Escaping the Exploitation Trap of Power-Disadvantaged Firms in Asymmetric Networks: A Study of Vietnamese Contract Manufacturing Exporters in Buyer-Driven Global Value Chains

<p>This study investigates how power-disadvantaged firms in power asymmetric networks can improve their performance. Drawing on theoretical insights from the Resource-Based Theory and the Resource Dependence Theory, the proposed model suggests that when participating in power asymmetric networks, the exploitation strategy of power-disadvantaged firms affects their exploration strategy. While these two strategies are related, their influences on performance through firm competitive capability are different. Exploitation strategy negatively impacts firm competitive capability whereas exploration strategy positively impacts firm competitive capability. The model further posits that the impact of exploitation and exploration strategies on competitive capability depends on absorptive capacity of the firm. The model is tested on Vietnamese contract manufacturing exporters who participate in buyer-driven global value chains, where the exporting firms are dominated by powerful international buyers. The study employs a mixed-methods approach to test the proposed conceptual model. Survey data was collected from a sample of 154 Vietnamese contract manufacturing exporters following the drop-and-collect method. At the same time, ten semi-structured interviews were conducted with key informants from top management teams of Vietnamese contract manufacturing exporters to seek contextual details for the enhancement and triangulation of the survey findings. The survey data were analysed using the partial least square structural equation modelling technique, whereas the interview data were examined using theoretical thematic analysis. The results broadly support the proposed model for Vietnamese contract manufacturing exporters. The findings of this study indicate that power-disadvantaged firms in power asymmetric inter-organisational networks benefit from the dual practice of exploitation and exploration strategies. The study shows that exploitation strategy motivates exploration strategy in this type of interfirm linkage. This motivation is primarily shaped by the power imbalance structure. This finding confirms the explanation for the behaviour of power-disadvantaged firms in asymmetric relationships advanced by the Resource Dependence Theory. Moreover, the study also contributes to the Resource-Based Theory by emphasising the critical role of competitive capability in explaining firm performance. Competitive capability is found to mediate the relationships between exploitation strategy, exploration strategy and firm performance. Furthermore, the links between exploration strategy and competitive capability act as serial multiple mediators transmitting the influence of exploitation strategy on performance. In addition, the influences of exploitation strategy and exploration strategy on firm competitive capability are found to be intensified by firm absorptive capacity. Thus, an alignment of exploitation strategy, exploration strategy, competitive capability, and absorptive capacity enhances the performance of contract manufacturing exporters in buyer-driven global value chains.</p>

Escaping the Exploitation Trap of Power-Disadvantaged Firms in Asymmetric Networks: A Study of Vietnamese Contract Manufacturing Exporters in Buyer-Driven Global Value Chains

<p>This study investigates how power-disadvantaged firms in power asymmetric networks can improve their performance. Drawing on theoretical insights from the Resource-Based Theory and the Resource Dependence Theory, the proposed model suggests that when participating in power asymmetric networks, the exploitation strategy of power-disadvantaged firms affects their exploration strategy. While these two strategies are related, their influences on performance through firm competitive capability are different. Exploitation strategy negatively impacts firm competitive capability whereas exploration strategy positively impacts firm competitive capability. The model further posits that the impact of exploitation and exploration strategies on competitive capability depends on absorptive capacity of the firm. The model is tested on Vietnamese contract manufacturing exporters who participate in buyer-driven global value chains, where the exporting firms are dominated by powerful international buyers. The study employs a mixed-methods approach to test the proposed conceptual model. Survey data was collected from a sample of 154 Vietnamese contract manufacturing exporters following the drop-and-collect method. At the same time, ten semi-structured interviews were conducted with key informants from top management teams of Vietnamese contract manufacturing exporters to seek contextual details for the enhancement and triangulation of the survey findings. The survey data were analysed using the partial least square structural equation modelling technique, whereas the interview data were examined using theoretical thematic analysis. The results broadly support the proposed model for Vietnamese contract manufacturing exporters. The findings of this study indicate that power-disadvantaged firms in power asymmetric inter-organisational networks benefit from the dual practice of exploitation and exploration strategies. The study shows that exploitation strategy motivates exploration strategy in this type of interfirm linkage. This motivation is primarily shaped by the power imbalance structure. This finding confirms the explanation for the behaviour of power-disadvantaged firms in asymmetric relationships advanced by the Resource Dependence Theory. Moreover, the study also contributes to the Resource-Based Theory by emphasising the critical role of competitive capability in explaining firm performance. Competitive capability is found to mediate the relationships between exploitation strategy, exploration strategy and firm performance. Furthermore, the links between exploration strategy and competitive capability act as serial multiple mediators transmitting the influence of exploitation strategy on performance. In addition, the influences of exploitation strategy and exploration strategy on firm competitive capability are found to be intensified by firm absorptive capacity. Thus, an alignment of exploitation strategy, exploration strategy, competitive capability, and absorptive capacity enhances the performance of contract manufacturing exporters in buyer-driven global value chains.</p>

Research on TCP Performance Model and Transport Agent Architecture in Broadband Wireless Network

The problems of Internet stability, heterogeneity, fairness of bandwidth sharing among streams, efficiency of use and congestion control have been solved in this article. This paper proposes an improved scheme of TCP proxy acknowledgement based on Automatic Repeat Request (ARQ), which improves throughput, reduces delay and saves uplink bandwidth of wireless link, and is more suitable for future asymmetric networks. The substantial improvement is observed during the experimentation as processing efficiency of protocol. The observed results revealed that overall processing time for each packet is approximately equals to one fourth of the transfer control protocol and the reduction of 59% is also observed in the utility of resources. The protocol also incorporates various simple techniques for the recovery of loss to improve the throughput in noisy wireless conditions. The results show that the adoption of the average diversity combining technology is helpful to improve the throughput and effective factor performance, and can reduce the requirement of radio link protocol (RLP) maximum retransmission times. As nearly 90% of uplink acknowledgement frames are filtered, the uplink bandwidth utilization rate is significantly improved. Decomposing large data frames into small data frames is also helpful to improve system performance.

Efficiency and Equilibrium in Network Games: An Experiment

The tension between efficiency and equilibrium is a central feature of economic systems. We examine this trade-off in a network game with a unique Nash equilibrium in which agents can achieve a higher payoff by following a “collaborative norm”. Subjects establish and maintain a collaborative norm in the circle, but the norm weakens with the introduction of one hub connected to everyone in the wheel. In complex and asymmetric networks of 15 and 21 nodes, the norm disappears and subjects’ play converges to Nash. We provide evidence that subjects base their decisions on their degree, rather than the overall network structure.

Connectional asymmetry of the inferior parietal lobule shapes hemispheric specialization in humans, chimpanzees, and rhesus macaques

The inferior parietal lobule (IPL) is one of the most expanded cortical regions in humans relative to other primates. It is also among the most structurally and functionally asymmetric regions in the human cerebral cortex. Whether the structural and connectional asymmetries of IPL subdivisions differ across primate species and how this relates to functional asymmetries remain unclear. We identified IPL subregions that exhibited positive allometric in both hemispheres, scaling across rhesus macaque monkeys, chimpanzees, and humans. The patterns of IPL subregions asymmetry were similar in chimpanzees and humans, but no IPL asymmetries were evident in macaques. Among the comparative sample of primates, humans showed the most widespread asymmetric connections in the frontal, parietal, and temporal cortices, constituting leftward asymmetric networks that may provide an anatomical basis for language and tool use. Unique human asymmetric connectivity between the IPL and primary motor cortex might be related to handedness. These findings suggest that structural and connectional asymmetries may underlie hemispheric specialization of the human brain.

Integrated Inference of Asymmetric Protein Interaction Networks Using Dynamic Model and Individual Patient Proteomics Data

Recent advances in experimental biology studies have produced large amount of molecular activity data. In particular, individual patient data provide non-time series information for the molecular activities in disease conditions. The challenge is how to design effective algorithms to infer regulatory networks using the individual patient datasets and consequently address the issue of network symmetry. This work is aimed at developing an efficient pipeline to reverse-engineer regulatory networks based on the individual patient proteomic data. The first step uses the SCOUT algorithm to infer the pseudo-time trajectory of individual patients. Then the path-consistent method with part mutual information is used to construct a static network that contains the potential protein interactions. To address the issue of network symmetry in terms of undirected symmetric network, a dynamic model of ordinary differential equations is used to further remove false interactions to derive asymmetric networks. In this work a dataset from triple-negative breast cancer patients is used to develop a protein-protein interaction network with 15 proteins.

Adaptive Orthogonal Characteristics of Bio-Inspired Neural Networks

In recent years, neural networks have attracted much attention in the machine learning and the deep learning technologies. Bio-inspired functions and intelligence are also expected to process efficiently and improve existing technologies. In the visual pathway, the prominent features consist of nonlinear characteristics of squaring and rectification functions observed in the retinal and visual cortex networks, respectively. Further, adaptation is an important feature to activate the biological systems, efficiently. Recently, to overcome short-comings of the deep learning techniques, orthogonality for the weights in the networks has been developed for the signal propagation and the efficient optimization of the learning. In this paper, bio-inspired asymmetric networks with nonlinear characteristics are proposed, which are derived from the retinal networks in the biological visual pathway. The asymmetric network proposed here was verified to detect the movement of the object, efficiently in our previous studies. This paper shows a new characteristic of the adaptive orthogonality in the asymmetric networks. First, it is shown that the asymmetric network with nonlinear characteristics is effective for generating orthogonality. Second, the proposed asymmetric network with Gabor filters is compared with the conventional energy model from the point of the orthogonality characteristics. Finally, the asymmetric networks with nonlinear characteristics can generate the extended orthogonal bases in independent subspaces, which are useful for classification and efficient learning.

High-accuracy Ising machine using Kerr-nonlinear parametric oscillators with local four-body interactions

A two-dimensional array of Kerr-nonlinear parametric oscillators (KPOs) with local four-body interactions is a promising candidate for realizing an Ising machine with all-to-all spin couplings, based on adiabatic quantum computation in the Lechner–Hauke–Zoller (LHZ) scheme. However, its performance has been evaluated only for a symmetric network of three KPOs, and thus it has been unclear whether such an Ising machine works in general cases with asymmetric networks. By numerically simulating an asymmetric network of more KPOs in the LHZ scheme, we find that the asymmetry in the four-body interactions causes inhomogeneity in photon numbers and hence degrades the performance. We then propose a method for reducing the inhomogeneity, where the discrepancies of the photon numbers are corrected by tuning the detunings of KPOs depending on their positions, without monitoring their states during adiabatic time evolution. Our simulation results show that the performance can be dramatically improved by this method. The proposed method, which is based on the understanding of the asymmetry, is expected to be useful for general networks of KPOs in the LHZ scheme and thus for their large-scale implementation.

Divergent Connectional Asymmetries of the Inferior Parietal Lobule Shape Hemispheric Specialization in Humans, Chimpanzees, and Macaque Monkeys

The inferior parietal lobule (IPL) is one of the most expanded and structurally and functionally asymmetric regions in the human cerebral cortex. Whether the structural and connectional asymmetries of IPL subdivisions differ across primate species and whether this relates to functional asymmetries remain unclear. We identified IPL subregions that exhibited symmetric positive allometric scaling across macaque monkeys, chimpanzees, and humans. Patterns of IPL subregions asymmetry were similar in chimpanzees and humans, whereas no IPL asymmetries were evident in macaques. Among the comparative sample of primates, humans showed the most widespread asymmetric connections in the frontal, parietal, and temporal cortices, constituting leftward asymmetric networks that may provide an anatomical basis for language and tool use. Unique human asymmetric connectivity between the IPL and the primary motor cortex may be related to handedness. These findings suggest that structural and connectional asymmetries may underlie hemispheric specialization of the human brain.