How managers can build trust in strategic alliances: a meta-analysis on the central trust-building mechanisms

Trust is an important driver of superior alliance performance. Alliance managers are influential in this regard because trust requires active involvement, commitment and the dedicated support of the key actors involved in the strategic alliance. Despite the importance of trust for explaining alliance performance, little effort has been made to systematically investigate the mechanisms that managers can use to purposefully create trust in strategic alliances. We use Parkhe’s (1998b) theoretical framework to derive nine hypotheses that distinguish between process-based, characteristic-based and institutional-based trust-building mechanisms. Our meta-analysis of 64 empirical studies shows that trust is strongly related to alliance performance. Process-based mechanisms are more important for building trust than characteristic- and institutional-based mechanisms. The effects of prior ties and asset specificity are not as strong as expected and the impact of safeguards on trust is not well understood. Overall, theoretical trust research has outpaced empirical research by far and promising opportunities for future empirical research exist

Trust Between International Joint Venture Partners: Effects of Home Countries

Trust is an important factor in interorganizational relations. Interorganizational trust in cross-border relationships is likely to be influenced by the home countries of both partners. Using data on 165 international joint ventures (IJVs), we show that the perceived trustworthiness of an IJV partner is influenced by the general propensity to trust in the trustor's home country. Moreover, the trustworthiness perceived by a focal parent firm is also affected by the home country of the other IJV partner. This second effect is mitigated by experience between the partners

Global Sustainability Under Uncertainty: How Do Multinationals Craft Regulatory Policies?

Multinational corporations are increasingly mindful of the significance of sustainability transitions and the need for operations that are energy efficient and environmentally sound. Achieving sustainability under conditions of uncertainty entails the involvement of multiple stakeholders in initiating and carrying outsustainability-focused initiatives. Using longitudinal analysis of Royal Dutch Shell’s sustainability policies, we developed an integrated model to elucidate how uncertainty influences sustainability policies in the specific context of multinational corporations (hereinafter – MNCs). We identified three phases in theevolution of Shell’s sustainability innovation: a self-reflective phase (2000–2003) characterized by intense pressure from climate advocacy groups, an investment phase (2004–2006) for which the MNC attempted to rise to the waste disposal and pollution challenge through renewable sources of energy, and a reorganization phase (2007–2010) to streamline operations. We also uncovered themes that influence how regulatory policies are crafted: responding positively to the “community’s voice”, risk spreading through joint ventures, revenue transparency for government accountability and reporting innovation that confronts hard truths. The practical implications are outlined

Next-generation WDM network design and routing: Introduction to the feature issue

Feature Issue on Next-Generation WDM Network Design and Routing (WDMN) The ever-increasing volume of Internet traffic is the major driver behind the increased efforts toward designing switches, routers, and new techniques and technologies that are capable of sustaining such tremendous demands. Optical networking and wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) have emerged in the past decade as the technology and the technique of choice for efficiently exploiting the large bandwidth offered by optical devices at a very competitive cost per carried bit. To bring such technologies all the way from mere hardware to user-ready devices, there remains a large gap to be filled with protocols, frameworks, algorithms, and designs that make effective and efficient use of this optical fiber bandwidth. Research in the area has been focused recently on many aspects of optical networks. Of particular interest to this feature issue of JON are some aspects that can grossly be sorted as follows: teletraffic techniques; routing and wavelength assignment in circuit-switched WDM networks; optical packet and burst switching and performance-related issues; GMPLS and IP traffic transport in WDM networks; topology configuration, path protection, network architecture, and related issues. To cover theses areas, 15 papers have been carefully selected through a rigorous peer-review process. Seven of these are invited papers that also underwent review to help enhance the quality of the presentation. The remaining 8 papers were selected among 31 submitted. © 2004 Optical Society of America

Design and implementation of A MAC scheme for wireless ad-hoc networks based on a cooperative game framework

Due to their dynamic topologies, providing Quality of Service (QoS) in wireless/mobile ad-hoc networks introduces major new challenges to the research community. Today, the only commercially available ad-hoc network products are those based on the widely deployed IEEE802.11 Distributed Coordination Function (DCF). However DCF is a random access scheme, which not only can not provide any guarantees, but is also well known to suffer from a problem of fairness. In this paper, the bandwidth allocation problem in the medium access control (MAC) layer of ad-hoc networks is modelled as a constrained maximization problem. Based on duality, the problem is further modelled as a cooperative game and an algorithm to solve this problem is provided, and the discussion is centered around the design and implementation issues of the algorithm