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The increasing pace of global competition has recast the balance between multinational corporations’ (MNCs’) needs to protect the knowledge that underlies their competitive advantages and their needs to continually create new knowledge. This essay will discuss MNCs’ knowledge-seeking strategies as industry-level phenomena. I will argue that knowledge-seeking strategies demand a concept of industries both as arenas for competition and as global knowledge networks within which firms collaborate to innovate. Contemporary MNCs face challenges to function not only as self-contained production systems that internationalize in the search for efficiency and markets, but also as open systems globally seeking knowledge and innovations. Metanational strategies and organizations represent a new response to these challenges. I present empirical evidence of distinctive metanational industry opportunities and organizational responses from the emergence of the global flat panel display industry. The essay concludes with a framework that outlines the characteristics of a global knowledge-driven generic strategy as an alternative and synthesis of generic product-driven strategies of cost-leadership and differentiation.

Our understanding of Japanese supply relationships comes primarily from studying the automobile industry. This paper identifies three elements of the automobile industry that, although generally assumed to be widespread, are largely absent in the notebook computer industry, leading to a different pattern of supply relationships: a sizable pool of external suppliers; the feasibility of shukko and cross-shareholding to strengthen supply relationships; and the adequacy of these means to manage external supply relationships. This finding debunks the myth of a monolithic model of “Japanese-style” supply relationships and illustrates the importance of idiosyncratic elements of an industry’s environment on its supply relationships.

The effects of price limits and market illiquidity are crucial for pricing derivatives based on some underlying assets traded in the markets with a price limit rule and an illiquidity phenomenon. We develop models to value options for the cases of either the underlying assets encountering price limits and market illiquidity, or when the underlying assets are imposed with price limits and the options themselves show market illiquidity in this paper. The Black–Scholes (1973) model, the Krakovsky (1999) model, and the Ban, Choi, and Ku (2000) model are presented as special cases of our model. Our numerical results show that both the price limit and market illiquidity significantly affect the option values.