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Variation, replication and selection processes are acknowledged as key constructs in studies on how industries evolve, but no theoretical and empirical contributions have applied these key constructs to analyzing industries in specific stages of their history. This paper aims to fill this gap, taking for reference the firm and its strategic action in particular.

After delineating and discussing the three processes of interest – variation, replication and selection – this paper analyzes three very different evolutionary contexts: “red” industries, that reached maturity maintaining a polypolistic structure, and that continue to evolve in this phase; the oligopolistic transformation undergone by certain industries; and the emergence of new market spaces around new products developed by firms.

Variations are mainly reactions to the competitive environment in the evolution of red industries or environment-modifying in the case of industries evolving toward an oligopoly, and in the creation of new market spaces. Horizontal replication through employee mobility prevails in red industries, while in the other two contexts firms driving the evolution raise barriers to replication, inhibiting both horizontal and vertical replication. While selection does not come about in a new market space as long as the barriers erected by the first comer remain in place, it occurs in the form of subset selection in the other two settings.

This paper takes an entirely novel approach and proposes a pluralist framing of how industries evolve, interpreting the different evolutionary situations on the strength of the key variables of variation, replication and selection.

This paper aims to examine how the “wage premium,” the percentage by which wages earned by skilled workers exceed those of unskilled workers, varies across industries characterized by different levels of competitiveness.

A theoretical model employing constant elasticity of substitution (CES) utility function and constant returns to scale production function is developed and analyzed to derive the effects of industry competitiveness on the wage premium. Econometric methods are applied to Chilean manufacturing data to test implications of theoretical model.

Once the relative factor endowment is being controlled, market competition significantly reduces the wage premium. More specifically, given with the same relative factor endowment, the wage premium is significantly higher under oligopolistic competition than under monopolistic competition. Empirical evidence from Chilean manufacturers supports our theoretical conclusions.

During economic development, the reallocation of production factors from unskilled labor-intensive to skilled labor-intensive industries raises the wage premiums received by skilled workers. Besides, skilled workers will earn higher wages by working in more highly concentrated industries instead of more competitive industries. This needs to be considered by government policymakers who must balance promotion of technical change with prevention of extreme the income inequality.

This paper examines how market structure affects wage premiums, providing new insights into a well-established literature that largely maintains that wage premiums are primarily a function of relative factor endowments or international trade.

Over the last years, powerful advances in the area of dynamic games have enriched game theory and made it more applicable to the modeling of real-world competitive strategies. The study of strategic behaviors of firms in an oligopoly market has received little attention, even though real firms have been shown to compete in output and in price in a single industry. The purpose of this study is to propose a game-theoretic approach to studying strategic behaviors of firms in an oligopoly market structure.

This approach was developed to study market dynamics and pricing strategic behavior of firms that have the possibility of deciding to be one of the two types (price-maker or price-taker) and reconsider the choice overtime on the basis of their current insights and knowledge and their experience. Firms try to improve their performance in the competitive market in a strategic way, by considering their steady-state profits and choosing the best type given the other firms’ types, actions and interactions.

The results of the present study confirm the previous study that the Cournot market is a stable market, where each firm can be a price-maker and enjoy individual learning as well as social learning. On the contrary, the market with price-takers only is never stable, and, therefore, the Walrasian equilibrium may not be supported in some instances. The Cournot market loses its stability as the number of firms in the market increases due to the fact that it will be more profitable for a firm to switch to price-taking when the number of firms is high enough. In such a situation, when the number of price-takers increases, there are no stable markets and price dynamics are destabilized.

The study and modeling of real-world competitive strategies would enhance the understanding of oligopoly markets. The study of strategic behaviors of firms in an oligopoly market has received little attention, even though real firms have been shown to compete in output and in price in a single industry as price-takers and price-makers.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the wide-ranging implications of the global economic crisis and provide a comprehensive assessment of the how the structure of the market and competition within it is changing as a result.

The research methodology draws on a “financialization” market construct and adapts it to include the public-private interfaces (PPIs) that have appeared since the global economic crisis.

The crisis has turned the global system on a dime. The decades-long surge of globalization, as characterized by market liberalization and ever more fast-paced investment flows, has abated and, in some cases, been dramatically reversed. It has altered the international investment paradigm. Firms have revised their risk functions and are re-arranging their stakeholder relationships.

Much needs to be done to assess the wide-ranging implications of the most recent crisis. This is just one set of “snapshots”, if you will, of the way in which market structure and competition are being altered.

The re-arrangement of stakeholder relationships of both privately owned firms and sovereign enterprises will have far-reaching effects on market structure in such areas as market access and competition, as well as on civil society, writ large.

Economics, entrepreneurship, pricing and marketing strategy, print industry in Pakistan.

Undergraduate and first-year graduate level.

The main theme of the case revolves around decision-making by the publisher, Bilal Lakhani, as he operates in conditions of an oligopolistic market. The case focuses on the set-up of a major English-language newspaper, The Express Tribune, in conjunction with the internationally branded and well-regarded International Herald Tribune by a well-known business group of Pakistan. The group already has a major Urdu newspaper, which has been operational for 15 years, and three television channels, as well as a host of other non-media-related businesses. The case tries to go behind the reasons for setting up an English-language newspaper in a market which already has at least five major existing ones and where literacy is not that widespread. Also, experience in much of the rest of the world would suggest that newspapers – i.e. the print media – are in decline, especially because of the rise of the Internet and social media as means for providing news, information and entertainment. The case is set in Karachi, Pakistan's media capital and, in particular, in an organization that has been involved in the business of media for several years. It currently runs the country's second most-circulated Urdu newspaper, Daily Express. Specifically, the time period is three weeks after the paper, The Express Tribune, was launched into a market with a few competitors and high brand loyalty for existing competitors. The publisher of the paper, Bilal Lakhani, is questioning his pricing decision right after the launch of the paper and there are a series of reasons he is looking into on how he set the original price and why should he reduce the price of the paper now.

Students should be able to see, understand and analyze: challenges faced by entrepreneurs of starting an initiative which has a largely unreliable and untested audience; the extent of interdependence in an oligopolistic industry and how it influences the current and future decision-makings of an entrepreneur or any other firm for that matter, especially in a developing economy; the personnel, financial production and regulation issues involved in setting up assembly/ delivery systems that deliver a product for mass use, i.e. a newspaper; and the pricing and marketing strategies involved in the launch and subsequent successful operation of a product, in this case, a newspaper.

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The purpose of this paper is to enlighten the intriguing process of industry asset consolidation. It is critical for firms to manage their business acquisitions strategically for survival in this industry life cycle process, which develops through multiple company mergers. The companies extensively acquiring industry assets have utilized acquisition programs consisting of both pre-acquisition strategizing and post-acquisition integration; however, the existing literature on acquisition programs focuses on post-acquisition integration activities. This study aims to bridge this gap.

This study focuses on pre-acquisition strategizing of acquisition programs and proposes a model in which an acquiring company could manage its acquisitions for industry asset consolidation over the industry evolution.

Empirically, in the multi-case study of telecommunications infrastructure companies, the authors collect an extensive set of archival records accumulated over the whole industry life-cycle, spanning more than 30 years, and they apply a qualitative data analysis to reveal strategic actions within the companies.

The discoveries elaborate on activities comprising the acquisition process model: social legitimacy, strategic alignment, resource fulfillment, consolidation pursuit and merging.

The counterintuitive findings are that the companies strived to ensure legitimacy early in the telecommunication infrastructure markets before they reached strategic alignment with their owners.

The results extend the understanding of industry asset consolidation as an organization-level phenomenon and show how contextual factors connected to industry life-cycle phases, such as regulatory regimes and financial cycles and industry evolution, influence the attributions of an acquisition program.

The aim of this paper is to analyze how deregulation affects different stakeholder groups, such as customers, employees, suppliers, creditors, the community and the environment. A distinction has been made between industries with and without network structures.

The approach is based on literature review in order to formulate propositions.

Deregulation has not always benefited the stakeholder groups analyzed. Consumers and employees have been able to profited from new entries, but the effect on prices and wages, respectively, is not always conclusive. Suppliers can increase their negotiating power, but on the other hand, creditors might find it difficult to get loans repaid. Deregulation in itself does not affect the environment, nor the ethical behavior of the firm.

This study provides an insight on how deregulation affects different stakeholder groups. The regulator can benefit from the findings in order to improve the methods of deregulation. Particularly, deregulation of industries with network structures, such as electricity, natural gas, telecommunications give rise to some specific problems pointed out in the study, which the regulator ought to take into account. Consequences in other industries are also mentioned, which can help the regulator avoid errors made in the past.

This paper studies the moderating effect of industry structure on strategy-performance relationships in international markets.

We have carried out a survey among a sample of German, Norwegian and Singaporean small and medium sized firms, and test – using structural equation modelling (EQS) – four hypotheses founded in industrial organisation,

We find that industry structure indeed matters. The general picture is that cautious internationalisation strategies are more effective in fragmented industries than in concentrated industries. Also, with somewhat more nuance, global marketing strategies – such as standardisation and integration – seem by and large to be more effective in concentrated industries than in fragmented industries.

The operationalisation of industry structure in an international context is challenging and we have deviated from the traditional Herfindahl–Hirschman Index. This may be a limitation but we also consider it a strength, given the weaknesses of this index in an international setting. The study is cross-sectional and should ideally follow each firm over time, again a challenging endeavour.

Despite a considerable amount of studies on strategy – performance relationships in international markets, there is no general agreement on the topic. We argue that a contingency approach needs to be taken, and that industry structure is one important factor not yet analysed.

Purpose – This chapter analyzes the effects that the international integration of product markets induced by globalization exerts on the direction of technological change at the industry level.

Methodology/approach – In order to do so it elaborates an interpretative framework that complements the classical inducement hypotheses with the Schumpeterian literature and the localized technological change approach, putting forward the hypothesis that technological change is biased by the dynamics of both factor and product markets. We argue and show that not only the changing levels of input costs but also the changing prevalence of product and process innovations affect the direction of technological change: specifically when product innovations prevail technological change is skill-biased, while when process innovations play a major role innovation is capital intensive.

Findings – Following this perspective we analyze the interindustrial variance of the output elasticities of labor of the main advanced economies in recent years and claim that such heterogeneity can be understood as the result of differentiated innovative reactions of firms to changes induced by the globalization of the markets: fast-growing sectors innovate mainly through (skilled) labor-augmenting technological change, while mature industries rely more on capital-enhancing innovations. The empirical evidence supports our hypotheses and shows that the variance of the output elasticity of labor in a panel data estimate across 17 manufacturing sectors in 16 OECD countries from 1995 to 2006, is significantly and positively associated with the rates of growth of employment, wage levels and their rates of increase, and R&D intensity.

Originality/value of paper – By investigating the variance of output elasticities at the industry level the chapter provides new insights within the literature focused on the bias of technological change.