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The aim of this study is to investigate the differential effects of pure and creative imitation on customer equity and the moderating roles of market contingency (i.e. competition intensity) and institutional contingency (i.e. enforcement inefficiency).

A lab experiment with 181 subjects and a survey of both senior and middle managers from 149 pharmaceutical firms in China were conducted.

Pure imitation decreases customer equity, but creative imitation increases it. Competition intensity attenuates the negative effect of pure imitation and the positive effect of creative imitation, whereas enforcement inefficiency only attenuates the negative effect of pure imitation.

The findings have significant implications for managers seeking to implement product imitation strategies in emerging economies. They can help managers understand the effects of two kinds of imitation strategies on customer equity. Furthermore, this shows that product imitation strategies should be aligned with various market and institutional contingencies to achieve better performance.

The authors distinguished between pure and creative imitation. Whereas previous studies have investigated the effects of pure and creative imitation on financial and market performance, the focus was on their differential effects on customer equity and the moderating roles of environmental contingencies at the market and institutional levels.

Based on the knowledge-based view, this study investigates how firms' information technology (IT) capability broadens and deepens their knowledge base, which consequently improves digital innovation. By further drawing on the institutional theory perspective, this study examines how the relationships between IT capability and knowledge base are moderated by the institutional environments in which the firm operates.

This paper uses 170 samples of Chinese firms and an empirical test conducted by the authors following a hierarchical moderated regression analysis.

The results find that IT capability positively affects knowledge breadth and knowledge depth, which consequently improves digital innovation. Furthermore, the study reveals the negative moderating effects of enforcement inefficiency on IT capability–knowledge breadth relationship, and the negative moderating effects of government support on IT capability–knowledge depth relationship.

This research is one of the earliest attempts to explore the impact of the institutional environment of emerging economies on IT capability. It also clarifies the impact of knowledge breadth and knowledge depth on digital innovation.

This paper aims to investigate how to improve new product performance in turbulent circumstances of emerging economies.

This paper used regression analysis to examine the performance impact of customer relationship management (CRM) and product development management (PDM) concentration strategy in new product development (NPD). A detailed contingent analysis of the market and institutional environments in emerging economies is also conducted based on a survey of 114 Chinese high-tech manufacturers.

The research findings show that PDM has a stronger positive effect on new product performance than CRM in emerging economies and that the contingent effects of the market and institutional environment vary. More specifically, technological turbulence and enforcement inefficiency can positively moderate the relationship between CRM and new product performance, whereas the moderating effect of market turbulence on CRM is negative. Meanwhile, enforcement inefficiency negatively moderates the effect of PDM on new product performance, while the moderating effect of market turbulence on PDM is positive.

This paper is limited to a survey of high-tech manufacturing enterprises in China. Further research should continues to explore and document the strategic issue about NPD in emerging economies by longitudinal study.

This paper contributed to theoretical and practical initiatives on the strategic issue of NPD and provided firms a further understanding of how to select the right NPD strategy in emerging economies to improve new product performance.

The effectiveness of corporate governance enforcement is a complex issue requiring the understanding of the role of institutional factors. The latter may or may not converge towards best practices, depending upon the extent to which history and politics matter more than purely economic or efficiency‐related considerations for convergence. The appropriateness and effectiveness of corporate governance enforcement mechanisms differ among market economies and cannot be attributed to one single factor nor does any such factor have the same significance in all countries as it depends on the relative state of development of financial intermediation. This paper aims to address these issues.

A critique is launched on the hypothesis of legal conformity used to explain the deviation of corporate governance practices and enforcement efficiency from is considered as best practice. The critique follows an historical development approach and is substantiated with some new empirical evidence of ownership structures and market views.

Empirical evidence on ownership structures and on the market views regarding the effectiveness of corporate governance legislation shows that for an understanding of the relationship between financial intermediation and corporate governance broader institutional influences must be taken into consideration.

The analysis of empirical evidence needs detailed expansion and proper association with institutional elements to provide a more comprehensive understanding of corporate governance enforcement efficiency.

The exercise of corporate governance enforcement is an interactive process that goes beyond the role of legal rules and must combine an optimal set of private and public mechanisms properly tailored to each corporate governance regime.

New empirical evidence is provided on ownership structures and on the market view regarding the effectiveness of corporate governance legislation and a broader account is provided on institutional setting for understanding corporate governance policy.

The aim of this study is to investigate profit efficiency in the banking industries of 11 Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries for the period 1998‐2005.

The authors employ a directional technology distance function approach to measure profit efficiency and decompose it into its technical and allocative components. They use these efficiency measures to investigate potential differences in banking performance across countries and across banks of different size and with different ownership status.

The results indicate that the highest proportion of profit inefficiency in the CEE region is attributed to allocative inefficiency, recognizing that considerable variation and different patterns in inefficiency levels across banking systems can be observed. Small and domestic private banks appear to be the most efficient. A negative relationship between efficiency and bank size, the capitalization ratio and market concentration, and a positive relationship with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development index of banking reform are also found.

Bank performance relative to best practice is measured across the CEE region. While it is found that on average technical inefficiency is relatively small and about one quarter of the banks lie on the technological frontier, the size of technical inefficiencies is likely to be exacerbated if the sample were to include Western European banks.

The effects of banking reforms are evident by recent positive trends in profit and allocative efficiencies estimated for CEE banking sectors. These trends suggest that policy makers should intensify efforts to further improve the financial services regulatory and supervisory framework while freeing any remaining explicit or implicit barriers to bank competition.

The study departs from the traditional literature of efficiency. It uses a directional distance function approach to model multi input – multi output banking technology and to investigate profit efficiency in CEE countries.

This study aims to deem the new policy – talk for environmental protection – promoted in the second half of 2014 to be the exogenous event and adopts PSM and DID to verify whether and how the central government’s mechanism of supervision of environmental enforcement improves firm environmental performance and reveals the micro effect and working mechanism of the supervision of environmental enforcement.

The researchers first select reasonable control groups for target districts by means of PSM, then apply DID to compare corporations in the treatment group with those in the control group for the change of environmental performance before and after the talk for environmental protection, so as to evaluate the micro-level effect of such talks on corporate environmental performance; after that, the research examines the working mechanism of such talks on corporate environmental performance; then, it goes a step further to find out the environmental impact of such talks on corporations of different natures of property right.

It is found from the research that the talk for environmental protection will effectively improve the environmental performance of corporations in the target districts, and the improvement of environmental performance in state-owned corporations in the target districts will be more evident. However, such improvements, to a certain extent, are achieved by reducing the output value, and corporations do not increase environmental investments from a long-term perspective.

First, the targets of the talk for environmental protection are mainly principals of municipal governments, but the research expands the scope to the whole province due to the small sample at the municipal level. Despite evidences showing that such a pressure of supervision impacts the whole province, the results obtained based on the data at the municipal level will be accurate. Second, the research selects a relatively short research period. Third, due to the limited data on corporate environmental performance in China, the research selects only listed companies from key monitored and controlled firms by state.

First, for the central government, environmental policy making is not the end of its job; it shall also supervise local governments’ work at environmental governance and properly handle its relationship with local governments. Second, for the local governments, in the course of implementing environmental policies, they should not only strengthen law enforcement but keep the continuity of law enforcement to avoid moving law enforcement. Third, in the long run, corporations must start from the source of production to enhance environmental governance and make cleaner production, so as to keep boosting corporate competitiveness and their ability of fighting risks.

First, the research innovatively provides empirical evidence about the effect of China’s supervision of environmental enforcement. Previous studies on this topic are mostly theoretical discussions only, while this research makes the talk for environmental protection the exogenous event about the supervision of law enforcement and achieves breakthroughs in empirical studies of administrative enforcement supervision. Second, the research pushes the studies on the implementation effect of environmental policies from a medium level to a micro level. Third, the research achieves some breakthroughs in the data for measuring corporate environmental performance.

The purpose of this study is to reconcile the positive, non-significant and even negative effects of guanxi on firm performance from two aspects. First, it explores the linear and curvilinear relationships between guanxi and distinct performance dimensions. Second, it examines the moderating effects of both exchange-related behavioral risk (reflected by contract enforcement in this study) and market-related environmental risk (reflected by market turbulence in this study) on the above relationship.

Based on data for 206 samples collected from distributors of house furnishings, computers and their components, a moderated regression is used to test the hypotheses.

The empirical test generally supports the conceptual model and demonstrates three findings. First, guanxi has a linear, positive effect on financial performance and an inverted U-shaped effect on strategic performance. Second, contract enforcement decreases the effect of guanxi on financial performance and enhances its effect on strategic performance. Third, market turbulence enhances the effect of guanxi on financial performance and weakens its effect on strategic performance.

First, this study collects data only from China. Future studies should collect data from other emerging markets to allow for either model validation or cross-country comparisons. Second, the data come only from buyers, and suppliers’ viewpoints are not included. Third, in addition to contract enforcement and market turbulence, other important contingencies should be considered in the guanxi–performance link.

The results provide important implications for managers to manage guanxi in an emerging economy. Managers should be very clear about their primary goal (i.e. pursuing short-term financial revenue or long-term strategic targets); next, they should understand how to match guanxi with various levels of contract enforcement and market turbulence to achieve that goal.

First, prior research has documented guanxi’s role in channel relationships, but it has not achieved consistent conclusions. Second, although existing studies have analyzed the contingencies of guanxi at the firm level, market level and institutional level, another important contingency “the dyadic relationship condition” is rarely considered. Third, although the extant research has realized the value of guanxi contingent on various market conditions, conflicting views exist. This study contributes by addressing these issues.

This paper aims to draw attention to a broad range of experimental institutional initiatives which operate in the absence of a global antitrust regime. The purpose of this paper is to offer food for thought to scholars in other fields of international trade law facing challenges from divergent national regimes.

Taking inspiration from political science literature on institutions, this paper crafts a broad analytical lens which captures various organisational forms (including networks), codes (including soft law) and culture (including epistemic communities). The strength and shortcomings of traditional “bricks and mortar” institutions such as the European Union (EU) and General Agreement Tariffs and Trade/World Trade Organisation are first examined. Then, the innovative global network of International Competition Network (ICN) is analysed.

It highlights the value of the global antitrust epistemic community in providing a conducive environment for extensive recourse to “soft law”. Examples from the EU and the ICN include measures which find expression in enforcement tools and networks. These initiatives can be seen as experimental responses to the challenges of divergent national antitrust regimes.

It is desktop research rather than empirical field work.

To raise awareness outside the antitrust scholarly community of the variety of experimental institutional initiatives which have evolved, often on a soft law basis, in response to the challenges experienced by national enforcement agencies and businesses operating in the absence of a global antitrust regime.

It offers some personal reflections on the ICN from the author’s experience as a non-governmental advisor. It draws attention to the ICN’s underappreciated range of educational materials which are freely available on its website to everyone. It submits that the ICN template offers interesting ideas for other fields of international trade law where a global regime is unrealisable. The ICN is a voluntary virtual network of agencies collaborating to agree ways to reduce clashes among national regimes. Its goal of voluntary convergence is portrayed as standardisation rather than as absolute congruence. Even if standardisation of norms/processes is too ambitious a goal in other fields of international trade law, the ICN model still offers inspiration as an epistemic community within an inclusive and dynamic forum for encouraging debate and creating a culture of learning opportunities where familiarity and trust is fostered.

National terrorism is a comprehensive problem caused by various factors and conditions that give rise to or are capable of giving rise to it. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The purpose of this study is to identify the main risk factors contributing to the emergence of terrorism, based on an expert survey of the academic community and law enforcement officers who are directly involved in the security sector in the Russian regions.

The study identified 72 causes of national terrorism, which were then transformed into a questionnaire. The findings helped identify 18 major risk factors associated with the emergence of terrorism.

It was concluded that the elimination of these risk factors would generally reduce the impact of more insignificant factors. The results of the study may be useful for countries and national regions exposed to a high level of terrorist activity.

I begin with a dispute over a fox hunt, by which to understand the law of tangible property, then develop that metaphor for the major types of intellectual property. I start with domestic U.S. patent law for the sake of concreteness, and generalize to other jurisdictions and types of intellectual property. In the latter parts of the paper I discuss the international implications of intellectual property, including especially the effects of information spillovers. The last part of the paper describes the hazards in analogizing “trade” in intellectual property rights to trade in goods, and particularly in interpreting international patent data. These hazards motivate the search for a structural model specially adapted to the purpose of valuing international intellectual property rights and rules. The goal is to give economists a simple and integrated framework for analyzing intellectual property across time, jurisdiction and regime type, with an eye towards eventually developing other incentive systems that have the advantages of property (such as decentralized decision-making), but fewer of the disadvantages.