计量经济分析 = Econometric analysis

The Uppsala internationalization process model is revisited in the light of changes in business practices and theoretical advances that have been made since 1977. Now the business environment is viewed as a web of relationships, a network, rather than as a neoclassical market with many independent suppliers and customers. Outsidership, in relation to the relevant network, more than psychic distance, is the root of uncertainty. The change mechanisms in the revised model are essentially the same as those in the original version, although we add trust-building and knowledge creation, the latter to recognize the fact that new knowledge is developed in relationships.

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The Uppsala Internationalization Process Model Revisited: From Liability of Foreignness to Liability of Outsidership

How have Japanese companies become world leaders in the automotive and electronics industries, among others? What is the secret of their success? Two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi, are the first to tie the success of Japanese companies to their ability to create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. In The Knowledge-Creating Company, Nonaka and Takeuchi provide an inside look at how Japanese companies go about creating this new knowledge organizationally. The authors point out that there are two types of knowledge: explicit knowledge, contained in manuals and procedures, and tacit knowledge, learned only by experience, and communicated only indirectly, through metaphor and analogy. U.S. managers focus on explicit knowledge. The Japanese, on the other hand, focus on tacit knowledge. And this, the authors argue, is the key to their success--the Japanese have learned how to transform tacit into explicit knowledge. To explain how this is done--and illuminate Japanese business practices as they do so--the authors range from Greek philosophy to Zen Buddhism, from classical economists to modern management gurus, illustrating the theory of organizational knowledge creation with case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, Nissan, 3M, GE, and even the U.S. Marines. For instance, using Matsushita's development of the Home Bakery (the world's first fully automated bread-baking machine for home use), they show how tacit knowledge can be converted to explicit knowledge: when the designers couldn't perfect the dough kneading mechanism, a software programmer apprenticed herself withthe master baker at Osaka International Hotel, gained a tacit understanding of kneading, and then conveyed this information to the engineers. In addition, the authors show that, to create knowledge, the best management style is neither top-down nor bottom-up, but rather what they call "middle-up-down," in which the middle managers form a bridge between the ideals of top management and the chaotic realities of the frontline. As we make the turn into the 21st century, a new society is emerging. Peter Drucker calls it the "knowledge society," one that is drastically different from the "industrial society," and one in which acquiring and applying knowledge will become key competitive factors. Nonaka and Takeuchi go a step further, arguing that creating knowledge will become the key to sustaining a competitive advantage in the future. Because the competitive environment and customer preferences changes constantly, knowledge perishes quickly. With The Knowledge-Creating Company, managers have at their fingertips years of insight from Japanese firms that reveal how to create knowledge continuously, and how to exploit it to make successful new products, services, and systems.

The knowledge-creating company

The 2008 crash has left all the established economic doctrines - equilibrium models, real business cycles, disequilibria models - in disarray. Part of the problem is due to Smith’s "veil of ignorance": individuals unknowingly pursue society’s interest and, as a result, have no clue as to the macroeconomic effects of their actions: witness the Keynes and Leontief multipliers, the concept of value added, fiat money, Engel’s law and technical progress, to name but a few of the macrofoundations of microeconomics. A good viewpoint to take bearings anew lies in comparing the post-Great Depression institutions with those emerging from Thatcher and Reagan’s economic policies: deregulation, exogenous vs. endoge- nous money, shadow banking vs. Volcker’s Rule. Very simply, the banks, whose lending determined deposits after Roosevelt, and were a public service became private enterprises whose deposits determine lending. These underlay the great moderation preceding 2006, and the subsequent crash.

The Economic Institutions of Capitalism

Knowledge sharing: A review and directions for future research

In this article, we explore the idea that offshoring of services and technical work should be regarded as a dynamic process that evolves over time. Firms gradually move from offshoring of simple, standardized activities towards offshoring of advanced activities when they accumulate experience with offshoring, and this type of offshoring comes with an entirely different set of characteristics compared to traditional, cost-seeking offshoring. Based on a unique survey among the total population of firms in the eastern region of Denmark, we analyze some of the dynamics of this process through a model that incorporates two different aspects of the process of offshoring. First, we approach the question of whether to offshore and establish a baseline that investigates the determinants of firms' participation - or lack thereof - in offshoring. Secondly, we approach the question of what to offshore and the subsequent process of offshoring, as we analyze the determinants of the offshoring of advanced, highend technical, and service activities. The findings are consistent with the notion of offshoring as a dynamic process as they show how some (cost-related) determinants play a role when firms first engage in offshoring, while rather different determinants matter for the subsequent process of offshoring of advanced activities. Although the model portrays a simplified expression of the offshoring process with two stages, the findings underpin our view that a process perspective on offshoring is a useful analytical framework.

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Whether and What to Offshore

An LHRH agonist, Zoladex®, was employed as a monthly depot in 56 previously untreated patients with advanced carcinoma of the prostate. Of 53 evaluable patients, 27 achieved partial remission and 7 were stable. Median duration of response was 10 months. A favorable subjective response was attained in 68% of the patients. During treatment, serum testosterone was in the castrate range in all patients except five. Possible explanations for this escape phenomenon are discussed. No toxicity was observed and treatment was well tolerated in all patients.Thirty-two patients underwent bilateral orchiectomy following treatment failure of Zoladex®. In one patient partial remission according to protocol criteria was recorded.Treatment with LHRH agonists seems safe and may serve as an alternative to conventional hormonal treatment of advanced carcinoma of the prostate.

LHRH analogue as a depot preparation (Zoladex) in the treatment of advanced carcinoma of the prostate followed by orchiectomy as a second line therapy--a phase II study.

Lego Group: An Outsourcing Journey

The widespread deployment of smartphones, net-worked in-vehicle devices with geo-positioning capabilities, and vessel tracking technologies renders it feasible to collect the evolving geo-locations of populations of land- and sea-based moving objects. The continuous clustering of such data can enable a variety of real-time services, such as road traffic management and vessel collision risk assessment. However, little attention has so far been given to the quality of moving-object clusters-for example, it is beneficial to smooth short-term fluctuations in clusters to achieve robustness to exceptional data and to improve existing applications. We propose the notion of evolutionary clustering of moving objects, abbreviated ECM, that enhances the quality of moving object clustering by means of temporal smoothing that prevents abrupt changes in clusters across successive timestamps. Employing the notions of snapshot and historical costs, we formalize ECM and formulate ECM as an optimization problem. We prove that ECM can be performed approximately in linear time, thus eliminating iterative processes employed in previous studies. Further, we propose a minimal-group structure and a seed-point shifting strategy to facilitate temporal smoothing. Finally, we present all algorithms underlying ECM along with a set of optimization techniques. Extensive experiments with three real-life datasets offer insights into ECM and show that it outperforms state-of-the-art solutions in terms of both clustering quality and clustering efficiency.

Evolutionary Clustering of Moving Objects

Cross-border flows of goods, services, capital, knowledge, and ideas have substantially increased over the last decades. These developments have increased the interdependencies among previously separated economies, given rise to arguments regarding the flattening of the world. Yet, firms investing overseas continue to experience substantial liabilities stemming from their foreignness. At the same time new locations are appearing on the global map that offers very attractive location-specific advantages. In addition, the range of participants in international competition has widened, in terms of both the number of countries involved and the types of firms competing, to encompass developed market firms expanding beyond industrialized countries, and emerging market firms joining global competition. The focus of this volume is on how the interface between firm-specific advantages, liability of foreignness, and location-specific advantages are spelled out in the more global world.

Torben Pedersen

Papers

Whether and What to Offshore

LHRH analogue as a depot preparation (Zoladex) in the treatment of advanced carcinoma of the prostate followed by orchiectomy as a second line therapy--a phase II study.

Lego Group: An Outsourcing Journey

Evolutionary Clustering of Moving Objects

Dynamics of globalization : location-specific advantages or liabilities of foreignness?