There's no Place Like Home: A Strategic Framework to Overcome Liability of Foreignness in the German Car Market

Globalization has led to exciting new business opportunities around the globe. Still, national and cultural boundaries have not evaporated into a "borderless world". Several studies have identified so-called liabilities of foreignness that arise from a lack of embeddedness and roots in the host market and subsequent competitive disadvantages. Countervailing strategies for these effects have remained scarce so far. We suggest that this is due to the lack of a viable approach to identify and quantify these effects and develop a conceptual framework to empirically estimate the individual degree of liability of foreignness of a firm from a market perspective. We suggest that disruptive changes in a society change the dynamics of liability of foreignness and generate opportunities for foreign companies to optimize their localization strategies. We apply our approach to a large mature market with established international competition : the German new car market. For a comprehensive sample of roughly 1,400 car models from 2003 we estimate the relative turnover disadvantage for all major foreign manufacturers. We find that most foreign producers have managed to overcome liabilities of foreignness in Germany through firm-specific advantages. Still, some face significant challenges. A submarket analysis shows that home market advantages are more deeply rooted in the Western part of Germany and that foreign competitors find a more accessible competitive environment in Eastern Germany. Therefore, East Germany is a superior platform for deploying effective and efficient countervailing strategies. Moreover, we identify a broader rationale to engage early and decisively in untapped but promising markets like China. --Liability of foreignness,automotive market,multinational strategy,seemingly unrelated regressions

Young, open and international: the impact of search strategies on the internationalization of new ventures

Young firms with the ability to internationalize early and decisively have received much attention in recent academic discussion. However, relatively little is known about the underlying processes that enable them to skip several stages of the internationalization process. We contribute to this research stream by establishing theoretical links with the emerging open innovation paradigm of firms optimizing their R&D activities by interconnecting them with external partners such as leading customers, universities or specialized suppliers. Based on a sample of more than 2,500 firms in Germany we contrast young and mature firms with regard to the effect of open innovation strategies on internationalization performance. Our results show that both the breadth and depth of search strategies for external knowledge help young firms to enter international markets. Once they have entered these markets, though, the drivers for success seem to shift from general knowledge sourcing to targeted and specific ones. --New ventures,internationalization,innovation,search strategies,entrepreneurship

New governance modes for Germany's financial reporting system

The question raised in this paper is whether changes over the last 20 years in the German financial accounting system signal a retreat of the nation state from this policy field. Using a comprehensive perspective on accountancy we consider the steps in the accounting process, i.e. standard setting, enforcement and disclosure, and analyse whether significant privatisation tendencies can be observed in accounting, whether and how the state safeguards its scope for interventions in the public interest and how these changes compare to the ongoing globalisation in accounting. We find that changes in all these areas are first of all driven by the application of European legislation, but also by voluntary harmonisation and an increased involvement of private actors. Altogether, a shift towards a (more) societal governance mode can be witnessed. However, the State increases its interventions at the same time by regulating arenas in which it was previously not active. --

Algebraic Uncertainty Theory : A Unifying Perspective on Reasoning under Uncertainty

The question of how to represent and process uncertainty is of fundamental importance to the scientific process, but also in everyday life. Currently there exist a lot of different calculi for managing uncertainty, each having its own advantages and disadvantages. Especially, almost all are defining the domain and structure of uncertainty values a priori, e.g., one real number, two real numbers, a finite domain, and so on, but maybe uncertainty is best measured by complex numbers, matrices or still another mathematical structure. This thesis investigates the notion of uncertainty from a foundational point of view, provides an ontology and axiomatic core system for uncertainty and derives and not defines the structure of uncertainty. The main result, the ring theorem, stating that uncertainty values are elements of the [0,1]-interval of a partially ordered ring, is used to derive a general decomposition theorem for uncertainty values, splitting them into a numerical interval and an ``interaction term''. In order to illustrate the unifying power of these results, the relationship to Dempster-Shafer theory is discussed and it is shown that all Dempster-Shafer measures over finite domains can be represented by ring-valued uncertainty measures. Finally, the historical development of approaches to modeling uncertainty which have led to the results of this thesis are reviewed

There's no Place Like Home : A Strategic Framework to Overcome Liability of Foreignness in the German Car Market

Globalization has led to exciting new business opportunities around the globe. Still, national and cultural boundaries have not evaporated into a "borderless world." Several studies have identified so-called liabilities of foreignness that arise from a lack of embeddedness and roots in the host market and subsequent competitive disadvantages. Countervailing strategies for these effects have remained scarce so far. We suggest that this is due to the lack of a viable approach to identify and quantify these effects and develop a conceptual framework to empirically estimate the individual degree of liability of foreignness of a firm from a market perspective. We suggest that disruptive changes in a society change the dynamics of liability of foreignness and generate opportunities for foreign companies to optimize their localization strategies. We apply our approach to a large mature market with established international competition: the German new car market. For a comprehensive sample of roughly 1,400 car models from 2003 we estimate the relative turnover disadvantage for all major foreign manufacturers. We find that most foreign producers have managed to overcome liabilities of foreignness in Germany through firm-specific advantages. Still, some face significant challenges. A submarket analysis shows that home market advantages are more deeply rooted in the Western part of Germany and that foreign competitors find a more accessible competitive environment in Eastern Germany. Therefore, East Germany is a superior platform for deploying effective and efficient countervailing strategies. Moreover, we identify a broader rationale to engage early and decisively in untapped but promising markets like China

Young, open and international : the impact of search strategies on the internationalization of new ventures

Young firms with the ability to internationalize early and decisively have received much attention in recent academic discussion. However, relatively little is known about the underlying processes that enable them to skip several stages of the internationalization process. We contribute to this research stream by establishing theoretical links with the emerging open innovation paradigm of firms optimizing their R&D activities by interconnecting them with external partners such as leading customers, universities or specialized suppliers. Based on a sample of more than 2,500 firms in Germany we contrast young and mature firms with regard to the effect of open innovation strategies on internationalization performance. Our results show that both the breadth and depth of search strategies for external knowledge help young firms to enter international markets. Once they have entered these markets, though, the drivers for success seem to shift from general knowledge sourcing to targeted and specific ones

Unstable particles in finite volume: The broken phase of the 44-d O(4)O(4) non-linear σ\sigma-model

According to a proposal of L\"uscher it is possible to determine elastic scattering phases in infinite volume from the energy spectrum of two-particle states in a periodic box. We demonstrate the applicability of this method in the broken phase of the 4-dimensional $O(4)$ non-linear $\sigma$-model in a Monte-Carlo study on finite lattices. This non-perturbative approach also permits the study of unstable particles, the \sg-particle in our case. We observe the \sg-resonance and extract its mass and its width.Comment: 4 pages LaTeX, 4 PS figures, LATTICE'92 contributio

The 2013 EU Survey on Industrial R&D Investment Trends

This report presents the findings of the eigth survey on trends in industrial R&D investment. These are based on 172 responses of mainly larger companies from the 1000 EU-based companies in the 2012 EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard. These 172 companies are responsible for R&D investment worth € 62 billion, constituting around 41% of the total R&D investment by the 1000 EU Scoreboard companies.JRC.J.2-Knowledge for Growt

Attracting foreign direct investment without weakening domestic firms

The present policy brief builds on a recent study designed to provide insights that support the need for a comprehensive policy approach which simultaneously aims at attracting foreign direct investments while strengthening the competitiveness of domestic firms. More in detail, the applied framework provides policy-makers with an instrument to understand when foreign investments are beneficial with respect to knowledge inflows and when they start to jeopardise the competitiveness of local firms. This has interesting policy implications in relation to various relevant aspects of the Europe 2020 agenda, such as the need to strengthen the competitiveness of European firms in the global economy, by, among other things, promoting and supporting their mobility within the Internal Market, their internationalisation, and their capacity to contribute to and benefit from international knowledge flows.JRC.J.2-Knowledge for Growt