policy on the bargaining power of the parties in debt rescheduling negotiations two bargaining frameworks analyzed and compared in the paper represent the negotiation mechanism at different stages of the ifi sovereign debt policy evolution

burden sharing in sovereign debt reduction abstract we examine a concerted debt reduction deal between a sovereign debtor a private creditor and an official creditor who insures the deposits of the commercial bank our results show that a weakening of the financial position of the commercial bank reduces the contribution of the commercial bank and increases that of the official creditor without affecting the net terms faced by the debtor this result is robust to changes in seniority moreover leaving both creditor values unchanged requires that commercial banks retire debt at unfairly high prices while official creditors make a net contribution

entry mode organizational learning and r d in foreign affiliates evidence from japanese firms this paper develops hypotheses concerning the role of entry mode and experience based organizational learning as determinants of the r d intensity of foreign affiliates and tests these hypotheses on a sample of 420 japanese manufacturing affiliates abroad entry mode has a major impact on r d activities the r d intensities of acquired affiliates substantially exceed those in wholly owned greenfield affiliates while the r d intensities of minority owned ventures are higher if japanese parent firms lack strong r d capabilities at home for greenfield operations support is found for an incremental growth pattern of foreign r d as a function of organizational learning and affiliate capability building the results are consistent with the view that part of the explanation for japanese firms relative lack of involvement in overseas r d must be sought in their status as latecomers in the establishment of overseas manufacturing networks at the same time a number of japanese firms have actively used foreign acquisitions and joint ventures to gain access to overseas technology and to establish overseas r d capabilities at a faster pace copyright 2002 john wiley sons ltd

new perspectives on the innovation strategies of multinational enterprises lessons for technology policy in europe abstract the aim of this contribution is to learn more about changes in the innovation strategies of large multinational corporations whereby one focus is on internationalization aspects as sources for our analyses we reviewed the main empirical studies and gathered information and insights from 21 corporations our results show firstly that the internationalization of research and technology is still characterized by triadization involving companies from the us the european union and japan secondly qualitative motives are increasingly driving r d location decisions like learning from technological excellence and lead markets and dynamic interactions within the value chain thirdly the process of internationalization in research and technology has been accompanied by an increasingly selective focus on a very few locations and the concentration of innovation activities on worldwide centers of excellence we conclude that these changes in the innovation strategies of large multinational companies put several topics on the agenda for technology policy in europe 1 a stronger focus on extra european collaboration and mobility 2 strengthening the attractiveness of the european union to foreign r d investment and 3 the absorptive capacities of r d organizations in europe 4 a stronger integration of different policy areas and of indirect policy measures 5 as well as the establishment of a transparent and global framework for policy coordination and priority setting worldwide

global analysis of an expectations augmented evolutionary dynamics we consider a deterministic evolutionary model where players form expectations about future play players are not fully rational and have expectations that change over time in response to current payoffs and feedback from the past we provide a complete characterization of the qualitative dynamics so induced for a two strategy population game and relate our findings to standard evolutionary dynamics and equilibrium selection when agents have rational forward looking expectations

sources procedures and microeconomic effects of innovation fabio arcangeli paul david frank engelman christopher freeman massimo moggi richard nelson luigi orsenigo nathan rosenberg michele salvati g n von tunzelman two anonymous referees and the participants at the meeting of the committee on distribution growth and technical progress of the italian national research council cnr rome november 16 1985 have helped with various redraftings a particularly grateful acknowledgment is for the insightful and patient help of moses abramovitz this work has been undertaken at the science policy research unit spru university of sussex as part of the research program of the designated research centre sponsored by the economic and social research council esrc earlier support to the research that led to this paper by the italian national research council cnr is also gratefully acknowledged the statistical research has been undertaken with the assistance of stephano brioschi ilaria fornari and giovannu prennushi

strategy subsets closed under rational behavior a set of strategy profiles is here said to be closed under rational behavior curb of it contains all its best replies each curb set contains the support of at least one nash equilibrium in mixed

imitation by price and quantity setting firms in a differentiated market abstract we study the evolution of imitation behaviour in a differentiated market where firms are located equidistantly on a salop circle firms choose price and quantity simultaneously leaving open the possibility for non market clearing outcomes the strategy of the most successful firm is imitated behaviour in the stochastically stable outcome depends on the level of market differentiation and corresponds exactly with the nash equilibrium outcome of the underlying stage game for high level of differentiation firms end up at the monopoly outcome for intermediate level of differentiation they gravitate to a mutually non aggressive outcome where price is higher than the monopoly price for low level of differentiation firms price at a mark up above the marginal cost market clearing always results endogenously

interorganizational alliances and the performance of firms a study of growth and innovation rates in a high technology industry this paper investigates the relationship between intercorporate technology alliances and firm performance it argues that alliances are access relationships and therefore that the advantages which a focal firm derives from a portfolio of strategic coalitions depend upon the resource profiles of its alliance partners in particular large firms and those that possess leading edge technological resources are posited to be the most valuable associates the paper also argues that alliances are both pathways for the exchange of resources and signals that convey social status and recognition particularly when one of the firms in an alliance is a young or small organization or more generally an organization of equivocal quality alliances can act as endorsements they build public confidence in the value of an organization s products and services and thereby facilitate the firm s efforts to attract customers and other corporate partners the findings from models of sales growth and innovation rates in a large sample of semiconductor producers confirm that organizations with large and innovative alliance partners perform better than otherwise comparable firms that lack such partners consistent with the status transfer arguments the findings also demonstrate that young and small firms benefit more from large and innovative strategic alliance partners than do old and large organizations copyright 2000 john wiley sons ltd

measuring innovative performance is there an advantage in using multiple indicators abstract the innovative performance of companies has been studied quite extensively and for a long period of time however the results of many studies have not yet led to a generally accepted indicator of innovative performance or a common set of indicators so far the variety in terms of constructs measurements samples industries and countries has been substantial this paper studies the innovative performance of a large international sample of nearly 1200 companies in four high tech industries using a variety of indicators these indicators range from r d inputs patent counts and patent citations to new product announcements the study establishes that a composite construct based on these four indicators clearly catches a latent variable innovative performance however our findings also suggest that the statistical overlap between these indicators is that strong that future research might also consider using any of these indicators to measure the innovative performance of companies in high tech industries

adaptive dynamics in games played by heterogeneous populations consider a population of agents who play a game through repeated interactions and adapt their behavior based on information about other agents previous behavior the standard way of modeling such a process is to assume that everyone in the population is governed by the same adaptive rule e g best response imitation or the replicator dynamic this paper studies heterogeneous populations of agents in which some agents are best responders others are conformists they do what the majority does and still others are nonconformists they do the opposite of what the majority does unlike deterministic best reply processes which in 2 2 games converge to nash equilibrium these heterogeneous processes may have limit cycles moreover limit cycles may exist even when the proportion of non best responders is arbitrarily small we show how to analyze the asymptotic behavior of such processes through a suitable generalization of bendixson stability theory combined with stochastic approximation theory journal of economic literature classification numbers c44 c73 d83

popularity of reinforcement based and belief based learning models an evolutionary approach in an evolutionary model players from a given population meet randomly in pairs each instant to play a coordination game at each instant the learning model used is determined via some replicator dynamics that respects payoff fitness we allow for two such models a belief based best response model that uses a costly predictor and a costless reinforcement based one this generates dynamics over the choice of learning models and the consequent choices of endogenous variables we report conditions under which the long run outcomes are efficient or inefficient and they support the exclusive use of either of the models or their co existence

an evolutionary model of bargaining abstract individuals from two populations of bargainers are randomly matched to play the nash demand game they make their demands by choosing best replies based on an incomplete knowledge of the precedents and occasionally they choose randomly there is no common knowledge over the long run typically one division will be observed almost all of the time this stochastically stable division is close to the nash solution when all agents in the same population are alike when the populations are heterogeneous a generalization of the nash solution results if there is some mixing between the two populations the stable division is fifty fifty journal of economic literature classification number c78

safe nests in global nets internationalization and appropriability of r d in wireless telecom this paper documents the case of the wireless telecom industry to bring new empirical evidence to the debate on the internationalization of research and development r d activities us patent statistics on the four industry leaders ericsson motorola nokia and qualcomm illustrate the growing trend of the internationalization of r d over the 1990s yet we show that the most critical r d projects related to the development of wireless standards remain homebound the paper then leverages qualitative data collected through interviews with informed managers to provide a fresh interpretation for the homeboundedness of critical industrial r d the stickiness of core r d projects to domestic locations is related not only to organizational inertia and the unripe maturation of subsidiaries as suggested by prior literature but particularly to the headquarters centralization of intellectual property ip management which offers a high level of appropriability of r d results the unequal distribution of appropriability across corporate r d networks is at the base of the formation of safe nests domestic r d centers that are sheltered from the forces of globalization because they offer a desirable setting for the exploitation of technologies deriving from a stronger coordination of inventive activities with the management of ip

the innovative performance of in house and contracted r d in terms of patents and utility models abstract the standard empirical framework for analysing the r d patents relationship is widened both by examining the different role of in house and contracted r d in the innovative performance of firms and by considering patents and utility models counts as measures of innovation output patents and utility models are considered to approximate for significant and incremental innovations respectively applying count data econometrics to a panel data set of spanish manufacturing firms surveyed in the period 1990 1996 a transcendental production function is estimated which allows for non constant elasticities of the r d inputs the results indicate that significant innovations are mainly gestated in house whereas contracted r d seems more orientated towards innovations of incremental nature

diversification strategy and r d intensity in multiproduct firms this study provides empirical evidence that choice of diversification strategy systematically affects r d intensity in large multiproduct firms research and development intensity in dominant busin

corporate strategic technological partnerships in the european information and communications technology industry abstract in the era of alliance capitalism the increasing number of strategic technological partnerships stps has been mainly recorded in the science based fields of which information and communications technology ict is a leading sector the establishment of stps has also characterised the european ict industry the growing technological interrelatedness and the need to acquire capabilities in related fields have been identified in the literature as major explanations for the increase in corporate technological co operation this paper investigates the role of corporate technological specialisation factors in the conclusion of stps in the european ict industry by carrying out a dynamic analysis accordingly the patterns followed by corporate technological partnerships in the industry in question are investigated since the late 1970s based on us patent data granted to the world s largest firms as well as stps data the results of the econometric analysis are consistent with the view that the more similar partners technological portfolios are with one another the easier it is to absorb each other s capabilities

knowledge transfer in international acquisitions this paper reports on a multimethod study of knowledge transfer in international acquisitions using questionnaire data we show that the transfer of technological know how is facilitated by communication visits meetings and by time elapsed since acquisition while the transfer of patents is associated with the articulability of the knowledge the size of the acquired unit and the recency of the acquisition using case study data we show that the immediate post acquisition period is characterized by imposed one way transfers of knowledge from the acquirer to the acquired but over time this gives way to high quality reciprocal knowledge transfer

innovation strategies as a source of persistent innovation an important topic in the recent literature on firms innovation is the question of whether and to what extent firms which innovate once have a higher probability of innovating again in subsequent periods this phenomenon is called the persistence of innovation although the literature has established that innovation persistence is indeed important from an empirical point of view relatively little attention has been paid to identifying the reasons why this is the case in this article we contribute to the literature by proposing that differences in innovation strategies across firms are an important driving force behind innovation persistence we analyses this issue using a panel database constructed from r d and community innovation surveys in norway empirical measures of five innovation strategies are identified by means of an inductive method ad hoc supplier based market driven r d intensive and science based a dynamic random effects probit model is used to estimate whether and to what extent these innovation strategies are a source of persistent innovation the results support the idea that the differences in innovation strategies across firms are an important determinant of the firms probability to repeatedly innovate more concretely we found that firms pursuing the strategies market driven r d intensive and science based were more likely to be persistent innovators we also distinguish the effects of strategy differences on the persistence of product and process innovation in all firms and within high tech versus low tech firms

patents as indicators of corporate technological strength abstract quantitative indicators of the technological strengths of individual companies would be an important addition to the financial and economic data used in competitor assessments merger acquisition analyses investment decisions and corporate planning and management this paper examines the links between corporate patent and patent citation data and several other indicators of corporate performance changes in sales and profits research and development budgets scientific productivity and expert opinions of company technological strength the study covers 17 us pharmaceutical companies for which financial r d and expert opinion data were readily available for these pharmaceutical companies it was found that the patent data are an excellent indicator of overall corporate technological strength with 1 an overall correlation of 0 82 between expert opinion of pharmaceutical company technical strength and the number of us patents granted to the companies and 2 correlations in the general range of 0 6 to 0 9 between increases in company profits and sales and both patent citation frequency and concentration of company patents within a few patent classes

clever agents in young s evolutionary bargaining model in the models of young 1993 econometrica61 57 84 1993 j econ theory59 145 168 boundedly rational individuals are recurrently matched to play a game and they play myopic best replies to the recent history of play it could therefore be an advantage to instead play a myopic best reply to the myopic best reply something boundedly rational players might conceivably also do we investigate this possibility in the context of young s j econ theory59 145 168 bargaining model it turns out that cleverness in this respect indeed does have an advantage in some cases however if all individuals are equally informed about past play in a statistical sense then the nash bargaining solution remains the unique long run outcome when the mutation rate goes to zero journal of economic literature classification numbers c70 c78

sovereign debt repurchases no cure for overhang troubled debtor countries do not gain by repurchasing external bank debt at market discount even if a buyback would stimulate investment by relieving debt overhang the reason is that buybacks allow creditors to reap more than 100 percent of any efficiency gains that might result from increased investment we show that open market buybacks provide a benchmark for evaluating more complex negotiated buyback deals by comparing any given deal with a hypothetical market buyback of the same size one can derive upper and lower bounds on the gain to the country we apply our model to the 1990 mexican debt deal

patents r d and technological spillovers at the firm level some evidence from econometric count models for panel data this paper analyses the relationship between the main determinants of technological activity and patent applications to this end an original panel of 181 international manufacturing firms investing substantial amounts in r d during the late 1980s has been constructed the number of patent applications by firms is explained by current and lagged levels of r d expenditures and technological spillovers technological and geographical opportunities are also taken into account as additional determinants in order to examine this relationship several econometric models for count panel data are estimated these models deal with the discrete nature of patents and firm specific unobservables arising from the panel data context the main findings of the paper are first a high sensitivity of results to the specification of patent distribution second the estimates of the preferred gmm panel data method suggest decreasing returns to scale in technological activity and finally a positive impact of technological spillovers on firm s own innovation 1997 john wiley sons ltd

leading companies and networks of strategic alliances in information technologies abstract strategic alliances joint ventures and a wide array of cooperative r d pacts have received considerable attention in recent years in this paper an attempt is made to understand not only some recent trends in inter firm cooperation in information technologies but also to reveal the role played by a large group of companies the research is based on a large databank with information on thousands of alliances and their participating companies applying a number of statistical techniques it is possible to identify the major players within information technology and its sub fields the analysis enables us to recognize the major international networks of inter firm alliances the changes over time and different positions taken by world leading companies in several industrial and technological settings

are buybacks back menu driven debt reduction schemes with heterogeneous creditors abstract we analyze the mechanics of menu driven debt reduction deals similar to those recently initiated by debtor countries in which heterogeneous banks choose freely between selling or retaining their debt claims we show that menu deals can facilitate discrimination across heterogeneous banks because of imperfections in the secondary market for debt this implies that menu deals are likely to dominate market buybacks and pure concerted relending agreements particularly when banks differ widely in their valuation of claims on the debtor

the rate and motives of the internationalisation of large firm r d 1994 2005 towards a turning point this paper addresses the internationalisation of rd and iii a rapid rise but still limited of asian firm r d internationalisation third these movements did not promote as anticipated the role of technology based motives asset augmenting strategies in the internationalisation of large firms r d technology based motives remain the most important of driver but the gap with market based considerations has narrowed

what percentage of innovations are patented empirical estimates for european firms abstract a 1993 survey on the innovative activities of europe s largest industrial firms obtained useable results on patenting activities for 604 respondents the data are used to calculate the sales weighted propensity rates for 19 industries the propensity rates equal the percentage of innovations for which a patent application is made the propensity rates for product innovations average 35 9 varying between 8 1 in textiles and 79 2 in pharmaceuticals the average for process innovations is 24 8 varying from 8 1 in textiles to 46 8 for precision instruments only four sectors have patent propensity rates for both product and process innovations combined that exceed 50 pharmaceuticals chemicals machinery and precision instruments regression results that control for the effect of industry sector show that patent propensity rates increase with firm size and are higher among firms that find patents to be an important method for preventing competitors from copying both product and process innovations the effect of secrecy is not so straightforward firms that find secrecy to be an important protection method for product innovations are less likely to patent as expected but secrecy has little effect on the propensity to patent process innovations the r d intensity of the firm has no effect on patent propensity rates for both product and process innovations the sector of activity has a strong influence on product patent propensities but very little effect on process patent propensities after controlling for the effect of other factors

internationalization of r d a survey of some recent research this paper surveys the current state of the art concerning the management and economic impact of geographically decentralized research and development r d in multinational companies mncs this line of research has recently begun to attract renewed interest in reflection of not only critical new trends regarding the nature and conditions of technological change but also significant developments in the realm of economic and managerial theory the aim of this paper is first to outline the empirical and theoretical background and perspective of this new research agenda second it gives a summary and overview of prior research in the area third it outlines the content and structure of a number of recent studies based on these studies the paper identifies a number of trends and implications in terms of policy issues and critical areas for future research

arms race or detente how interfirm alliance announcements change the stock market valuation of rivals most prior event studies find that the announcement of a new alliance is accompanied by a positive stock market response for the partners this result has usually been interpreted as evidence for the prevailing view that alliances are effective vehicles for partners to acquire or access new skills and thus become stronger competitors however partners should also earn positive abnormal returns if alliances are used to shape competitive interactions attenuating competitive intensity industry wide in this study we disentangle these different mechanisms by examining how alliance announcements affect the stock market s evaluation of allying firms rivals if an alliance is expected to make partner firms more competitive this should lead to negative abnormal returns for partners rivals if an alliance is expected to facilitate a reduction in competitive intensity this should lead to positive abnormal returns for rivals results from an event study analysis of research and development alliances in the telecommunications and electronics industries during 1996 2004 provide evidence consistent with competition attenuation in some alliances our research thus challenges the increasingly narrow focus on learning and resource accumulation through alliances and calls for broader consideration of the roles and effects of collaboration both for individual firms and for industry structure

accounting for innovation and measuring innovativeness an illustrative framework and an application the purpose of this paper is to propose and illustrate an accounting framework for innovation we characterize the intensity of innovation by a sales weighted measure of innovation the share of sales in innovative products but other output indicators of innovation could be considered as well comparing statistics on the share of innovative sales across countries industries or firms measures but does not explain the intercountry interindustry or interfirm differences in innovation intensity to have a more meaningful basis of comparison we need a model if an exact model of innovation in its various dimensions existed and if we knew it we would be able to understand fully why innovation differs among countries industries or firms of course such a model does not exist nevertheless it is worth trying to account for innovation differences if only very roughly in such an endeavor what remains to be explained is as important to consider as what can be explained because it reflects the extent of innovative ability or capacity or innovativeness to motivate our approach better and make it more explicit we find it appealing to draw a comparison with the standard framework for growth accounting and the underlying model of a production function production output is viewed as resulting from a process of transformation of inputs into output that can be represented and analyzed in terms of a production function based on the production function an accounting framework can be constructed in which changes in output between periods years decades or differences between spatial units firms industries countries are ascribed to changes or differences in the inputs and in a residual that is known as total factor or multifactor productivity tfp or mfp or simply productivity likewise innovation output can be viewed as resulting from innovation inputs such as r d efforts and other contextual determinants such as the pressure of competition this linkage can be represented in terms of an innovation function and an innovation accounting framework on the basis of which changes in innovation output between periods or differences between spatial units can be ascribed to changes or differences in the factors of innovation and in a residual that we call innovativeness or the unexplained ability to turn innovation inputs into innovation output innovativeness is thus to innovation what tfp is to production innovativeness is conditional on a model of an innovation function and a set of factors of innovation just as tfp is conditional on an assumed specification of the production function and measured factors of production both correspond to omitted factors of performance such as technological organizational cultural or environmental factors and to other sources of misspecification errors although tfp is commonly interpreted as being mainly an indicator of technology the produc

experimentation imitation and stochastic stability abstract do boundedly rational agents repeatedly playing a symmetric game with a unique symmetric equilibrium learn over time to play it in this paper we model the dynamic interaction of two types of such agents experimenters and imitators whose behavior is characterized by simple rules of thumb we find that the stochastic process describing their play isstable in the large it converges globally and with probability one to a compact neighborhood of the equilibrium however its local behavior near the equilibrium depends in interesting ways on the details of the model journal of economic literatureclassification number d83

clever agents in adaptive learning abstract saez marti and weibull j econom theory 86 1999 268 investigate the consequences of letting some agents play a myopic best reply to the myopic best reply in young s j econom theory 59 1993 145 bargaining model which is how they introduce cleverness of players i analyze such clever agents in general finite two player games and show young s individual strategy and social structure princeton university press princeton nj 1998 prediction to be robust adaptive learning with clever agents does select the same minimal curb set as in the absence of clever agents if their population share is less than one however the long run strategy distribution in such a curb set may vary with the share of clever agents

internationalization of corporate technology through strategic partnering an empirical investigation this paper explores some trends in the internationalization of corporate r d efforts innovation output and strategic technology partnering in the past decade inter firm strategic technology partnering through which companies share their innovation efforts supplements the standard indicators of technological competence to broaden the scope from internal innovation processes to a wider range of innovative activities the international information technology industry is singled out for empirical study the main conclusion of this contribution is that even in a global industry such as information technology internationalization of innovation although by no means insignificant appears less important than expected

financing vs forgiving a debt overhang abstract this paper examines the tradeoffs facing creditors of a country whose debt is large enough that the country cannot attract voluntary new lending if the country is unable to meet its debt service requirements out of current income the creditors have two choices they can finance the country lending at an expected loss in the hope that the country will eventually be able to repay its debt after all or they can forgive reducing the debt level to one that the country can repay the post 1983 debt strategy of the imf and the us has relied on financing but many current calls for debt reform call for forgiveness instead the paper shows that the choice between financing and forgiveness represents a tradeoff financing gives the creditors an option value if the country turns out to do relatively well creditors will not have written down their claims unnecessarily however the burden of debt distorts the country s incentives since the benefits of good performance go largely to creditors rather than itself the paper also shows that the tradeoff itself can be improved if both financing and forgiveness are made contingent on states of nature that the country cannot affect such as oil prices world interest rates etc

a penny for your quotes patent citations and the value of innovations the use ofpatents in economic research has been seriously hindered by the fact that patents vary enormously in their importance or value and hence simple patent counts cannot be informative about innovative output the purpose of this article is to put forward patent counts weighted by citations as indicators of the value of innovations thereby overcoming the limitations of simple counts the empirical analysis of a particular innovation computed tomography scanners indeed shows a close association between citation based patent indices and independent measures of the social value of innovations in that field moreover the weighting scheme appears to be nonlinear increasing in the number of citations implying that the informational content of citations rises at the margin as in previous studies simple patent counts are found to be highly correlated with contemporaneous rd however here the association is within afield over time rather than cross sectional

co operative r d why and with whom an integrated framework of analysis abstract firms use r d partnerships to access knowledge and build global r d networks this article develops an integrated framework to examine the determinants of the choice of partners with which firms co operate on r d this resource based perspective underscores the interactions between three major questions why co operate who does and with whom it argues in particular that the choice of partners is dictated by the complementary resources which the latter command the framework is then expanded to predict the relative efficiency of r d co operation with different partners including suppliers clients rivals academic institutions and foreign firms the empirical analysis which is based on responses to france s version of the second european community innovation survey cis 2 strongly supports the overall framework of analysis

stochastic adaptation in finite games played by heterogeneous populations we analyze stochastic adaptation in finite n player games played by heterogeneous populations containing best repliers better repliers and imitators individuals select strategies by applying a

change in domestic network centrality uncertainty and the foreign divestment decisions of firms abstract we investigate the role of domestic interfirm networks for the foreign divestment decisions of firms we argue that firms foreign operations risk being divested when a firm becomes more central in its domestic network positive changes in firm centrality at home facilitate access to information about new business opportunities but they may also lead firms to consider reconfiguring their value chain activities and resources across locations the resulting opportunity costs of maintaining foreign operations could subsequently lead to their divestment moreover we argue that the positive association between an increase in firm centrality in the domestic network and foreign divestment is stronger under higher uncertainty as pursuing new business opportunities at home becomes more appealing we distinguish between firm specific uncertainty and domestic market uncertainty we test and get support for our hypotheses using foreign subsidiary data from u s firms in the ict industry

do company strategies and structures converge in global markets evidence from the computer industry this note examines isomorphism and diversity in a global industry we study how the ongoing internationalisation process has affected companies from various regions of the world empirical research is focussed on the international computer industry we find that companies in this sector have become more divergent and that there is little evidence of a process of isomorphism

the impact of green innovation on energy intensity an empirical analysis for 14 industrial sectors in oecd countries abstract this paper analyses the impact of green innovation on energy intensity in a set of 14 industrial sectors in 17 oecd countries over the 1975 2005 period we create a stock of green patents for each industrial sector and estimate a translog cost function to measure the impact of green innovation on energy intensity next to other factors such as input substitution and autonomous technical change we find that green innovation has contributed to the decline in energy intensity in the majority of sectors the median elasticity of energy intensity with respect to green patenting is estimated at 0 03 in our sample hence a 1 increase in green patenting activities in a given sector is associated with a 0 03 decline in energy intensity the magnitude of the effect is robust across various specifications and is larger in more recent years a decomposition exercise shows that overall half of the decrease in energy intensity over the sample period is related to changes in input prices and half to changes in production technologies

endogenous fluctuations under evolutionary pressure in cournot competition abstract an evolutionary game theoretic model of cournot competition is investigated individuals choose from a finite set of different behavioral rules each rule specifies the quantity to be produced in the current period as a function of past quantities using more sophisticated rules may require extra information costs based upon realized payoffs the fractions of the population choosing a certain behavioral rule are updated according to the replicator equation with noise the long run behavior of the evolutionary system consisting of the population dynamics coupled with the quantity dynamics of the cournot game may be complicated and endogenous fluctuations may arise we consider a typical example where firms can choose between two rules the nash rule and the best reply rule we show that a homoclinic tangency between the stable and unstable manifold of the equilibrium occurs as evolutionary pressure increases implying bifurcation routes to complicated dynamics and strange attractors

imitators and optimizers in a changing environment abstract we analyze the repeated interaction between an imitating and a myopically optimizing player in an otherwise symmetric environment of changing marginal payoff focusing on finite irreducible environments and the case of strategic substitutes we unfold a trade off between the degree of interaction and the size of environmental shocks the optimizer outperforms the imitator if interaction is weak or shocks are large as to the case of duopoly this translates into small cross price elasticities or large shocks in marginal cost and or the maximum willingness to pay in these cases a changing environment creates selection pressure against imitative behavior

global r d networks and large scale innovations the case of the automobile industry abstract the transition towards mass flexibility the increasing heterogeneity of the automobile market and the penetration of foreign investment have been singled out as important factors behind the rise of post national corporations operating in multiple regions of the world such firms not only conduct sales and assembly operations on a multi regional basis but it is claimed rd and ii by coordinating activities globally the purpose of this research is to determine whether r d activities in the automobile industry are globalized it was found that the process of large scale innovation the acceleration of product development and the increasing strategic importance of technology tend to concentrate r d e activities near the home base the factors limiting the concentration of this phenomenon are the dispersion of foreign sales the surveillance of competitor s engineering and styling activities and the support of foreign assembly plants firms pursuing global export or regional strategies tend to concentrate r d e activities near the home base only firms pursuing multi regional strategies have partly dispersed r d e activities to major regional markets the development of global networks is constrained by communication difficulties travel time and cost as well as by pressures for regional autonomy

large firms in the production of the world s technology an important case of non globalisation us patenting by 686 of the world s largest manufacturing firms shows that their share of the world s production of technology is less than their share of r d activities and varies greatly amongst sectors in most cases the technological activities of these large firms are concentrated in their home country the characteristics of which influence the volume and trends in their technological activities much more strongly then the international component of these activities at the same time these large firms are major elements in the volume and the pattern of sectoral specializations in their home countries technological activities

rule evolution and equilibrium selection abstract this paper studies rule evolution and its effect on selection between strict equilibria two rules are investigated the myopic best response and naive imitation if agents cannot change rules equilibrium selection is determined by the relative frequency of agents using the two rules when agents can only change rules through mutation the efficient equilibrium weakly dominates the risk dominant one if agents can change rules by updating then the efficient equilibrium strictly dominates the risk dominant one journal of economic literature classification numbers c72 c73 d81

evaluating innovative processes in french firms methodological proposition for firm innovation capacity evaluation abstract measuring innovation processes is a major concern for academics and firm managers this study proposes an innovation capacity ic measure framework based on a set of 15 innovation management practices every practice is subdivided into multiple criteria which are directly observable phenomena or facts the statistical method of value test and a multi criteria approach are adopted to propose a typology of four groups of innovative firms proactive preactive reactive passive the features observed on these groups of firms allow the determination of the firms innovation capacity and are useful for providing recommendations and practical actions for them with a view to reinforcing it data from a sample group of 39 small and medium sized enterprises smes in the manufacturing industry in lorraine france were collected via a field survey and were fed into the model to determine the innovation capacity of the companies

foreign patenting in the u s as a technology indicator the case of norway abstract foreign patenting in the u s has been considered to be a useful technology indicator in comparisons between countries in order to shed light on this topic this paper will try to explain foreign patenting in the u s by way of data for one country norway a crucial question is what role is played by exports in explaining the foreign patent activity is the u s patenting just an indicator of the export performance or is it the other way around that technology measured by foreign patent activity is an important trade explanatory variable the first part of this paper deals with the relationship between norwegian u s patenting and export to the u s by way of time series analysis on data from 1883 to 1980 then some more detailed analysis are done on industry level data from 1920 and from 1960 1980 an hypothesis is further tested for the possible relationship between foreign u s patenting and the international business cycles finally a detailed but tentative analysis is done on firm level data for the years 1969 1980 the results lend partial support to the assumption that foreign u s patent activity reflects innovative activity in the country where the patents originated a major advantage in using foreign patenting in the u s as a technology indicator is that this type of data in general seems to be of a higher quality than domestic patent data

cournot versus walras in dynamic oligopolies with memory abstract this paper explores the impact of memory in cournot oligopolies where firms learn through imitation of success as suggested in alchian j polit econ 57 1950 211 and modeled in vega redondo econometrica 65 1997 375 as long as memory includes at least one period the long run outcome corresponds to any quantity between the cournot one and the walras one the evolutionary stability of the walrasian outcome relies on interfirm comparisons of simultaneously observed profits i e whether a firm earns more than others in a given period whereas the stability of the cournot nash equilibrium is derived from intertemporal comparisons of profits for each given firm i e whether a deviation pays off for that firm

crossing the innovation threshold through mergers and acquisitions firms are resorting more and more to mergers and acquisitions m a to bridge the gap between where they are and where they would like to be in relation to innovation and performance this paper investigates whether involvement in m a triggers distinct patterns of innovative behaviour across firms and whether this effect is conditional on firm size the analysis combines data from four waves of the community innovation survey cis and the business register of dutch manufacturing firms we observe that m as influence the probability that firms will begin innovation activities or persist with them and these effects vary at different points in the firm size distribution in particular by using m a firms are able to persist with the innovation efforts and output over time and this effect is especially strong for large firms for small firms m a help them to cross the innovation threshold increasing the probability of the transition from a non innovator to an active innovator however the m a effect does not mitigate the tendency of small firms to be occasional innovators

the rejuvenation of inventors through corporate spinouts this article focuses on corporate spinouts as a strategy that can rejuvenate the inventive efforts of inventors with a long tenure in the same company we rely on an unbalanced panel of 5 604 inventor year observations to study a matched sample of 431 inventors employed by the xerox corporation and find evidence in support of three predictions first inventors who join a spinout increase the extent of exploration in their inventive activities second they decrease the extent to which they rely on the parent organization s knowledge third because long tenured employees through socialization tend to progressively adopt more exploitative behavior than short tenured members they benefit relatively more from the spinout experience these results are robust to several econometric specifications that try to account for the endogeneity of the inventors decision to join the spinout for the fact that spinouts inventive activity may be intrinsically different from that of the parent company and for the possible presence of novel external stimuli for those who join spinouts the data provide large sample evidence consistent with the idea that socialization reduces opportunities for organizational learning we discuss the implications for theory and practice

the role of relative performance in inter firm mobility of inventors abstract prior research has emphasized the influence of inter firm mobility on knowledge flows and innovation yet we have an incomplete picture of the antecedents of inventor mobility building on theoretical traditions related to decision making based on limited asymmetric bounded information and economic and other incentives our paper suggests that after controlling for individual performance and other variables previously shown to affect inter organizational mobility an inventor s performance relative to his co patenting group alters his likelihood of mobility our analysis of 2648 inventors in the pharmaceutical industry shows that for those performing above their reference group of past and current co inventors in patenting an increase in relative performance decreases the likelihood of mobility and for those performing below the reference group a decrease in relative performance decreases the likelihood of mobility we also find that when inventors have more external scientific collaborations their likelihood of mobility increases and this variable moderates the relationship between the performance gap and mobility but only for those performing above their peers