Strategic Responses to Institutional Voids (Rationalization, Aggression, and Defensiveness): Institutional Complementarity and Why the Home Country Matters

We seek to understand how the strategic responses of firms to institutional voids are affected by their home countries’ institutional contexts. It adopts an exploratory, multiple case studies approach examining the responses of advanced and emerging multinational enterprises, and local firms in two African countries which are characterized by such voids, namely the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zimbabwe. Our research suggests that firms’ strategic responses to institutional voids in emerging or developing markets are affected by the home country’s institutional environment and firms’ experiences and advantages arising from that home context. Firms adopt strategic responses which reflect their respective advantages and this results in diverse approaches based on the interplay between capitalizing upon internal resources and institutional know-how. For some firms this may result in a defensive strategic response, whilst for others opportunistic and aggressive agility, or rationalization and reconciliation may manifest. We demonstrate differences between advanced and emerging multinational enterprises and domestic firms covering the spectrum between institutional outsiders and insiders. We emphasize the contextual nature of these strategic responses and argue that this requires integrating both a resource and institution-based analysis of firms’ underlying advantages and how they are able to leverage off these advantages in institutionally voided environments. Practical implications arise for doing business in emerging and developing markets.

Learning to Litigate: the Relationship Between Past Litigation Experience and Litigation Outcomes in the Chinese Intellectual Property System

Intellectual property (IP) and the protection of IP is of increasing importance to firms’ competitiveness, and firms must be able to defend their IP when it is infringed upon. In most markets, IP and the defense of IP is a stringent legal process, but in developing markets and markets undergoing changes, this is not necessarily so. The Chinese IP system and protection is comparatively new, and the system is still under development. In this study, we analyze the relationship between firms’ previous litigation experience and litigation outcomes using a sample of 10,211 court cases tried in China between 2001 and 2009. We find that despite litigation being a rare event for most firms, plaintiffs’ prior litigation experience and especially prior successful litigation experience or experience with specific case types is related to their likelihood of a positive outcome. However, plaintiffs’ successful application of prior litigation experience is contingent on the type of litigation case.

MARKETING: NEW APPROACHES TO TEACHING

Difficulties and problems of business education are theoretically considered in the article. The advantages of traditional Western business education and the problems of young managers that are not ready for business activity in the environment of developing markets are highlighted. The author has examined the conditions of business education in Russia, its content and approaches to teaching.

The Approach of Major Players in Retail in Expanding Their Operations into Developing Markets – Taking Walmart as an Example

This research investigates the expansion behavior of international (giant) retailers, with a specific focus on the determinants of the entry mode choice in emerging markets based on the performance of Walmart in its venture into less developed markets. This research investigates the approach in which major players in retail are expanding their operations into other developing markets, specifically focusing on how the entry mode decisions of giant retailers moderate the risks and difficulties in making business in emerging countries. The objective of this study is to analyze and evaluate the potential causes and antecedents of large merchants’ entry mode (EM) choices by assessing Walmart’s business performance in less advanced nations in recent years.

Empirical Evidences on the Interconnectedness between Sampling and Asset Returns’ Distributions

The aim of this work was to test how returns are distributed across multiple asset classes, markets and sampling frequency. We examine returns of swaps, equity and bond indices as well as the rescaling by their volatilities over different horizons (since inception to Q2-2020). Contrarily to some literature, we find that the realized distributions of logarithmic returns, scaled or not by the standard deviations, are skewed and that they may be better fitted by t-skew distributions. Our finding holds true across asset classes, maturity and developed and developing markets. This may explain why models based on dynamic conditional score (DCS) have superior performance when the underlying distribution belongs to the t-skew family. Finally, we show how sampling and distribution of returns are strictly connected. This is of great importance as, for example, extrapolating yearly scenarios from daily performances may prove not to be correct.

Viability of Commodity Exchange in Bhutan: Assessing Challenges and Benefits

This paper investigates the viability of commodity exchange in Bhutan and identifies its essential pre-conditions. Challenges and benefits are enumerated using exploratory and qualitative research with open-ended and semi-structured interviews. Bhutan represents an emerging South-Central Asian country successful emergence of which into the global arena in the last fifty years could serve as an example for other small and developing markets. The results of this study put challenges for farmers in two categories, before and after harvest. All post-harvest challenges can be addressed through an established commodity exchange and its three pre-conditions are essential to the development of commodity exchange in Bhutan.