Growth and renewal: how does organizational experience affect diversification in early and mature organizations

This dissertation presents a theory on how organizational experience affects decisions by organizations to enter new product-markets. Facing the choice of new product-markets, a firm might decide to introduce a related product, which leverages existing firm knowledge and capabilities, or to experiment with a less related product, which requires new knowledge and capabilities. Learning and evolutionary theory suggests firms tend to diversify into related knowledge areas. Consistent with this view of local search, the first question examined in this study is how a firm's technology and market experience affect its product-market entry choice. While local search is considered dominant, it might not be a homogenous process across all types of organizations. Organizations at different stages differ in organizational size, structure, and cognitive styles. These factors interact with the process of experiential learning, leading to divergent learning results. The second question in this study examined how experience affects organizations at different stages. Finally, I propose that organizational knowledge diversity and organizational access to innovative knowledge are concrete examples of dynamic capabilities that might weaken the path-dependency of existing technology or market experience, leading to distant product-market entries. The product-market entry choices were examined using a model that integrates organizational characteristics with organizational learning. The data are on new drug introductions in the generic pharmaceutical industry. This dataset covers the whole population of generic pharmaceutical firms in the US from 1984-2004, including firms at a variety of ages and stages. The analyses showed clear support for the relationship between experience and related product-market entries. And strong evidence was found for the heterogeneity of this relationship across organizations. The most interesting results are the heterogeneous diversification behavior between new ventures and established firms. Compared to established firms (older firms), new ventures (younger firms) are more likely to enter related product-markets, and less likely to enter product-markets with many competitors. The two organizational features, knowledge diversity and access to innovative knowledge, were also found to moderate the relationship between experience and product-market entries. Firms with diverse knowledge and access to innovative knowledge are less likely to enter related product markets

The effects of contract detail and prior ties on contract change : a learning perspective

Despite the large literature on alliance contract design, we know little about how transacting parties change and amend their underlying contracts during the execution of strategic alliances. Drawing on existing research in the alliance contracting literature, we develop the empirical question of how contract detail and prior ties influence the amount, direction, and type of change in such agreements during the collaboration. We generated a sample of 115 joint ventures (JVs) by distributing a survey to JV board members or top managers and found that the amount of contract change is negatively associated with the level of detail in the initial contract but is positively associated with the number of prior ties between alliance partners. In relation to the direction of contract change, we find that the level of detail of the initial agreements negatively correlates with the likelihood of removing or weakening existing provisions and that prior collaborative experience positively correlates with the likelihood of strengthening of existing provisions or adding of new ones. We also find that prior ties affect the type of change in that JV parents prefer to change enforcement provisions more so than the coordination provisions in the contract. Our paper generates new insights on the complementarities between relational governance and transaction cost economics perspectives on alliance contracting

Performance Analysis for Near-Field MIMO: Discrete and Continuous Aperture Antennas

Performance analysis is carried out in a near-field multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system for both discrete and continuous aperture antennas. The effective degrees of freedom (EDoF) is first derived. It is shown that near-field MIMO systems have a higher EDoF than free-space far-field ones. Additionally, the near-field EDoF further depends on the communication distance. Based on the derived EDoF, closed-form expressions of channel capacity with a fixed distance are obtained. As a further advance, with randomly deployed receivers, ergodic capacity is derived. Simulation results reveal that near-field MIMO has an enhanced multiplexing gain even under line-of-sight transmissions. In addition, the performance of discrete MIMO converges to that of continuous-aperture MIMO.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

Physical Layer Security for STAR-RIS-NOMA in Large-Scale Networks

In this paper, an analytical framework for secure simultaneous transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS) assisted non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) transmissions in large-scale networks is proposed, where users and eavesdroppers are randomly distributed. Both the time-switching protocol (TS) and energy splitting (ES) protocol are considered for the STAR-RIS. To characterize system performance, the channel statistics are first provided, and the Gamma approximation is adopted for general cascaded $\kappa$-$\mu$ fading. Afterward, the closed-form expressions for both the secrecy outage probability and secrecy ergodic rate are derived. To obtain further insights, the asymptotic performance for the secrecy diversity order and the secrecy slope are deduced. The theoretical results show that 1) the secrecy diversity orders of the strong user and the weak user depend on the path loss exponent and the distribution of the received signal-to-noise ratio, respectively; 2) the secrecy slope of the ES protocol achieves the value of one, higher than the slope of the TS protocol which is the mode operation parameter of TS. The numerical results demonstrate that: 1) there is an optimal STAR-RIS mode operation parameter to maximize the system performance; 2) the STAR-RIS-NOMA significantly outperforms the STAR-RIS-orthogonal multiple access.Comment: 30 pages, 7 figure

How do emerging market SMEs utilize resources in the face of environmental uncertainty?

Using the resource-based view of the firm, this article examines how different resources are used by small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in response to environmental uncertainty in an emerging market context. A survey was conducted involving 212 owners, CEOs, or managing directors of SMEs in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to explore the drivers of firm growth strategies. Our empirical results show that higher environmental uncertainty, in terms of market and regulatory uncertainty, drives SMEs to pursue a more exploratory instead of an exploitative growth strategy. Our results also show that SMEs pursuing more of an exploratory growth strategy focus predominantly on intangible resources such as human capital and social capital while firms pursuing more of an exploitative growth strategy focus more on financial resources. The results from our study provide valuable insights for how managers can structure, bundle, and leverage different resources for developing their strategies based on their level of perceived environmental uncertainty. The policy implications from our study are that support for SMEs should be multi-faceted depending on the combination of uncertainty faced and type of strategy chosen by SMEs. JEL CLASSIFICATION: M10; M19; M1

Is the Envelope Beneficial to Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access?

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is capable of serving different numbers of users in the same time-frequency resource element, and this feature can be leveraged to carry additional information. In the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system, a novel enhanced NOMA scheme called NOMA with informative envelope (NOMA-IE) is proposed to explore extra flexibility from the envelope of NOMA signals. In this scheme, data bits are conveyed by the quantified signal envelope in addition to classic signal constellations. The sub- carrier activation patterns of different users are jointly decided by the envelope former at the transmitter of NOMA-IE. At the receiver, successive interference cancellation (SIC) is employed, and the envelope detection coefficient is introduced to eliminate the error floor. Theoretical expressions of spectral efficiency, energy efficiency, and detection complexity are provided first. Then, considering the binary phase shift keying modulation, the block error rate and bit error rate are derived based on the two-subcarrier element. The analytical results reveal that the SIC error and the index error are the main factors degrading the error performance. The numerical results demonstrate the superiority of the NOMA-IE over the OFDM and OFDM-NOMA in terms of the error rate performance when all the schemes have the same spectral efficiency and energy efficiency

Physical Layer Security for STAR-RIS-NOMA: A Stochastic Geometry Approach

In this paper, a stochastic geometry based analytical framework is proposed for secure simultaneous transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS) assisted non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) transmissions, where legitimate users (LUs) and eavesdroppers are randomly distributed. Both the time-switching protocol (TS) and energy splitting (ES) protocol are considered for the STAR-RIS. To characterize system performance, the channel statistics are first provided, and the Gamma approximation is adopted for general cascaded κ-μ fading. Afterward, the closed-form expressions for both the secrecy outage probability (SOP) and average secrecy capacity (ASC) are derived. To obtain further insights, the asymptotic performance for the secrecy diversity order and the secrecy slope are deduced. The theoretical results show that 1) the secrecy diversity orders of the strong LU and the weak LU depend on the path loss exponent and the distribution of the received signal-to-noise ratio, respectively; 2) the secrecy slope of the ES protocol achieves the value of one, higher than the slope of the TS protocol which is the mode operation parameter of TS. The numerical results demonstrate that: 1) there is an optimal STAR-RIS mode operation parameter to maximize the secrecy performance; 2) the STAR-RIS-NOMA significantly outperforms the STAR-RIS-orthogonal multiple access

Moving from the developing to the developed: compensation disparities of Chinese expatriates

This research examines Chinese expatriates working in Chinese multinational companies subsidiaries in the United Arab Emirates. We identify three salient social referents used by Chinese expatriates to assess distributive justice, i.e. employees working in mainland China, locals from the host country, and employees working in developed country multinational companies in the host country. For each referent, we explore the determinants of perceived distributive justice. The results show that equity and non-monetary rewards are stable and influential factors for perceived distributive justice. Compensation disparity vis-a-vis employees working in mainland China and in international multinational companies has a significant effect on perceived distributive justice. However, compensation disparity is not used when it comes to assessing perceived distributive justice compared to locals in the host country. Finally, our findings suggest that only equity and non-monetary rewards have significant effects on expatriation satisfaction, not perceived distributive justice