Strategic Interdependence Research Articles

The Impact of Entrepreneurial Capital on CSR and New Joint Venture Performance in Emerging Economies

This research highlights the critical role that entrepreneurial capital (EC) plays in organizational development and resilience by examining the connections between EC and the success of new joint ventures (NJVs) in developing nations. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is becoming more popular in the early phases of a company’s growth because of its capacity to improve credibility and competitive differentiation. Traditionally associated with well-established corporations. This study uses a mediated-moderation model to explore theories on how EC affects the disruptive innovation, economic, social, legal, and environmental sustainability of NJVs. Using quantitative survey data from 270 NJVs, this paper highlights the strategic interdependencies influencing NJV trajectories, as well as the functions of disruptive innovation and CSR. The findings demonstrate that EC greatly enhances NJVs performance in every category, promoting CSR and innovative projects. NJVs benefit from early CSR participation because it reduces risks and boosts entrepreneurial vitality. Disruptive innovation transforms EC into measurable performance advantages. This study has important policy and management implications because it shows that NJVs can stay ahead of the competition and improve their performance by strategically using EC for CSR and innovation projects. Overall, this study emphasizes how crucial CSR is to the startup environment, supporting resilient and long-term growth in emerging economies.

Middle Managers’ Relational Dynamics in the Context of Acquisitions: Balancing Strategic Interdependence and Organizational Autonomy

AbstractDuring acquisitions, middle managers (MMs) play a crucial role in facilitating the integration of two previously separate organizations, thereby facing the challenge of balancing competing needs for strategic interdependence and organizational autonomy. Drawing on interviews with acquiring and acquired MMs, this study explores the unfolding dynamics of framing the relationships between both groups. We introduce the concept of actionable intersubjectivity as a core ability of MMs to take into account the presence of the other while accomplishing integration tasks. We propose a grounded process model that traces how actionable intersubjectivity is developed to varying degrees throughout the MMs’ relational dynamics occurring in the various interaction spaces provided at each acquisition stage by getting a sense of the other (pre‐acquisition), by deciphering how the other think (approval), by experiencing how the other act and react (post‐acquisition I) and by putting oneself in the place of the other (post‐acquisition II). Our paper contributes to mergers and acquisitions research in two ways: (1) by unpacking the relational dynamics between MMs and introducing actionable intersubjectivity as a crucial ability in the context of acquisitions and (2) by extending our understanding of MMs’ role in balancing strategic interdependence and organizational autonomy during the acquisition process.

OLTENIA ȘI EVOLUȚIA „PROBLEMEI DOBROGENE” (1878-1940). ASPECTE GEOPOLITICE ȘI MILITARE

Towards 1900, due to its ethnic homogeneity, its geostrategic position and its role during some events from the previous decades, Oltenia had reached within the Romanian collective perception a specific position: the hardcore of the national identity and the hinterland of resistance. On the contrary, Dobruja, which, after more than four centuries of Ottoman domination, had become, since 1878, the object of a Romanian-Bulgarian dispute, had always been an invasion corridor and an area of extraordinary ethno-cultural mixing. This article briefly presents the link between these two Romanian provinces throughout the period 1878-1940, considering the role of Oltenia in the plans and actions of the Romanian state aimed at defending or consolidating its sovereignty in Dobruja. Thus, Oltenia was a key-area for Romanian military operations planned against Bulgaria, cause of the 'Dobrujan Issue', and the strategic interdependence between the two provinces was highlighted in both the 1913 and 1916 military campaigns. Also, many ethnic Romanians from Oltenia were granted land in Northern Dobruja (after 1878) and in Southern Dobruja (during the interwar period). Lastly, the final settlement of the Romanian-Bulgarian dispute over Dobruja, through the bilateral treaty from 7th of September 1940, is linked to Craiova, the metropolis of Oltenia.

Mutual Perceptions and China-South Korea Relations: A Comparative Study of the Academic Literature

How do China and South Korea see their relationship after 30 years of normalization, and why have views shifted since 2017? Research on perceptions and their foreign policy implications usually draws from offcial discourse and public opinion. This review essay assesses the nature and drivers of China-South Korea mutual perceptions by comparing their academic literature on bilateral relations. Scholarly accounts may offer longer-term interpretations of specialized interests, and a fuller picture of how and why views vary. On both sides of the China-South Korea academic debate, the quantitative volume of studies and qualitative appraisal of relations declined in the 2017???2021 Xi Jinping-Moon Jae-in period. Levels of optimism/pessimism vary by issue-area. Views of third-party constraints on security relations, and domestic political influences on societal relations, drive mutual pessimism. Koreans are more pessimistic about the economic partnership and reassess historical relations more unfavourably, which trace back to views of relative dependence and hierarchy. Three implications emerge for post-2022 relations in light of leadership transition in Beijing and Seoul. Enduring security priorities require minimum strategic interdependence and stronger trust-building mechanisms. Positive functional spillovers from economic and local/nonstate cooperation remain in question. And lasting cultural costs of political disputes compel joint efforts to enhance mutual understanding. Overall, shifts in structural and ideational factors that historically drove normalization are driving the current discord, and prompting both sides to lower future expectations of each other.

Free riding in climate protests

Climate protests are an important driver for ambitious climate policies. However, it is still unknown how individual protest participation decisions depend on each other. Exploiting the unique opportunity of the Third Global Climate Strike, we conducted multi-wave population surveys with 1,510 people in the four largest German cities. With a randomized information intervention, we changed turnout expectations of a subgroup of respondents and measured the impact on the probability to join the local protest event. Our findings provide causal evidence for strategic interdependence in protest participation decisions among members of the general public rather than among a movement’s core group of supporters. These decisions are found to be strategic substitutes: individuals who expect many other people to participate are less likely to participate themselves. This dynamic has important implications for the movement’s future communication and growth perspective.

Regulating Data Privacy and Cybersecurity

This paper studies firms' data privacy and cybersecurity choices. We emphasise the strategic interdependence between these decisions and demonstrate that security in both the market equilibrium and the social optimum tends to be higher when data is shared. We also identify important market failures in the sense that firms tend to under‐invest in security and over‐share data. Our welfare analysis of a minimum security standard, disclosure and consumer education policies, liability rules and consumer mitigation strategies highlights the need for a co‐ordinated approach to regulation.

The Connection between Imported Inputs and Exports: The Importance of Strategic Interdependence

Ignoring strategic interactions among final goods producers, the extant theoretical literature shows that lower costs of imported inputs increase the exports of the final goods using those inputs. Hence, it does not explain the empirically relevant positive relationship between the costs of imported inputs and the export of the final goods. We use a simple Cournot duopoly (i.e., duopoly quantity competition) with homogeneous products to show that if the exporters differ in input coefficients, lower costs of imported inputs may increase or decrease the exports of the final goods. Thus, we argue that strategic interdependence among the exporters can be an important factor for the positive relationship between lower costs of imported inputs and the export of the final goods. We further show that a lower cost of imported inputs may reduce the consumer surplus, total profits of the exporters, and world welfare. We also show the implications of a Bertrand duopoly (i.e., duopoly price competition) with horizontal product differentiation for our analysis.

Europe’s Fragile Unity

The EU is unlikely to develop the kinds of efficient collective responses to the Russia–Ukraine war that it produced in reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic. The conditions of strategic interdependence generated by the Ukraine crisis are more demanding than those triggered by the pandemic because its consequences are asymmetrically distributed across member states. Germany will find it difficult to play the role of regional stabiliser, anti-Europe parties could become stronger, new intra-European cleavages may arise over collective goals, and the expansion of the crisis’s time horizon could weaken prospects for effective collective action.

Multi-activity influence and intervention

Using a general network model with multiple activities, we analyse a planner's welfare maximising interventions taking into account within-activity network spillovers and cross-activity interdependence. We show that the direction of the optimal intervention, under sufficiently large budgets, critically depends on the spectral properties of two matrices: the first matrix depicts the social connections among agents, while the second one quantifies the strategic interdependence among different activities. In particular, the first principal component of the interdependence matrix determines budget resource allocation across different activities, while the first (last) principal component of the network matrix shapes the resource allocation across different agents when network effects are strategic complements (substitutes). We explore some comparative statics analysis with respective to model primitives and discuss several applications and extensions.

Designing division of labor with strategic uncertainty within organizations: Model analysis and a behavioral experiment

AbstractFor managers who are responsible for designing the division of labor, there are prototypes such as the divisional and functional designs, but insufficient knowledge of what to consider when selecting them. To address this shortfall, we developed a multiple economic game model with a two‐step structure to examine the strategic interdependence between the two prototypes. We analyzed the model from three different perspectives: a traditional analysis, an equilibrium analysis, and a behavioral analysis followed by a laboratory experiment. While the first analysis revealed that the functional design would outperform divisional design when individual decisions are exogenous, the game theoretic equilibrium analysis demonstrated that the two prototype designs have similar equilibria when individuals are rational. However, assuming that individuals made autonomous decisions with accessible information under given organizational structures, behavioral analysis derived predictions that the divisional design was more likely to produce favorable consequences than the functional design. This prediction was confirmed by the economic experiment in the laboratory. These results imply that the strategic uncertainty within organizations differs according to the designs and affects organizational consequences.

Financial Leverage, Innovation and Cournot Output: Limited Liability Effect Under Demand Uncertainty

We address the strategic interdependence among capital structure, firm-level (process) innovation, and subsequent output decisions. In the backdrop of the limited liability effect, the interlinkage among financial and real variables is established through a three-stage game. The levered duopolist produces higher output and earns a larger profit than its unlevered counterpart. Even the industry output is higher when one of the duopolists is levered. However, if the levered duopolist undertakes investment in (process) innovation, then the debt-financed innovation induced output is larger than the innovation-led output of a completely equity financed firm. The levered innovative firm eventually becomes a monopolist by driving out the unlevered innovative duopolist. JEL Codes: D21, G32, L13, O31

Strategic interdependence and preferences for debt mutualization in the eurozone

Existing research argues that a ‘democratic constraint’ blocks the path towards fiscal integration in the eurozone: Voters in creditor countries are fundamentally opposed to debt sharing, while voters in debtor countries are unwilling to leave the euro, which constrains the ability of their politicians to negotiate a more equitable distribution of the burden of adjustment. However, this literature neglects that preferences are strategically interdependent across countries and are affected by the type of information processed by individuals. Based on two linked survey experiments in Germany and Italy, conducted at a crucial moment during the COVID-19 pandemic, we show that Germans respond to information that highlights the possibility of a break-up of the euro as a result of Italexit by increasing their support for debt mutualization. In contrast, Italians are more affected by information about the costs of remaining in the euro than of exiting it and drastically reduce their support for the euro if they are told that austerity and structural reforms are required to remain in it. Our results help to explain why German politicians relaxed their hostility to joint debt and agreed to the introduction of the EU’s pandemic recovery fund in 2020.

Game modelling and stability strategy research on distributed leadership pattern: A tripartite evolutionary game perspective.

Distributed leadership pattern has been a topic of growing interest in recent years, recognizing that much remains to be known about this phenomenon. The research on distributed leadership acknowledges that responsibility and power are not exclusively limited to one formal leader, but are distributed between formal and informal leaders. The decision-making behavior of team members plays a vital role in optimizing cooperation and team performance. Nevertheless, little attention is paid to investigating the underlying mechanisms about how people in a team cooperate to initiate effective interactions and enhance team performance. Game theory offers a comprehensive analysis of rational behavior under the circumstances of strategic interdependence. By organizing the formal leader, the informal leader, and the ordinary employee in a team, this study constructs a tripartite evolutionary game model and analyzes the internal mechanism of distributed leadership patterns. The study finds that the equilibrium of the three parties is affected by multiple factors. The simulation results reveal that the empowerment of the formal leader to the informal leader is indispensable to promoting optimal cooperation and team performance in distributed leadership patterns. These findings have theoretical implications for the distributed leadership literature and managerial implications for practitioners.

Competition and Civilian Victimization

Violence against civilians in civil war is widely thought of as a strategic choice by combatant groups. We argue that a common strategic logic of competition underlies diverse theories of civilian victimization. We develop a theory of strategic complements in victimization, hypothesizing that an armed group’s propensity to victimize civilians will increase with its expectation that its competitors will act likewise. We test this argument by structurally estimating a formal model of strategic interdependence between armed groups using data from the Colombian civil war. Our findings indicate that strategic expectations are responsible for a substantial amount of violence against civilians: the two major combatant groups would have systematically victimized civilians in at least 9% fewer municipalities if they had expected no violence by their rival. Examining causal mechanisms, we also find that victimization in the Colombian case was more likely aimed at controlling civilians than at influencing peace negotiations.

Do Major-Power Interventions Encourage the Onset of Civil Conflict? A Structural Analysis

What is the impact of major-power intervention on civil-war onset? A considerable hurdle to answering this question is gauging expectations about future intervention on the eve of conflict. We tackle this challenge by developing a unified theoretical and empirical model of civil-war onset and subsequent intervention. Our model allows for strategic interdependence among interveners, and our empirical strategy enables estimation of intervention expectations from equilibrium behavior. We fit the model to civil war and intervention data from the second half of the twentieth century and find that major-power intervention is primarily characterized by strategic complementarities—for example, cost sharing among allies or competition for control among rivals—rather than free-riding incentives. Through counterfactual experiments, we show that commitments to decreased intervention would raise the risk of civil war worldwide, whereas increased intervention would have little effect. Our results suggest that coordination among major powers is maximally deterring civil conflict.

Brinkmanship: A game of Increasing Risk

A game is a situation of strategic interdependence: the result of a player’s strategies (actions/choices) depends upon the strategies of other people (one or many), who are responding consciously in the given scenario. The negotiation strategy of Brinkmanship is an essence of competitive edge in business, politics, and everyday life, if practised effectively. This paper covers the application of Brinkmanship as a strategic response in various situations, alongside examining the impact in different scenarios. The paper also analyses and highlights the importance of balance while applying the strategic move of Brinkmanship to avoid the serious risk of miscalculation and dangerous escalations, through various real-time case studies. The analysis also helps to explain other incentives which are offered by the brinkmanship strategy to the players/agents along with an advantageous outcome. This paper shall also discuss the characterization of optimal behaviour and decision making in conflictive scenarios among different players. Keywords— risk, brinkmanship, conflict, behaviour, trade-off, controlled loss, credibility, nuclear war, entrepreneurial brinkmanship, Nash Equilibrium, probabilistic situations, strategy, world peace, management, game theory

Blockchain Framework for Cognitive Sensor Network Using Non-Cooperative Game Theory

The incorporation of Technology in healthcare and hospital management has given a new perception to the medical procedures, and drug management for patient-centric care. Emerging technologies like blockchain, Internet of Things, and cognitive computing are most adaptable for designing smart healthcare systems. However, due to the diversified tasks involved, a design approach with broader understanding involving multiple factors that represent each area of the healthcare is the need of the hour. Game theory has gained prominence in modeling multi-player problems designated by strategic interdependency. This paper proposes a non-cooperative game strategy between players (stakeholders) to inspect how rationality is exhibited among the players who seamlessly try to get benefitted from the actions of other players. To evaluate the feasibility of the proposed model, a prototype was designed based on Ethereum permissioned blockchain employing Raspberry pi IoT devices and sensor-based cognition. Use of blockchain brings in trust, security and transparency to the system. The simulation results show that the proposed model provides better outcomes in terms of latency (≈ 15 min), throughput and scalability with an increased number of transactions. The comparative analysis elucidates the fact that the proposed method outperforms the existing healthcare systems with a significant improvement of 10-15% in terms of resource utilization and provides faster and accurate patient-centric services.

Incomplete‐information games in large populations with anonymity

The paper provides theoretical foundations for models of strategic interdependence under uncertainty that have a continuum of agents and a decomposition of uncertainty into a macro component and an agent‐specific micro component, with a law of large numbers for the latter. This macro–micro decomposition of uncertainty is implied by a condition of exchangeability of agents' types, which holds at the level of the prior if and only if it also holds at the level of agents' beliefs, i.e., posteriors. Under an additional condition of anonymity in payoffs, agents' behaviors are fully determined by their beliefs about the cross‐section distribution of types and other macro variables, and by their beliefs about the cross‐section distribution of other agents' strategies. Any probability distribution over cross‐section distributions of types and other macro variables is compatible with a fully specified belief system, but not every function from types to such probability distributions is compatible with a common prior. The paper gives necessary and sufficient conditions for compatibility of such a function with a common prior.

Filtering Facepiece Respirator Supply Chain Management Framework in a Disaster Such as COVID-19

Due to the lack of vaccines and treatments, filtering facepiece respirators are a primary and effective tool to dampen the spread of COVID-19. To meet the huge and continuous demand for filtering facepiece respirators, this concept paper suggests a supply chain management framework based on the disaster management principle. This concept paper adopts an exploratory and qualitative literature review to provide managerial insights for the supply chain participants. Due to implementation delay and strategic interdependency, the supply chain management strategies need to be systematically integrated. A viable way to integrate strategies is based on the disaster management cycle: mitigation, preparation, response, and recovery phases. Our model integrates innovative and successful but overlooked supply chain management strategies. First, the production capacity should be flexible so that the production mode in emergency and normal situations can be different. Second, the concept paper and development facilities can utilize their capacities for actual production in emergencies. Third, the quality certification process should accommodate the flexible production capacities. Fourth, inventory stockpiling should be renewable. This concept paper contributes to policymakers, healthcare sector decision-makers, stakeholders throughout the FFR supply chain to cope with future crises caused by pandemics by providing a systematic approach to constructing an effective, flexible, and resilient supply chain.

An Optimization-Based System Dynamics Simulation for Sustainable Policy Design in WEEE Management Systems

The increase in the use of electrical and electronic devices worldwide has created a rapid growth of waste of electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE). The current paper presents an optimization-based simulation (OBS) approach that allows the design of sustainable WEEE management system policies. The proposed OBS approach integrates a system dynamics (SD) model and a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) model to improve the representation and performance of the WEEE processes considering their operative and strategic interdependence. The SD component elicits the complexity of the WEEE generation process. Complementarily, the MINLP model periodically optimizes key variables of the WEEE management system. Computational results in a case study based on WEEE from Colombian mobile phones illustrates how an approach solely based on SD simulation is unable to capture the operative-strategic nature of the system and perform optimal parameter updates. By contrast, the OBS approach of this paper outperforms an exclusive SD analysis both in the economic and environmental performance of the system. It obtains 33% more profits and 65% more environmental benefits. Moreover, for this case study, the model suggests that the cornerstone of the WEEE management system for increasing its performance is the replacement rate.