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The purpose of this study is to investigate the antecedents and the conditions of coopetition at the inter-organizational level.

This study is based on survey research methodology and analyzes the data from 138 companies regarding the antecedents and the conditions of their coopetition.

The results indicate that the interdependence between partners (i.e. the antecedent) positively affects interfirm coopetition, and that this relationship is contingent on the joint occurrence of opportunism (a behavioral condition) and technology uncertainty (a contextual condition). Specifically, highly interdependent firms are more likely to be involved in a coopetitive relationship when both opportunism and technology uncertainty are high. Interestingly, the authors’ data also show that opportunism or technology uncertainty alone may not be adequate in moderating the interdependence–coopetition relationship.

This study contributes to the current literature in two meaningful ways. First, it empirically examines interdependence as a potential antecedent of interfirm coopetition. Second, it improves our understanding of the behavioral and contextual conditions that facilitate the formation of coopetitive relationships by examining the moderating roles of opportunisms and technology uncertainty in the relationship between interdependence and interfirm coopetition. The limitations of this study lie in its confined method of cross-sectional survey from the focal firm’s perspective. Future research may advance beyond this study through experimental and/or longitudinal research designs.

This study provides managers with two important practical insights in coopetition management. First, the findings suggest a two-step approach to help a firm assess and manage the level of coopetition in its relationship with a business partner. In addition, the findings provide a counterintuitive suggestion to managers that the joint conditions of high opportunism and high technology uncertainty indeed prime the relationship for the rise of coopetition, provided that managerial efforts are made to somewhat increase the level of interdependence in the relationship.

Despite the growing number of studies on coopetition, research still lacks knowledge about the antecedents and the conditions of inter-organizational coopetition, and this study aims to fill this gap.

This conceptual paper aims to examine theoretical issues in the proactive ethical assessment of technology development, with a focus on uncertainty. Although uncertainty is a fundamental feature of complex technologies, its importance has not yet been fully recognized within the field of ethics. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to study uncertainty in technology development and its consequences for ethics.

Going on the insight of various scientific disciplines, the concept of uncertainty will be scrutinised and a typology of uncertainty is proposed and introduced to ethical theory. The method used is theoretical and conceptual analysis.

The analysis results in questions with regard to the collection of information about the object of assessment (i.e. complex technologies and their development) and the framework of assessment (i.e. ethical theory and its practical aim of guiding the assessment of technology development). Moreover, based on the insights of the analysis of uncertainty, it is argued that substantive ethical theories prove to be inapt for the ethical assessment of complex technology development and therefore require a concomitant procedural approach. The paper concludes with requirements for any future ethics of technology under uncertainty.

The value of the paper consists in establishing the need of researching and incorporating uncertainty in ethics. The results are consequently of practical and theoretical interest for anyone working in the field of ethics and technology.

The objective of this paper is to offer a validated framework for the analysis of (future) risks and uncertainties involved in the decision‐making process concerning the upgrade and roll‐out of large infrastructural projects, e.g. broadband networks. The framework classifies risks and uncertainties based on the nature of the risks, levels and sources.

The approach takes the form of conceptual as well as qualitative and quantitative empirical analyses.

Telecommunications operators are faced with various types of risks and uncertainties in their decision‐making process concerning the upgrade and roll‐out of their broadband networks. In one respect, these risks and uncertainties have to do with the characteristics of large infrastructural projects, while, on the other hand, being caused by (unknown) competitor behaviour, (unknown) end‐user demand, rapid technological development and different development paths available to operators. Framing risks and uncertainties into a typology provides greater insight into the categories, characteristics and sources of the risks and uncertainties, as well as being a first step in finding ways to deal with them.

The paper presents and validates a framework for the analysis of risks and uncertainty. It also offers empirical data on how operators manage risk and uncertainties.

This paper investigates the effects of different uncertainties on Internet stock trading (IST) adoption intentions of individual investors in China and aims to determine the interaction effects of trust and perceived benefits in the relationship between uncertainty dimensions and IST adoption intentions.

Using a structured questionnaire, a survey of 353 experienced stock traders was conducted in China. The proposed uncertainty-trust-perceived benefits framework was examined through structural equation modelling using Smart PLS 3.0.

The study found significant negative effects of perceived technology uncertainty, perceived regulatory uncertainty and perceived information asymmetry on the IST adoption intentions of individual investors. Perceived service intangibility was found to have only insignificant effects on IST adoption intentions. In terms of interaction results, trust significantly moderates the relationship between IST adoption intentions and, respectively, perceived technology uncertainty and perceived information asymmetry. Similarly, perceived benefits significantly moderate the relationship between intentions to adopt IST and both perceived technology uncertainty and perceived regulatory uncertainty.

The regulators for IST development in China could utilise the results of this study as guidelines for strategies to increase the use of IST among existing and potential investors.

Using social cognitive theory, this research investigates the effects of various uncertainties on IST adoption intentions of individual investors in China; these effects have not been explored by previous literature. Furthermore, few studies other than this one have investigated the interaction effects of factors which counteract the negative effect of other factors.

The performance of the World Wide Web is evaluated as an information resource in a specific information domain. The theoretical framework underpinning this approach recognises the contribution of information‐seeking behaviour from the discipline of information science and models of information systems success from the discipline of information systems in explaining World Wide Web usage as an information resource. A model integrating the construct of uncertainty and the task‐technology fit model is presented. A questionnaire‐based empirical study is used to test this integrated approach. Our results confirm that richer models representing the broad context of World Wide Web usage are required to evaluate usage of the World Wide Web as an information resource. Usage for travel tasks, uncertainty reduction, the Web as an information resource, and mediation all have a significant impact on users' perception of performance, explaining 46 per cent of the variance.

This paper empirically examines the process of acquiring technology from a source, external to the firm, and incorporating it into a new product or operational process under development. We refer to this key activity in product and process innovation as external technology integration. This paper develops a conceptual model of external technology integration based on organizational information processing theory and a wide range of technology management literature. Field interviews were conducted to evaluate the validity of the model across diverse settings. Our results indicate general support for the conceptual model. We close with a discussion of the implications of this study for both theory and practice.

This paper aims to explore and gain a better understanding of the relationship between power circumstances and the environmental uncertainty perceived by managers.

This paper conducted a survey of 1,000 manufacturing firms selected randomly from the Top 5000 largest firms in Taiwan. The responding firms were clustered by K‐means into four groups of power circumstances. The paper then applied MANOVA and ANOVA to test the differences among the three types of supply chain uncertainty across the four groups.

The results show that power circumstances are associated with managers' perceptions of environmental uncertainty in terms of demand, technology, and supply. This paper finds that managers of buying firms in dominant positions perceive a lower demand uncertainty while managers facing higher supplier power perceive greater uncertainty in technology. For buying firms under ambiguous power circumstances, their managers tend to perceive higher supply uncertainty. The paper then put forth six power‐based propositions on the basis of their results.

Given that the data are from large‐sized firms, the generalizability of their findings to smaller firms may be limited.

When developing strategies to tackle environmental uncertainties, managers should consider their firm's power circumstances because these tend to influence the managers' interpretation and decisions and thereby their subsequent strategies.

Although environmental uncertainty has been addressed extensively in various management fields, how the environmental uncertainty perceived by a firm's managers is related to the power the firm holds has never been empirically examined. This study clarifies this issue.

When considering whether to adopt a network technology, how does uncertainty about whom a potential adopter might interact with affect their adoption choice? On the one hand, uncertainty about potential network partners might enhance adoption incentives, as increased uncertainty induces the potential for economies of scope across the potential network. On the other hand, uncertainty may reduce the expected value of any particular connection, and reduce adoption incentives. Since this is a theoretical puzzle, this chapter presents empirical evidence to help illuminate it. It presents evidence the destabilizing of a social network may increase the scope of network externalities, using data on sales of a video-calling system made to an investment bank’s employees and subsequent usage by these customers. The terrorist attacks of 2001 led potential customers in New York to start communicating with a new and less predictable set of people when their work teams were reorganized as a result of the physical displacement that resulted from the attacks. This did not happen in other comparable cities. These destabilized communication patterns were associated with potential adopters in New York being more likely to take into account a wider spectrum of the user base when deciding whether to adopt relative to those in other cities. Empirical analysis suggests that the aggregate effect of network externalities on adoption was doubled by this instability, and that for those with diffuse networks, this more than compensated for the negative baseline effects of the instability.

The dynamic nature of uncertainty sources in regional operations represents supply chain management (SCM) imperatives to review uncertainty management frameworks on an ongoing basis with a view to identifying and prioritising critical indices of uncertainty for effective SCM. The purpose of this study is to identify the critical indices of uncertainty for regional supply chains and analyse how SCM practitioners perceive uncertainty.

This paper presents a Delphi-based study with a panel of 70 SCM experts from the Sultanate of Oman in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region. It applies three rounds of a Delphi exercise to identify, select and prioritise the critical indices of supply chain uncertainty perceived by panel experts. The thematic analysis also provides theorisations on the process for uncertainty perception and factors shaping perception.

A total of 39 uncertainty indices were identified from demand, supply, manufacturing, control, technology, competitive, project, transport and geological sources. The Delphi selection round captured the top 12 indices of experts. The research found an accumulative–aggregative duality that explains uncertainty perception and a cost–conformance–connection triadic set of factors underlying the perceived critical indices. Project uncertainty produced the top-ranked index in the final Delphi round.

This paper makes three main contributions. First, it offers a bottom-up based insight into supply chain uncertainty using the Delphi-based study and from a GCC perspective. Second, the research is unique in its focus on Oman and, third, it is of value for the international operations of GCC companies and for international firms with intentions of expanding, moving or outsourcing their operations to a GCC country such as Oman.

This paper, being complementary to existing perspectives, aims to examine the behaviors and the strategies of production migration of polluting firms from an economic point of view under appropriate decision conditions in terms of uncertain influence of supply chain support and green technology progress.

Strategic alternatives are investigated by using option pricing tools to examine the impact of various characteristics of green technology development and supply chain relations on the timing of the decision.

The theoretical and empirical results show that a polluting firm should not consider the option of relocating to offshore countries if uncertainty has been anticipated. It is suggested that, by facing green technology development uncertainty, a firm should be refrained from relocating production abroad if technology develops and offshore cost advantage disappears soon. On the other hand, a pre‐emptive migration strategy is preferable when the green technology is anticipated to be delayed.

A polluting firm in a supply chain faces challenges of uncertainty depending on whether it decides to produce domestically or to relocate internationally. The analysis conveys a concept that polluting firms can be more profitable by promoting clean production technology, instead of relocating to offshore or so called pollution havens.

The paper contributes to the existing literature on the evaluation of offshore migration option values by taking extra consideration of uncertainty in the supply chain cost, green technology progress and complementing to studies in a moral perspective.