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1 – 10 of over 87000Aim of the present monograph is the economic analysis of the role of MNEs regarding globalisation and digital economy and in parallel there is a reference and examination of some…
Abstract
Aim of the present monograph is the economic analysis of the role of MNEs regarding globalisation and digital economy and in parallel there is a reference and examination of some legal aspects concerning MNEs, cyberspace and e‐commerce as the means of expression of the digital economy. The whole effort of the author is focused on the examination of various aspects of MNEs and their impact upon globalisation and vice versa and how and if we are moving towards a global digital economy.
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David D. Van Fleet, Abagail McWilliams and Michael Freeman
To develop an understanding of communication among agribusiness journals and to examine patterns of citations that allow the measurement and description of the structure of…
Abstract
Purpose
To develop an understanding of communication among agribusiness journals and to examine patterns of citations that allow the measurement and description of the structure of communication flows among those journals in a network.
Design/methodology/approach
The data for this study were gathered from the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) published by Thomson Scientific (Philadelphia). The authors conducted a bibliometric analysis, based on an international trade analogy to explain the network of agribusiness journals and how these journals communicate with business and economics journals.
Findings
Business and economics journals and, particularly the traditionally major ones, surprisingly were scarcely every used. However, the British Food Journal stood out with 50 citations to marketing and strategic management journals.
Research limitations/implications
There are predominantly four such limitations: only 33 journals were studied, only one 5-year time period was involved, that time period is a few years old and the journal characteristics were derived using data from the “Scopes” and “Information for Authors” text on the website of each journal.
Practical implications
Exchanges of agribusiness knowledge and information among diverse stakeholders (consumers, suppliers and public agencies) in a complex environment require a better understanding of the network of agribusiness journals and their relation to traditional business and economics journals.
Social implications
Networks of journals facilitate cooperation and interactions to improve developments in the field.
Originality/value
Examining citations from and to the field of agribusiness is interesting and important because knowledge is transferred through networks comprise those who contribute to journals, read them and learn from them, i.e. by “talking” to each other as well as by practitioners who also read and learn from those journals.
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William Baumol is best-known as an academic. He was a prodigious researcher and publisher of texts on microeconomic theory, and a highly regarded educator with roles as head of…
Abstract
William Baumol is best-known as an academic. He was a prodigious researcher and publisher of texts on microeconomic theory, and a highly regarded educator with roles as head of the Department of Economics at Princeton University, director of the C.V. Starr Center for Applied Economics and director of the Berkley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at New York University. Less well-known were his engagements as a corporate consultant, notably for the telecommunications monopoly AT&T. Baumol’s work as an advisor, expert witness and theorist for AT&T spanned three decades from 1966. His relationship with AT&T arguably forms the context within which we can better understand his work on contestability theory, which he developed with a team of economists working for AT&T’s Bell Telephone Laboratories in the 1970s. Contestability theory was later deployed as a policy tool to justify industry deregulation and even advocate for monopolies and oligopolies on the ground that they were optimally efficient industry structures if potential competitors faced low barriers of entry. Baumol’s intellectual contribution to contestability theory was arguably influenced by the Chicago school and by AT&T’s drive toward the technological integration of telecommunications. Contestability was a rebellion against economic orthodoxies concerning competition and government regulation, and the status quo within AT&T which opposed market competition on the ground that it threatened the technological integration of the Bell system. The outcome was a revolution in industrial organization that would pave the way for the emergence of platform business models incorporating multi-sided and two-sided markets as exemplified by Amazon and Uber.
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In every industry there are resources. Some are moving, others more fixed; some are technical, others social. People working with the resources, for example, as buyers or sellers…
Abstract
In every industry there are resources. Some are moving, others more fixed; some are technical, others social. People working with the resources, for example, as buyers or sellers, or users or producers, may not make much notice of them. A product sells. A facility functions. The business relationship in which we make our money has “always” been there. However, some times this picture of order is disturbed. A user having purchased a product for decades may “suddenly” say to the producer that s/he does not appreciate the product. And a producer having received an order of a product that s/he thought was well known, may find it impossible to sell it. Such disturbances may be ignored. Or they can be used as a platform for development. In this study we investigate the latter option, theoretically and through real world data. Concerning theory we draw on the industrial network approach. We see industrial actors as part of (industrial) networks. In their activities actors use and produce resources. Moreover, the actors interact − bilaterally and multilaterally. This leads to development of resources and networks. Through “thick” descriptions of two cases we illustrate and try to understand the interactive character of resource development and how actors do business on features of resources. The cases are about a certain type of resource, a product − goat milk. The main message to industrial actors is that they should pay attention to that products can be co-created. Successful co-creation of products, moreover, may require development also of business relationships and their connections (“networking”).
Yonghua Cen and Li Li
Given a product or service, the number of its installed user base has a significant positive effect on the existing users’ loyalty and new users’ conversion. This effect is…
Abstract
Purpose
Given a product or service, the number of its installed user base has a significant positive effect on the existing users’ loyalty and new users’ conversion. This effect is conceptualized as network externalities in economics. Network externalities are supposed to be particularly striking in nowadays online business-to-business (B2B) platforms, but yet the mystery behind their effects on user loyalty to online B2B platforms remains to be delicately unraveled. The purpose of this paper is to discover the factors driving users’ loyalty, especially buyers’ loyalty, to online B2B platforms, by highlighting the impacts of network externalities on loyalty and other mediating factors.
Design/methodology/approach
A conceptual model of buyer loyalty under network externalities is elaborated. The reliability and validity of the instruments of the latent model constructs are assessed by confirmatory factor analysis, and the hypothesized causal relationships among the constructs are tested by structural equation modeling, on 710 valid buyer samples collected from a famous online B2B platform in China.
Findings
The analysis demonstrates that: perceived value, user satisfaction and switching costs are the major predictors of buyer loyalty to online B2B platforms characterized by network externalities; network externalities positively account for buyer loyalty by contributing to perceived value, user satisfaction and switching costs; and direct network externality (measured by perceived network size and perceived external prestige) has a significant effect on indirect network externality (measured by perceived compatibility and perceived complementarity).
Originality/value
The findings allow the authors to conclude meaningful managerial implications for online B2B service providers to build up loyal user bases through improving users’ perceptions of network externalities, switching costs and value.
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Yan Ma, Cai Minqiang and Li Yun
The purpose of this paper is to define the Internet as a virtual space supported by technologies and presented in the form of socioeconomic relations from the perspective of…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to define the Internet as a virtual space supported by technologies and presented in the form of socioeconomic relations from the perspective of political economy. The Internet space is a unique virtual commodity different from ordinary commodities and has the following effect characteristics: super replicability, space- and time-transcendence, open-source shareability and reality–virtuality transformation.
Design/methodology/approach
Internet space can also be imagined as a piece of virtual land. Internet space can be deemed as a piece of virtual land and its value can be divided into labor value and virtual value. The pricing model of virtual value is mainly determined by the gain and discount rate and this value comes from the transfer and markup of social value. In the context of the Internet Plus era, Internet space has become an essential economic factor that influences human economic activities.
Findings
Therefore, it is of practical significance and theoretical value to introduce Internet space as an economic variable into the framework of economic theory. The realistic logic of Internet space is to influence human economic behaviors with the combination of information binding.
Originality/value
The theoretical mechanism is to have an impact on the micro-market price by changing market relations from two-dimensional to three-dimensional. Its path to functioning at the macro level is to influence economic behaviors by changing the expectations of investment and consumption, resulting in new economic trends.
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Jørgen P. Bansler and Erling Havn
This paper seeks to analyze the role of network effects in relation to the adoption and use of systems for knowledge sharing in organizations and draws on recent developments…
Abstract
This paper seeks to analyze the role of network effects in relation to the adoption and use of systems for knowledge sharing in organizations and draws on recent developments within network economics to outline a theoretical perspective on the implementation of knowledge repositories in organizations. Findings from a longitudinal field study are presented to explore the concept of network effects in more detail. Commonly associated with economics, the concept of network effects can also be used in an organizational context to study adoption dynamics and use patterns when new information and communication technologies are introduced. The analysis of the field study data shows that knowledge repositories exhibit strong network effects, which can complicate the implementation process in multiple ways. The research is based on a single, in‐depth case study. Future research should study the role of network effects in relation to other technologies and organizational contexts. It underscores the need to be aware of – and try to manage – network effects when implementing knowledge repositories and other “networked” technologies. By and large, IS researchers have overlooked the role of network effects in relation to information and communication technologies in organizations. This paper begins to address this gap by focusing on the role of network effects in the adoption and use of knowledge repositories. It is suggested that the concept of network effects provides a useful theoretical lens in a number of other cases.
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Linking informational network and organizational change theories with the multi‐faceted transformations taking place in global competition, in particular the economic recession in…
Abstract
Linking informational network and organizational change theories with the multi‐faceted transformations taking place in global competition, in particular the economic recession in the Asia‐Pacific and information technological progress, the paper focuses on two major issues: first, the task facing Japanese companies in accommodating themselves to new trends pushed ahead primarily by changes emerging in the info‐communications industries. It is demonstrated that major challenges are facing Japanese‐style organization and management practices along with the advent of informational network industrialization. Essentially, Japanese business networks are forced to transform their organizational structure in conjunction with open networking and management practices. Second, the paper focusses on the impact of the economic slump in Asia on the strategies and management of Japanese production networks in the region. It is argued that impending domestic restructuring will extend in much the same way to the Asian production networks, while integrating these into new types of international production complexes.
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This chapter reviews the recent polarisation of debates in agrofood and rural studies, in particular the opposition between network (social relations, actor-network) and political…
Abstract
This chapter reviews the recent polarisation of debates in agrofood and rural studies, in particular the opposition between network (social relations, actor-network) and political economy analyses. It explores the contributions of different network approaches and draws on the French convention and regulation traditions, which provide alternative guidelines for confronting micro–macro tensions. Networks have similarly assumed analytical centrality in the new institutional economics and subsequent elaborations of the Williamsonian transaction costs paradigm have involved an approximation to some of the central tenets of social network analysis. Alternative traditions of political economy analysis (Global Value Chains (GVC), Global Production Networks) are now making an important contribution to agrofood studies. A distinctive feature of these analysts is their overture to social networks, actor-network, transaction costs and convention theory in the effort to capture the multiple dimensions of economic power and coordination. The possibilities for a fruitful convergence between these apparently conflicting approaches are best captured in the emergence of the concept of the “netchain”. At the same time, the intractability of values to absorption within economic transactions suggests the need to move forward to a focus on the tensions between netchains and social movements and a different type of network, the global policy network.
Lifang Zhang and Minghong Zhang
This paper aims to study network effects and the impacts on market structure in the specific context of China's network industries.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to study network effects and the impacts on market structure in the specific context of China's network industries.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper is organized in the mode of “concept‐model analysis‐empirical examination”. Starting from the concept of “network effect”, it is then extended to the theoretical analysis of market structure and the examination of China's representative network industries.
Findings
The data for China's representative network industries produce mixed findings. Some prove the theoretical estimation quite well, while others do not follow the theoretical conclusion so closely.
Research limitations/implications
The data for China's network industry are relatively limited. The depth of the data is especially inadequate, which prevents more systematic econometrical analysis.
Practical implications
The paper can serve as a reference for private decision makers of network industries and for regulators with antitrust concerns.
Originality/value
This paper may be the first of its kind to study the market structure of China's network industries from the perspective of network effects theory. It could be a good reference for those interested in learning the current status of China's network industries.
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