Organisational Responses to Discontinuous Innovation: A Case Study Approach

Research that examines entrant-incumbent dynamics often points to the organisational limitations that constrain incumbents from successfully pursuing new technologies or fending off new entrants. Some incumbents are nevertheless able to successfully implement organisational structures and develop routines that overcome these institutional constraints. We provide a case-study analysis of how three firms - Motorola, IBM and Kodak - responded to discontinuous innovations and the associated structural and organisational limitations that are typical to incumbent organisations. Each firm was able to capture gains from new technologies and develop profitable products in emerging markets, although their abilities to sustain these gains varied due to subsequent organisational changes. Drawing from these case studies, we synthesise how firms can institute organisational strategies to continue to capture gains from disruptive innovations. A schema suggests that particular organisational strategies are comparatively optimal for corresponding points along an innovation lifecycle

Modeling Supreme Court Strategic Decision Making: Congressional Constraint

This paper addresses the contradictory results obtained in Segal (1997) and Spiller and Gely (1992) concerning the impact of institutional constraints on the US Supreme Court decisionmaking. by adapting the Spiller and Gely model to the data set utilized by Segal. The major findings are as follows: first, by adapting the Spiller and Gely (1992) maximum likelihood model to the Segal (1997) dataset, we find support for the hypothesis that the Court adjusts its decisions to Presidential and congressional preferences. Second, data from 1947-92 indicate that the average probability of the Court being constrained has been approximately one third. Third, we show that the results obtained in Segal (1997) are the product of biases introduced by a misspecified econometric model. Finally, the estimation highlights the usefulness of Krehbiel’s model of legislative decision-making.

The Shadows of Life: Medicaid\u27s Failure of Health Care\u27s Moral Test

North Carolina Medicaid covers one-fifth of the state’s population and makes up approximately one-third of the budget. Yet the state has experienced increasing costs and worsening health outcomes over the past decade, while socioeconomic disparities persist among communities. In this article, the authors explore the factors that influence these trends and provide a series of policy lessons to inform the state’s current reform efforts following the recent approval of North Carolina’s Section 1115 waiver by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The authors used health, social, and financial data from the state Department of Health and Human Services, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the University of North Carolina to identify the highest cost counties in North Carolina. They found higher per beneficiary spending to be inversely related to population health, with many counties with the most expensive beneficiaries also reporting poor health outcomes. These trends appear to be attributed to a breakdown in access to basic health services, with high cost counties often lacking adequate numbers of health care providers and possessing limited health care services, leading patients to primarily engage the health care system in a reactive manner and predominantly in institutional care settings. To illustrate this pattern, the authors developed case studies of Tyrrell County and Graham County, which respectively are home to the state’s worst health outcomes and most expensive Medicaid beneficiaries. The authors combined stories of these counties with the larger historical trends to offer policy recommendations to help reorient North Carolina Medicaid around patient needs. The results shed light on traditionally understudied hotspots of cost and poor outcomes in North Carolina, while proposing tangible steps to support reform

The Political Economy of Congressional Patent Policymaking in the Late 20th Century

Beginning in the early 1980s, the U.S. Government reformed the patent law in ways that made patents easier to acquire and defend, but further efforts to expand the rights of patent owners had stalled by the mid-1990s. I use a political economy model to explain these changes in terms of the shifting constituency interests represented by members of the U.S. Congress. As the distribution of patenting became less skewed in the 1980s, more members represented constituencies likely to benefit from inefficient patent policy. But as the distribution of patent holding became more skewed once again in the later 1990s, support for expansions of patent rights decreased

Victory by the Weakest: Effects of Negative Advertising in N\u3e2 Candidate Campaigns

The truel, or three way duel, has distinct properties from duels: the weakest contestant often has a very good chance to win. This paper explores application of the logic of truels to election campaigns involving negative advertising. We show that negative campaigning that pits the leading candidates against each other can create circumstances in which the third (or worse) place candidate wins in one or more of the Nash equilibria of the game. We then study whether the simulated existence of an opportunity for Nash equilibrium victory by third place candidates predicts such outcomes in U.S. state-wide elections

Assessing Spurious Correlations in Big Search Data

Big search data offers the opportunity to identify new and potentially real-time measures and predictors of important political, geographic, social, cultural, economic, and epidemiological phenomena, measures that might serve an important role as leading indicators in forecasts and nowcasts. However, it also presents vast new risks that scientists or the public will identify meaningless and totally spurious ‘relationships’ between variables. This study is the first to quantify that risk in the context of search data. We find that spurious correlations arise at exceptionally high frequencies among probability distributions examined for random variables based upon gamma (1, 1) and Gaussian random walk distributions. Quantifying these spurious correlations and their likely magnitude for various distributions has value for several reasons. First, analysts can make progress toward accurate inference. Second, they can avoid unwarranted credulity. Third, they can demand appropriate disclosure from the study authors

Do Non-Citizens Vote in U.S. Elections?

In spite of substantial public controversy, very little reliable data exists concerning the frequency with which non-citizen immigrants participate in United States elections. Although such participation is a violation of election laws in most parts of the United States, enforcement depends principally on disclosure of citizenship status at the time of voter registration. This study examines participation rates by non-citizens using a nationally representative sample that includes non-citizen immigrants. We find that some non-citizens participate in U.S. elections, and that this participation has been large enough to change meaningful election outcomes including Electoral College votes, and Congressional elections. Non-citizen votes likely gave Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health care reform and other Obama administration priorities in the 111th Congress

Isolation and characterisation of the chick orthologue of the Opitz syndrome gene, Mid1, supports a conserved role in vertebrate development

© UBC PressThe X-linked form of Opitz syndrome (OS) is caused by loss of function of the microtubule-associated MID1 protein. The phenotype of OS includes defects along the central body axis, namely hypertelorism, cleft lip and palate, hypospadias and cardiac structural anomalies. Here we describe the isolation and characterisation of full-length cDNA clones representing the chick Mid1 gene and the detailed profile of its expression in stage 7 to 28 chick embryos. Consistent with the remarkable sequence conservation of MID1 between human and chick was the good correlation of the pattern of cMid1 expression with the tissues affected in OS. In stage 10 embryos, transcripts were concentrated in the head mesenchyme which includes migratory neural crest cells. However, the incomplete overlap with a neural crest marker, Sox10, suggests that Mid1 is a marker for somitomeric mesoderm and potentially for a subset of neural crest cells. Consistent with this, cMid1 expression was also detected at later stages in neural crest-derived facial mesenchyme, in the myotome and in the condensing muscle blocks of the limb. Expression of cMid1 was observed in the neural epithelium of the forebrain beginning at stage 7 with increased signal in presumptive rhombomeres 2/3. By stage 15, expression is highest in the diencephalon. Other areas with high expression are certain facial epithelia and the midgut that will give rise to the oesophagus and trachea. These data indicate that Mid1 plays an evolutionarily conserved developmental function in vertebrates that may involve effects on cellular proliferation, tissue interactions and morphogenesis.Joy M. Richman, Katherine K. Fu, Liza L. Cox, Jane P. Sibbons and Timothy C. Co