A study of strategic group mapping and understanding mobility barriers in Indian logistic industry

The purpose of this research was to identify the strategic groups present in the Indian logistics industry and discuss the mobility barriers across the strategic groups. Secondary research was performed by collecting data from online sources and results were vetted by experts in supply chain management through convergent interviews. The research identified nine strategic groups in Indian logistic industry. Requirement of group specific fleet structures, assets, expertise in Value-added services were some prominent intergroup mobility barriers identified. Managers could devise ‘End to End’ supply chain solutions by collaborating with firms of other strategic groups as identified in the study.

EXPRESS: Strategic Polarization in Group Interactions

We study the phenomenon of strategic group polarization in which members take more extreme actions than their preferences. The analysis is relevant for a broad range of formal and informal group settings, including social media, online platforms, sales teams, corporate and academic committees, and political action committees. In our model, agents with private preferences choose a public action (voice opinions), and the mean of their actions represents the group’s realized outcome. They face a trade-off between influencing the group decision and truth-telling. In a simultaneous move game, agents strategically shade their actions towards the extreme. The strategic group influence motive can create substantial polarization in actions and group decisions even when the preferences are relatively moderate. Compared to a simultaneous game, a randomized sequential actions game lowers polarization when agents’ preferences are relatively similar. Sequential actions can even lead to moderation if the later agents have moderate preferences. Endogenizing the order of moves (through a first-price sealed-bid auction) always increases polarization, but it is also welfare enhancing. Our findings can help group leaders, firms, and platforms design mechanisms that moderate polarization, e.g., the choice of speaking order, the group size, and the knowledge members have of others’ preferences and actions.

Riteband: combatting the challenges of cross-industry innovation

Study Level/Applicability Case can be taught at the undergraduate or postgraduate level, including executive Master of Business Administration programs. Subject Area This case is intended for courses in strategic management, entrepreneurship and innovation at the undergraduate or postgraduate level. Case Overview The case is about challenges faced by Linda Portnoff, the Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Riteband, a Sweden-based fintech startup. In March 2020, Portnoff was conducting beta testing of Riteband’s app, which experts considered the world’s first stock exchange for music trading. After completing a PhD, Portnoff who was working as a Research Analyst, left her job to pursue entrepreneurship. Through Riteband, Portnoff helped to resolve pain points of artists who were forced to give the copyright of their music tracks or albums to distributors, in lieu of funds or promotional campaigns that distributors arranged for them. Portnoff invested in developing a patent-pending machine learning-based algorithm that based on several parameters could predict the likelihood of a music track or an album to become a success. Based on this prediction and royalty that artists were interested in sharing with fans, shares were issued to investors, who were also fans of the artists. As Portnoff identified an innovative business opportunity to trade music on a stock exchange based on Riteband’s machine learning algorithm, competition in Riteband’s strategic group was also becoming intense. Consequently, Portnoff was facing challenges of establishing competitive advantage of Riteband. Furthermore, as women in general faced challenges in raising funds for their startups, and even though Portnoff obtained some funding for Riteband, but overall, funding was a challenge for her as well. Moreover, as machine learning was a technical aspect for artists and potential investors, Portnoff also faced challenges to monetize on its machine learning algorithm. Expected learning outcomes By the end of the case study discussion, students should be able to: understand the principles of cross-industry innovation and explain the creation of new business opportunities based on cross-industry innovation; differentiate between direct and indirect competitors through strategic group analysis and further critically analyze the competitive advantage of business over other direct competitors; determine ways of reducing gender biases in venture capital funding; describe how machine learning works and further formulate ways to monetize a business through machine learning; and demonstrate the application of the value proposition canvas and business model canvas. Subject codes CCS 3: Entrepreneurship; CCS 11: Strategy.

Competitive dynamics of strategic groups in the Portuguese banking industry

The objective of this paper is to analyse the retail banking behaviour in Portugal (2008–2010, 2011–2013 and 2014–2016), by taking into account the financial and economic assistance programme (FEAP) – monitored by the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund – that Portugal went through and that started in 2011. With competitive dynamics it is possible to understand the evolution of competitive strategies of the institutions of a strategic group within a given time horizon. Data were collected after consultation of reports and accounts of Banks from Banco de Portugal database. The results were analysed and discussed in light of the theory of strategic groups and their competitive dynamics allows us to conclude that: Banks implemented different competitive strategies; Strategic groups have dissimilar resources; and Strategic groups display different strategies. The 2008–2010 period can be considered as a ‘deregulated’ period, the 2011–2013 as a period of ‘imposed regulation’, and the 2014–2016 as a period of ‘strategic consolidation’ with strategic changes that have prompted strategic groupings of the various institutions as consequence of a low mobility barrier strategy.

‘We’ll Help Ourselves, but What’s in It for Us?’ Conflict, Development and Social Mobility among Roma in Romania

Roma-related development and policy discourse often represents the Roma development ‘subjects’ as disempowered victims. Against the pervasiveness of such narratives, a close look at the local level conflicts arising during the implementation of a World Bank development project in destitute Roma communities from Romania lays bare the strategies of unassisted social mobility in which a group of Roma engage. Not large or well-defined enough to be constituted into a real ‘class’ in sociological terms, this strategic group is made up of Roma civil servants (mediators, local experts, Romani language teachers) who negotiate their engagement in development projects on their own terms and use the material and immaterial resources that projects offer to enact their own upward social mobility. Often, though, this comes at the cost of a growing socio-economic gap between themselves and the most destitute parts of Roma communities, which complicates their involvement in development projects. The article underlines the necessity of taking into account both the strategies of unassisted social mobility of Roma development brokers, and the internal power imbalances that the development apparatus inevitably ends up producing in Roma communities.

EXPRESS: Organizational Herding in Advertising Spending Disclosures: Evidence and Mechanisms

As firms use advertising to gain product market advantages and increase their valuation in financial markets, disclosing their advertising spending is influential—whether it erodes organizational competitive advantages in product markets or signals quality in financial markets. The authors argue that firms learn from peers’ decisions to reduce the uncertainty in their own advertising disclosure, and they empirically investigate information-based organizational herding in the context of advertising spending disclosure, where a 1994 reporting rule made advertising spending disclosures voluntary in the United States. The authors examine whether a firm relies on information from benchmark leaders or similar peers to resolve disclosure uncertainty. A novel identification strategy, which uses partially overlapping strategic groups, to mitigate simultaneity and correlated unobservables, shows robust evidence for herding effects among peer firms in the same strategic group. Moreover, firms are more likely to resolve disclosure uncertainty from similar peers rather than from benchmark leaders. The authors discuss how firms can use knowledge of competitors’ predicted advertising disclosure decisions conditional on their disclosure to their strategic advantage in product and financial markets.

Scenarios for population health inequalities in 2030 in Europe

Health inequalities have been consistently reported across and within European countries and continue to pose major challenges to policy-making. In the EURO-HEALTHY project, funded by Horizon 2020, three 2030 time-horizon scenarios were developed, depicting the key factors that may affect the evolution of PH inequalities across European regions. A three-stage socio-technical approach was applied: i) identification of drivers (key factors expected to affect the evolution of PH inequalities across European regions until 2030) - this stage engaged in a Web-Delphi process a multidisciplinary panel of 51 experts and other stakeholders representing the different perspectives regarding PH inequalities; ii) generation of scenario structures - different drivers' configurations (i.e. their hypotheses for evolution) were organised into coherent scenarios using the Extreme-World Method; and iii) validation of scenario structures and generation of scenario narratives. Stages ii) and iii) were conducted in two workshops with a strategic group of 13 experts with a comprehensive view about PH inequalities. Three scenarios were developed for the evolution of PH inequalities in Europe until 2030: 'Failing Europe' (worst-case but plausible scenario), 'Sustainable Prosperity' (best-case), and an interim scenario 'Being Stuck' depicting a 'to the best of our knowledge' evolution. These scenarios show the extent to which a combination of Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal and Environmental drivers shape future health inequalities, providing information for European policy-makers to reflect upon whether and how to design robust policy solutions to tackle PH inequalities. The work presented owes its innovation to the use of a technological platform to interact with participants for idea-generation, together with the use of future-oriented evidence within a face-to-face environment to trigger discussion among a small strategic group to enrich the scenario narratives.