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The purpose of this paper is to evaluate which strategic resources or industry structural conditions help firms build up a competitive advantage and sustain it over time.

Our approach is based on one main variable. Firm‐specific profits (proxy for competitive advantage) were estimated as the difference between a firm's profits and the average profitability of its industry. From it, two measures of firm performance were estimated, the firm‐specific projected profitability (FSPP) and the persistence of firm‐specific profits (FSPPe) which were used two split the sample in two type of firms, out performers and underperformers.

The results suggested that FSPPe and FSPP are two different indicators of firms' performance and may not be influenced by the same factors. The results show that neither the FSPPe nor its sustainability is explained through strategic resources.

While intangible investments might help firms build up a competitive advantage, these might not help to preserve it.

Further examination on unobserved strategic factors should help gain better understandings of what makes out performers earn/sustain higher level of profits over time.

Investments on certain strategic resources above industry average can lock firms into persistent competitive disadvantages.

The Nature of Business Policy Business policy — or general management — is concerned with the following six major functions:

Preface The functions of business divide into several areas and the general focus of this book is on one of the most important although least understood of these—DISTRIBUTION. The particular focus is on reviewing current practice in distribution costing and on attempting to push the frontiers back a little by suggesting some new approaches to overcome previously defined shortcomings.

This paper aims to investigate whether organisations in developing economies legitimise their level of profit.

Organisations’ level of profit is evaluated against the readability of sections of information available in the corporate annual reports. These sections include the Chairman’s Report, the Chief Executive Officer Report and the Notes to the Accounts.

More profitable organisations report more readable information in their corporate annual reports. Information in the non-mandatory sections of the report (Notes to the Accounts) is more readable compared to the information in the mandatory sections of the report (Chairman’s Report). Larger organisations report more readable information. Public Enterprises report more readable information compared to the Publicly Listed Companies.

Organisations in the developing economies are aware of their role in their society. They respond to instances of possible violation of the implied social contract by sharing information in ways that relays news in certain ways.

Evidence of presence of legitimising activities by organisations would imply the need to strengthen the regulatory and monitoring guidelines to ensure efficient use of society’s resources and a fair rent charge for the utilities.

There is a greater need to monitor and question organisations’ level of earned profit to ensure it is necessary to maintain their operations.

This study is the first attempt to investigate organisations’ immediate legitimising activities in relation to their reported profit.

Sees the objective of teaching financial management to be to help managers and potential managers to make sensible investment and financing decisions. Acknowledges that financial theory teaches that investment and financing decisions should be based on cash flow and risk. Provides information on payback period; return on capital employed, earnings per share effect, working capital, profit planning, standard costing, financial statement planning and ratio analysis. Seeks to combine the practical rules of thumb of the traditionalists with the ideas of the financial theorists to form a balanced approach to practical financial management for MBA students, financial managers and undergraduates.

This book is a policy proposal aimed at the democratic left. It is concerned with gradual but radical reform of the socio‐economic system. An integrated policy of industrial and economic democracy, which centres around the establishment of a new sector of employee‐controlled enterprises, is presented. The proposal would retain the mix‐ed economy, but transform it into a much better “mixture”, with increased employee‐power in all sectors. While there is much of enduring value in our liberal western way of life, gross inequalities of wealth and power persist in our society.

This paper shows that consumer preference heterogeneity affects whether multinational firms serve local markets via imports or local production. Firms are least likely to choose local production over imports for product varieties that have relatively inelastic demand because transport costs have a smaller impact on the firm’s local profits for these products. The results suggest that there is complementarity between centralized production, with local market access via imports, and strategies that maintain low price elasticities at the brand level, such as advertising and within-brand product proliferation. A partial equilibrium study of the laundry detergent industry in Western Europe illustrates how firms and consumers interact at different levels of transport costs and reveals the product varieties that are most and least likely to be manufactured locally when transport costs are high.

An apparel supply chain primarily consists of geographically distant suppliers, manufacturers and retailers. The coordination among the members of the supply chain becomes difficult when we consider the triple bottom line of sustainability in it. Moreover, the complexity increases with the change in dominance power of the respective members. However, the task of managing the channel further becomes complicated after incorporating sustainability and dominance power simultaneously into the supply chain. To fill this gap, this paper focuses on designing of mechanism and demonstration of three-echelon model to coordinate sustainable supply chain.

In this paper, the noncooperative game theoretic method has been applied for the exploration of models. The various structures of the centralized and decentralized supply chain are considered on the basis of a player's dominance power. The model uses simultaneous and sequential move games to analyze optimal profit of supply chain agents, total channel profit, green innovation level and corporate social innovation level.

Analytical results show that simultaneous game performs better than the sequential game. The consumer sensitivity toward green and social innovations increases total channel profit. We also proposed a linear two-part tariff contract model. The proposed model enhances the sustainability level and leads to perfect channel coordination. Using a numerical example, we present the effectiveness of multiple game structures under centralized and decentralized settings. The results reveal that channel efficiency is the highest in the two-part tariff contract followed by a simultaneous move game structure and lower in the cases of sequential move game.

In this research, model setting are deterministic and there is no any information asymmetry. Therefore researchers are encouraged to study multiechelon sustainable supply chain coordination models under stochastic and information asymmetry settings.

The paper includes implications for the development of sustainable supply chain coordination model to tackle the problems of dominance power, sustainability issues and lower channel efficiency of supply chain.

This study proposes game-theory-based three-echelon sustainable supply chain for the channel coordination.

Contemporary literature reveals that, to date, the poultry livestock sector has not received sufficient research attention. This particular industry suffers from unstructured supply chain practices, lack of awareness of the implications of the sustainability concept and failure to recycle poultry wastes. The current research thus attempts to develop an integrated supply chain model in the context of poultry industry in Bangladesh. The study considers both sustainability and supply chain issues in order to incorporate them in the poultry supply chain. By placing the forward and reverse supply chains in a single framework, existing problems can be resolved to gain economic, social and environmental benefits, which will be more sustainable than the present practices.

The theoretical underpinning of this research is ‘sustainability’ and the ‘supply chain processes’ in order to examine possible improvements in the poultry production process along with waste management. The research adopts the positivist paradigm and ‘design science’ methods with the support of system dynamics (SD) and the case study methods. Initially, a mental model is developed followed by the causal loop diagram based on in-depth interviews, focus group discussions and observation techniques. The causal model helps to understand the linkages between the associated variables for each issue. Finally, the causal loop diagram is transformed into a stock and flow (quantitative) model, which is a prerequisite for SD-based simulation modelling. A decision support system (DSS) is then developed to analyse the complex decision-making process along the supply chains.

The findings reveal that integration of the supply chain can bring economic, social and environmental sustainability along with a structured production process. It is also observed that the poultry industry can apply the model outcomes in the real-life practices with minor adjustments. This present research has both theoretical and practical implications. The proposed model’s unique characteristics in mitigating the existing problems are supported by the sustainability and supply chain theories. As for practical implications, the poultry industry in Bangladesh can follow the proposed supply chain structure (as par the research model) and test various policies via simulation prior to its application. Positive outcomes of the simulation study may provide enough confidence to implement the desired changes within the industry and their supply chain networks.

The purpose of this paper is to develop alternative analytical measures for the degree of operating leverage (DOL) that reflect the impact of uncertain demand shocks in the product's market on optimal production levels, sales and profits of the firm.

The elasticity measures are constructed according to a theoretical formulation of optimal production level that corresponds to demand shocks for given predetermined levels of fixed cost.

The paper suggests two main findings. First, the analytical marginal DOL is at least twice the traditional DOL depending on the structure of the shock, the production function and demand's elasticity. The traditional DOL is equal to the measure only when large-scale negative demand prompts the firm to abandon production. Second, the paper also provides an analytical measure of DOL in terms of elasticity of profit to sales rather than to production level. Both theoretically and empirically elasticity of profit to sales can be better measured and better reflects risk.

This paper should be extended to encompass multiple shocks on demand and supply while investigating the empirical multi variants distribution of the shocks.

The model can be used by managers who are well informed about the fixed and variable costs of their firm. The model determines the mean profit- risk trade off which is an important factor in all investment decision problems.

Surprisingly and according to the best knowledge, this paper is the first attempt in the literature for alternative analytical DOLs’ formulations that is coherent with basic economic theories of optimal production level under risk.