Generic Expansion Research Articles

The Growth of the Firm in Planned Economies in Transition: Institutions, Organizations, and Strategic Choice

Highlighting an important facet of diversity among organizations operating in different institutional environments, this article presents a model of the growth strategy of the firm in planned economies in transition such as Eastern Europe, the former Soviet republics, and China. Focusing on the stylized state-owned enterprises, we explore the interaction between institutions and organizations in these countries. Given the institutional constraints, neither generic expansion nor acquisitions, two traditional strategies for growth found in the West, are viable for firms in these countries. Instead, firms settle on a network-based strategy of growth, building on personal trust and informal agreements among managers. The institutional environment that leads to this unique strategy of growth is examined, and boundary conditions, limitations, and implications of this model are discussed.

Generic expansions of structures

In this paper, Cohen's forcing technique is applied to some problems in model theory. Forcing has been used as a model-theoretic technique by several people, in particular, by A. Robinson in a series of papers [1], [10], [11]. Here forcing will be used to expand a family of structures in such a way that weak second-order embeddings are preserved. The forcing situation resembles that in Solovay's proof that for any theorem φ of GB (Godel-Bernays set theory with a strong form of the axiom of choice), if φ does not mention classes, then it is already a theorem of ZFC. (See [3, p. 105] and [2, p. 77].)The first application of forcing here is to the problem (posed by Keisler) of when is it possible to add a Skolem function to a pair of structures, one of which is an elementary substructure of the other, in such a way that the elementary embedding is preserved.It is not always possible to find such a Skolem function. Payne [9] found an example involving countable structures with uncountably many relations. The author [4], [6] found an example involving uncountable structures with only two relations. The problem remains open in case the structures are required both to be countable and to have countable type. Forcing is used to obtain a positive result under some special conditions.