Wholesale pricing in a small open economy

This paper addresses the empirical analysis of wholesale profit margins using data of the Dutch wholesale sector, 1986. At the heart of the analysis is the typical nature of wholesale production: wholesalers do not produce a tangible product, but offer a service capacity. This has an immediate impact on the identification, interprelation and measurement of determinants of profit variations. A model is set up to explain variations in wholesale profit margins, which is inspired by two widely applied approaches to industry pricing: the behavioural mark-up model and the marginalist price-cost model

A basic theory of inheritance: How bad practice prevails

This paper develops an inheritance theory explaining the diffusion and persistence of detrimental management practice. Received wisdom, in both management theory and practice, would suggest that a practice that lowers the life expectancy of adopting firms, over time, will vanish because it puts those firms at a competitive disadvantage. In this paper, I challenge this view. I develop a conceptual model that details how a practice that lowers the survival chances of adopting organizations may still spread and continue to exist across a population of firms. I propose that a combination of three basic conditions is sufficient to bring about this phenomenon: if the practice is somehow associated with success, if there exists causal ambiguity, and if the rate of its diffusion is high compared with the rate at which it accelerates firms’ demise, the practice may continue to thrive and become a widespread and persistent feature in an industry. A pivotal conceptual insight is that the endurance of particular management practices and strategies is not merely a corollary of the competitiveness of the organizations that use them but that they have fitness levels of their own

Toward a behavioral theory of cooperation between managers and employee representatives in works councils

This article builds a comprehensive behavioural framework of cooperation between management and employee representatives in a works council setting. The authors do so by applying insights from organizational behaviour in the works council setting in the belief that this discipline’s long-standing research tradition on (work) group processes and outcomes may provide the necessary theoretical building blocks to unravel cooperation among managers and employee representatives. The authors’ framework suggests that cooperation is a complex phenomenon that is largely driven by the extent of ideological and educational differences between management and employee representatives, procedural justice and perceived organizational support. A series of case studies of Belgian works councils provide illustrations of this framework. The overall contribution of this article is a grounded and testable behavioural framework of how cooperation can develop between management and employee representatives in a works council context

Survival during a crisis: Alliances by Singapore firms

10.1111/j.1467-8551.2006.00490.xBritish Journal of Management183209-22

Firm entry diversity, resource space heterogeneity and market structure

Evolutionary explanations of market structures have usually focused on the selection pressures impacted by a number of factors such as scale economies, niche width, firm size and consumer heterogeneity. How selection processes work in markets is highly dependent on the available firm type variation at entry. In order to explore the implications of different degrees of firm diversity at entry on posterior market selection processes, we develop an agent-based computational model. Results indicate that a proper understanding of market selection processes should, indeed, involve understanding the effects of firm type variation at market entry