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This paper aims to investigate the importance and prevalence of Guanxi in business interactions in network-based societies such as China, few studies have the phenomenon from a dyadic view. In a business dyad, one partner may not value Guanxi and take it as a template for actions as the other does.

The authors propose that such collective and asymmetric Guanxi orientation influence both the creation and distribution of relational rent in a Guanxi dyad. Furthermore, relationship-specific investments (RSIs) moderate the relationship between dyadic Guanxi orientation and relational rent creation and distribution.

Based on a matched sample of supplier-buyer dyads in China, the authors find that joint Guanxi orientation is positively related to joint pie creation, whereas Guanxi orientation imbalance has a positive effect on the pie distribution imbalance.

These results contribute to the literature by revealing how dyadic Guanxi dynamics and practices affect dyadic performance and providing managers with meaningful implications for dyadic Guanxi management.

This chapter examines the factors that may influence the total value created in a joint venture (JV) and also the relative value appropriated by each partner in the venture. We look at the effects of both partners’ embeddedness in prior networks of relationships and the asymmetry of business relatedness of two partners with the JV on these two important outcomes. Results of an event study of stock market reaction to JV announcements by the largest U.S. firms during 1987–1996 suggest that both network embeddedness of partners and the asymmetry of business relatedness of two firms with the JV affect the total value creation of all partners but not the relative value appropriation between the partners.

Stakeholder theory understands business in terms of relationships among stakeholders whose interests are mainly joint but may be occasionally conflicting. In the latter case, managers may need to make trade-offs between these interests. The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of managerial decision-making about these trade-offs.

This paper draws on the ordonomic approach which sees business life to be rife with social dilemmas and locates the role of stakeholders in harnessing or resolving these dilemmas through engagement in rule-finding and rule-setting processes.

The ordonomic approach suggests that stakeholder interests trade-offs ought to be neither ignored nor avoided, but rather embraced and welcomed as an opportunity for bringing to fruition the joint interest of stakeholders in playing a better game of business. Stakeholders are shown to bear responsibility for overcoming the perceived trade-offs through the institutional management of social dilemmas.

For many stakeholder theorists, the nature of managerial decision-making about trade-offs between conflicting stakeholder interests and the nature of trade-offs themselves have been a long-standing point of contention. The paper shows that trade-offs may be useful for the value creation process and explicitly discusses managerial strategies for dealing with them.

Scholars have affirmed that a conceptualization of value co-creation in business relationships should reflect the nature and characteristics of interactional processes that occur in use. The advent of sales and marketing technologies, however, is changing the nature and dynamics of interactions. New trends in digitalization have played a significant role in emphasizing and facilitating the occurrence of business-to- business (B2B) collaborative or sharing economy. The B2B sharing economy and value co-creation are closely intertwined, as businesses harness the power of shared resources and collaboration to generate value in diverse ways. This study highlights the importance of going beyond value co-creation in studying B2B collaborative economy, unpacking the interconnected value processes that influence value co-creation. It also aims at showing the activities that characterize multiple joint value spheres among actors.

The study consists of 49 qualitative interviews with managers operating in different industries.

The paper shows that when considering digital B2B contexts, five joint value spheres in business relationships should be considered: a value co-creation, a value appropriation, a value communication, a value measurement and a value representation sphere. Each one is characterized by specific activities that are relevant from a managerial point of view.

This study highlights that value co-creation has often been over stressed when discussing business interactions, also with the advent of new technologies. Rather, this study offers a more comprehensive view of value co-creation that includes different value processes occurring in joint value spheres. These further processes are relevant because failure and success in business relationships within the B2B sharing economy are often dependent from activities outside the value co-creation process, which strongly affect it. Such knowledge will also open up new research venues and opportunities to better contribute to the practice of value management in business relationships.

Relationship is based on the idea of creating a win‐win situation for parties involved in a business engagement. The purpose of the article is to develop a model of mutual value creation and reciprocal return on relationships (ROR_R) assessment, which enables calculation of joint and separate gains from a relational business engagement.

The approach takes the form of a conceptual analysis, which is tested empirically through a real‐life case. The empirical part is based on a longitudinal empirical study including several empirical cases.

Following a practice matching process, resulting in mutual innovation and aligning of their processes, resources and competencies, the parties in a business engagement make investments in the relationship. This enables the creation of joint productivity gains. Valuation of joint productivity gains produces an incremental value, which can be shared between the parties through a price mechanism. Finally, based on this shared value and costs of investments in the relationship by the parties, a reciprocal return on the relationship can be assessed and split between the business parties.

The study addresses dyadic business engagements only. The findings enable calculation of reciprocal return on relationships (ROR_R) and form a basis of further development of marketing metrics and financial contribution of marketing, and of developing financial measures of intangible assets called for by the finance and investor communities.

Using the conceptual model and corresponding metrics, the financial outcome of the development of customer relationships as well as an assessment of the return on relationships with customers can be established.

The approach to assess the value of customer relationships as a two‐sided endeavor is novel, as well as the joint productivity construct and the value sharing approach, and the way of assessing ROR as a reciprocal measure that can be split between the business parties.

The embedding of digital technology and the fuzzy organizational boundary have changed the operation of platform innovation ecosystem (PIE). Specifically, as an important energy of PIE, the internal logic of knowledge flow needs to be reconsidered in the context of digital age, which will be helpful to select the cultivation and governance strategy of PIE.

A dual case-analysis is applied to open the “black box” of knowledge flow in the PIE from the perspective of enabled by digital technology, by taking the intellectual property (IP) operation platform as cases.

The research findings are as follow: (1) The knowledge flow mechanism of PIE is mainly demonstrated through the processes of knowledge acquisition, knowledge integration and knowledge spillover. During this process, connectivity empowerment and scenario empowerment realize the digital empowerment of the platform. (2) Connectivity empowerment provides a channel of knowledge acquisition for the digital connection between participants in PIE. In the process of knowledge integration, scenario empowerment improves the opportunities for accurate matching and collaborative innovation between knowledge supplier and demander, and enhance the value of knowledge. The dual effect of connectivity empowerment and scenario empowerment has accelerated the knowledge spillover in PIE. Particularly, connectivity empowerment expands the range of knowledge spillover, and scenario empowerment affects the generativity of the platform, resulting in the enhancement of platform’s capability to embed and expand its value network. (3) Participants have been benefitted from the PIE enabled by digital technology through three key modules (knowledge acquisition, knowledge integration and knowledge spillover), as the result of knowledge flow.

This study focuses on the knowledge flow mechanism of PIE enabled by digital technology, which enriches the PIE theory, and has enlightenments for the cultivation of digital platform ecosystem.

This paper aims to examine the effects of the 2014 European regulatory reform on auditors’ activity, the audit outcome and the audit market, with a focus on the Spanish market.

The research is based on in-depth, semistructured interviews with partners of the main audit firms operating in the Spanish market. This qualitative approach provides a precise identification of the cause-effect relationships of the new measures introduced by the European audit regulation.

The findings indicate that, based on auditors’ opinions, the costs of the main regulatory changes outweigh the benefits. The European Union (EU) Audit Regulation imposes more demanding provisions, such as an extended auditor’s report, mandatory audit firm rotation, more banned nonaudit services and stricter quality controls, resulting in substantial side effects on audit activity and the audit market. This could undermine the objective of enhancing the quality of audit services.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to analyze the effect of the 2014 EU regulatory reform on audit activity, audit market and audit outcome based on auditors’ perceptions. The findings may be of interest to academics, professionals and regulators alike, as they offer valuable insights for assessing the effectiveness of the new audit provisions. Additionally, the qualitative methodology used facilitates a causal analysis of the key elements introduced by the regulations, potentially paving the way for future research avenues.

Being the basic need of humans, but also an attractive element of the tourist offer, gastronomy is related to the attractiveness of a destination, and Balkan gastronomy is considered to be one of the most positive aspects of the tourist image of the region. This study aims to investigate the locals' perception of gastronomic specificity of ‘Balkan food’ and national (local) food as well. Furthermore, the study investigated how ‘Balkan food’ is perceived in terms of its tourist potential, uniqueness, quality, nutrition and its general role in the creation of a joint ‘Balkan’ tourist brand. The methodology included a historical approach and a survey which involved110 respondents. Out of 21 traditional dishes identified in the official tourist promotional activities of selected countries and a review of the relevant literature, the following are identified as regional ‘Balkan’ dishes: ‘pečenje’, ‘musaka’, ‘ćevapi’ and ‘sarma’. The following are identified as national dishes: ‘pastrmajlija’, ‘sogan dolma’, ‘raštan’, ‘pašticada’, ‘burek’ and ‘svadbarski kupus’. The results indicated that some nations have specific knowledge of certain dishes being considered national and regionally present, while other nations show a lack of knowledge of food origin and regional presence in identified countries. Furthermore, the results showed that different dimensions of Balkan cuisine significantly contribute to the tourist potential of the region, while the contribution of its nutritive characteristics is perceived as less important. Results showed that ‘Balkan food’ is considered to be important for the improvement of the ‘Balkans'’ image and promotion, as well as important for the creation of the regional tourism brand.

The aim of this paper is to understand the process of value creation in business-to-business (B2B) contexts from the perspective of small- and medium-sized firms (SMEs). Small businesses are challenged to compete and collaborate with larger firms. While the “sharks” dilemma (often the most dangerous sharks also have the most valuable resources) focuses on specific defences, the authors emphasize a value generation perspective.

The concept of asymmetric relationships is taken as a reference and examined using a longitudinal multi-case study.

The authors results demonstrate how small firms not always assume an inferior, defensive position. Ambitious and growth-oriented SMEs learn to collaborate with larger partners and exhibit a proactive attitude towards relationship management. They understand the importance of developing social ties. They foster frequent and informal communication with their customers, favouring personal visits as a means to receive advice for directing their research efforts and exchange information and views. Such ties help them to develop shared plans and goals.

In asymmetric relationships, partner selection models should help firms to concentrate their efforts in a reduced group of key partners. These models should include not only economic performance indicators – variables such as flexibility and autonomy – but also innovation and improvement in processes, image, prestige and positioning, access to markets and stability.

The authors found insight into a novel concept: dual-value appropriation, where partners do not split the pie of the total value generated, as frequently proposed in the literature, but fully appropriate a different and unique value from the relationship. The authors further highlight the important role played by the committed champions in developing communication and trust.

The existing literature is fragmented across disciplines and does not provide a holistic, comprehensive view on how value is created, deployed and captured. This paper aims to provide a structured view of the current literature and facilitates a theoretical understanding of value creation and capture in buyer–supplier relationships.

A systematic literature review was conducted on 195 articles published in 21 leading journals in marketing, operations management and strategy disciplines.

An integrated, generalizable and expandable framework is proposed based on the causal or interactive relationship among four components, namely, dimensions of value creation; processes and interactions by which buyers and suppliers enable value creation; relationship characteristics that affect these components; and value capture. Two new areas for future studies are also suggested.

The findings are based on papers published in peer-reviewed academic literature. Future studies could include more heterogeneous publications in languages other than English and/or professional journals to compare scholars' and managers' perspectives.

This study offers simple, practical guidelines that managers can apply in their real-world situations to increase the value they gain from their relationships.

The framework does not pretend to be exhaustive because such an attempt would be impractical. Rather, this study provides practical examples for each component, and shows how additional concepts and constructs can be incorporated to make it inclusive and generalizable. Two new manners of value capture other than price negotiations are presented (volume and collaborative benefits).