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

Much has been written about how international firms create and sustain firm-specific advantages that offset their liability of foreignness. Less attention has been devoted the question of how international firms reduce their liability of foreignness. It is the contention of this study that entrant firms familiarize with foreign markets at different pace and to some extent are these differences due to varying management control of entrant firms. Thus, whereas the general approach to the liability of foreignness issue has been somewhat deterministic the study emphasize managerial discretion as a potentially important factor. The data from a sample of 494 international firms from Sweden, Denmark and New Zealand suggest that entrant firms’ learning engagement, i.e. the effort and ability to learn how to conduct business in a foreign environment, varies considerably. In particular, adoption of standardized, international business routines and unwillingness to adapt products and marketing practices to local markets seem to be associated with a low learning engagement. The data also indicate that a large proportion of the entrant firms have been engaged in pre-entry learning.

Coping Liability of Foreignness: Different Learning Engagements of Entrant Firms

This empirical study addresses the question of how foreign market unfamiliarity of entrant firms develops post-entry. Three different predictions of post-entry change of foreign market unfamiliarity are derived from the literature on firms’ internationalization process. The predictions are made subject to empirical examination using a set of primary data of current (i.e. at the point in time of mail interviews) foreign operation business operations reported by managers of Danish international firms. The empirical study gives insight to the incidence and character of the so-called ‘shock effect’ in relation to foreign market entry: the phenomenon of entrant firms’ inclination to underestimate differences between the home and host country in terms of the business environment. The data support the supposition that entrant firms in general are exposed to a ‘shock effect’. On average, the foreign market unfamiliarity as perceived by the entrant firms peaks seven years after entry. The company data indicate that entrant firms in general experience the shock effect in relation to entry of adjacent, rather than distant, countries. Hence, the ‘psychic distance paradox’ hypothesis is supported. Also, the data suggest that the shock effect befalls producers of customized products, but not producers of standardized products, and furthermore, entrant firms in general experience the shock effect in relation to acquisition of tacit rather than explicit knowledge.

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Organizational Learning in Foreign Markets: Feeling Its Way in an Unfamiliar Environment

BACKGROUND
Lung sealants are often used to prevent alveolar air leaks after lung resection surgery. Some sealants have shown to be effective in clinical studies, but extensive comparative evaluation has not yet been conducted. We aimed to evaluate different sealant burst pressures in an ex vivo model mimicking air leakage after lung resection.


METHODS
Fifty-four porcine lungs comprised the study material. Six different sealants were evaluated: Bioglue (V-Tech, Roskilde, Denmark), TachoSil (Nycomed, Roskilde, Denmark), Tisseel (Baxter, Allerød, Denmark), Evicel (OMRIX biopharmaceuticals S.A, Rhode-St-Genèse, Belgium), TissuePatchDural (Vingmed, Roskilde, Denmark), and Pleuraseal (Covidien, Copenhagen, Denmark). After creating a standardized pleural defect, each lung was randomized into 1 of the 6 treatment groups (n= 9). Each lung was ventilated with incremental airway pressure. Air leakage was assessed after each increment. If leakage occurred, the burst pressure was recorded.


RESULTS
The Evicel fibrin sealant and Tisseel fibrin sealant exhibited significantly lower burst pressures compared with the Bioglue, TachoSil, and Pleuraseal (p < 0.05). Bioglue had the highest median burst pressure (55 cm H(2)O) followed by TachoSil (35 cm H(2)O), PleuraSeal (35 cm H(2)O), TissuePatchDural (25 cm H(2)O), Evicel (15 cm H(2)O), and Tisseel (15 cm H(2)O).


CONCLUSIONS
This model has shown to be feasible in determining and comparing the burst pressures of different lung sealants. Further studies are needed to determine responses in living tissue and burst pressure over time in vivo.

A comparative study of lung sealants in a porcine ex vivo model

With the increasing use of IoT-enabled sensors, it is important to have effective methods to query the sensors. For example, in a dense network of battery-driven temperature sensors, it is often possible to query (sample) only a subset of the sensors at any given time, since the values of the non-sampled sensors can be estimated from the sampled values. If we can divide the set of sensors into disjoint so-called representative sampling subsets that each represents all the other sensors sufficiently well, we can alternate between the sampling subsets and thus, increase the battery life significantly of the sensor network. In this paper, we formulate the problem of finding representative sampling subsets as a graph problem on a so-called sensor graph with the sensors as nodes. Our proposed solution, SubGraphSample, consists of two phases. In Phase-I, we create edges in the similarity graph based on the similarities between the time-series of sensor values, analyzing six different techniques based on proven time-series similarity metrics. In Phase-II, we propose six different sampling techniques to find the maximum number of representative sampling subsets. Finally, we propose AutoSubGraphSample which auto-selects the best technique for Phase-I and Phase-II for a given dataset. Our extensive experimental evaluation shows that AutoSubGraphSample can yield significant battery life improvements within realistic error bounds.

Torben Pedersen

Papers

Coping Liability of Foreignness: Different Learning Engagements of Entrant Firms

Organizational Learning in Foreign Markets: Feeling Its Way in an Unfamiliar Environment

A comparative study of lung sealants in a porcine ex vivo model

Finding Representative Sampling Subsets in Sensor Graphs using Time-Series Similarities

Too Much of Two Good Things: Explicating the Limited Complementarity Between Drivers of MNC Headquarters’ Absorptive Capacity