Boualem Djehiche and Peter Helgesson
We aim to generalize the continuous-time principal–agent problem to incorporate time-inconsistent utility functions, such as those of mean-variance type, which are prevalent in…
Abstract
Purpose
We aim to generalize the continuous-time principal–agent problem to incorporate time-inconsistent utility functions, such as those of mean-variance type, which are prevalent in risk management and finance.
Design/methodology/approach
We use recent advancements of the Pontryagin maximum principle for forward-backward stochastic differential equations (FBSDEs) to develop a method for characterizing optimal contracts in such models. This approach addresses the challenges posed by the non-applicability of the classical Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman equation due to time inconsistency.
Findings
We provide a framework for deriving optimal contracts in the principal–agent problem under hidden action, specifically tailored for time-inconsistent utilities. This is illustrated through a fully solved example in the linear-quadratic setting, demonstrating the practical applicability of the method.
Originality/value
The work contributes to the existing literature by presenting a novel mathematical approach to a class of continuous time principal–agent problems, particularly under hidden action with time-inconsistent utilities, a scenario not previously addressed. The results offer potential insights for both theoretical development and practical applications in finance and economics.
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Tiziana Russo-Spena, Cristina Mele and Jaqueline Pels
This paper aims to focus on how the use of new technologies disrupts markets. To date, marketing literature has lacked studies investigating the link between market practices and…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to focus on how the use of new technologies disrupts markets. To date, marketing literature has lacked studies investigating the link between market practices and new technologies. The study adopts the blockchain technology (BcT) context to elicit novel technology-enhanced market practices.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors adopt a qualitative multimethod research design to engage in interpretative theorizing. They investigated 77 companies and used the Gioia method for the data coding and analysis.
Findings
The study of the adoption of blockchain prompts three technology-enhanced market practices. The latter offers new ways of resourcing by removing constraints and expanding actors’ network and knowledge to integrate resources; sensemaking by expressing new language and assigning novel meaning to represent markets; and legitimizing, by structuring new rules and trusting new mechanisms to institutionalize markets.
Research limitations/implications
The technology-enhanced market practices are distinct from extant market practices as well as related, thus, enriching and complementing them. Therefore, this work expands the understanding of the mechanisms of how markets work.
Originality/value
This study is the first, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, to focus on how BcT features affect market practices. BcT market practices entail how actors perform, share and interpret symbols and objects and set rules for how markets should work.
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Ida Schrøder, Emilia Cederberg and Amalie M. Hauge
This paper investigates how different and sometimes conflicting approaches to performance evaluations are hybridized in the day-to-day activities of a disciplined hybrid…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper investigates how different and sometimes conflicting approaches to performance evaluations are hybridized in the day-to-day activities of a disciplined hybrid organization–i.e. a public child protection agency at the intersection between the market and the public sector.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper is based on a one-year ethnography of how employees achieve to qualify their work as “good work” in situations with several and sometimes conflicting ideals of what “good work” is. Fieldwork material was collected by following casework activities across organizational boundaries. By combining accounting literature on hybridization with literature on practices of valuation, the paper develops a novel theoretical framework which allows for analyses of the various practices of valuation, when and where they clash and how they persist over time in everyday work.
Findings
Throughout the study, four distinct registers of valuation were identified: feeling, theorizing, formalizing and costing. To denote the meticulous efforts of pursuing good work in all four registers of valuation, the authors propose the notion of sequencing. Sequencing is an ongoing process of moving conflicting registers away from each other and bringing them back together again. Correspondingly, at the operational level of a hybrid organization, temporary compartmentalization is a means of avoiding clashes, and in doing so, making it possible for different and sometimes conflicting ways of achieving good results to continuously hybridize and persist together.
Research limitations/implications
The single-case approach allows for analytical depth, but limits the findings to theoretical, rather than empirical, generalizability. The framework the authors propose, however, is well-suited for mobilization and potential elaboration in further empirical contexts.
Originality/value
The paper provides a novel theoretical framework as well as rich empirical material from the highly political field of child protection work, which has seldomly been studied within accounting research.
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Hans Kjellberg, Johan Hagberg and Franck Cochoy
This chapter explores the concept of market infrastructure, which is tentatively defined as a materially heterogeneous arrangement that silently supports and structures the…
Abstract
This chapter explores the concept of market infrastructure, which is tentatively defined as a materially heterogeneous arrangement that silently supports and structures the consummation of market exchanges. Specifically, the authors investigate the enactment of market infrastructure in the US grocery retail sector by exploring how barcodes and related devices contributed to modify its market infrastructure during the period 1967–2010. Combining this empirical case with insights from previous research, the authors propose that market infrastructures are relational, available for use, modular, actively maintained, interdependent, commercial, emergent and political. The authors argue that this conception of market infrastructure provides a powerful tool for unveiling the complex agencements and engineering efforts that underpin seemingly superficial, individual and isolated market exchanges.
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Linda D. Peters, Suvi Nenonen, Francesco Polese, Pennie Frow and Adrian Payne
This paper aims to develop a conceptual framework based on the identification and examination of the mechanisms (termed “viability mechanisms”) under which market-shaping…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to develop a conceptual framework based on the identification and examination of the mechanisms (termed “viability mechanisms”) under which market-shaping activities yield the emergence of a viable market: one able to adapt to the changing environment over time while remaining stable enough for actors to benefit from it.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper uses extant literature to build a conceptual framework identifying viability mechanisms for market shaping and a case illustration examining how a viable market for Finnish timber high-rise buildings was created. The case exemplifies how the identified viability mechanisms are practically manifested through proactive market shaping.
Findings
The proposed conceptual framework incorporates four viability mechanisms identified in the extant literature: presence of dissipative structures, consonance among system elements, resonance among system elements and reinforcing and balancing feedback loops. It illustrates how these mechanisms are manifested in a contemporary case setting resulting in a viable market.
Practical implications
First, firms and other market-shaping organizations should look for, or themselves foster, viability mechanisms within their market-shaping strategies. Second, as failure rates in innovation are extremely high, managers should seek to identify or influence viability mechanisms to avoid premature commercialization of innovations.
Originality/value
This study identifies how these viability mechanisms permit markets to emerge and survive over time. Further, it illuminates the workings of the non-linear relationship between actor-level market-shaping actions and system-level market changes. As such, it provides a “missing link” to the scholarly and managerial discourse on market-shaping strategies. Unlike much extant market-shaping literature, this study draws substantively on the systems literature.
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This chapter seeks to place the Paris agreement on anthropogenic greenhouse gases (COP21) in a wider picture on how the global solar photovoltaic (PV) market has been created and…
Abstract
Purpose
This chapter seeks to place the Paris agreement on anthropogenic greenhouse gases (COP21) in a wider picture on how the global solar photovoltaic (PV) market has been created and shaped over decades. The chapter discusses the role of solar PV actors, as well as other actors in the market-shaping process. The aim is to show how the COP21 can be interpreted in a wider historical perspective.
Design/methodology/approach
The chapter builds on expert interviews conducted after the COP21, as well as secondary data on historical studies on evolution of solar energy markets in various countries.
Findings
Although scientists and entrepreneurs have been important in creating and shaping the global solar PV market, it is noted that other actors have also had an influence on the market development. Particularly, politicians are seen as playing a crucial role through legislation and funding. Unfortunately for the solar PV market, support has fluctuated over time. The COP21 provides a clear pathway for positive support, and it is expected to bind governments for pro-solar politics even during low prices of fossil fuels and economic downturn.
Practical implications
The chapter provides an overview of what has happened in the history of global solar PV market. It gives reasoning as to why the COP21 is important in securing support for the solar PV market. Thus, it can provide reasoning as to why the COP21 can make a difference.
Originality/value
This is the first academic study that portrays the COP21 against historical evolution of the global solar PV market.
Kaisa Koskela-Huotari and Stephen L Vargo
– The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of institutions and institutional complexity in the process through which resources-in-context get their “resourceness.”
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of institutions and institutional complexity in the process through which resources-in-context get their “resourceness.”
Design/methodology/approach
To shed light on the process of potential resources gaining their “resourceness,” the authors draw from two streams of literature: the service ecosystems perspective and institutional theory.
Findings
The authors combine the process of resources “becoming” with the concept of institutions and conceptualize institutional arrangements, and the unique sets of practices, symbols and organizing principles they carry, as the sense-making frames of the “resourceness” of potential resources. In service ecosystems, numerous partially conflicting institutional arrangements co-exit and provide actors with alternative frames of sense-making and action, enabling the emergence of new instances of “resourceness”.
Research limitations/implications
The paper suggests that “resourceness” is inseparable from the complex institutional context in which it arises. This conceptualization reveals the need for more holistic, systemic and multidisciplinary perspectives on understanding the implications of the process of resources “becoming” on value co creation, innovation and market formation.
Practical implications
As the “resourceness” of potential resources arises due to the influence of institutions, managers need a more profound understanding of the complimentary and inhibiting institutional arrangements and the related practices, symbols and organizing principles that comprise the multidimensional context in which they operate.
Originality/value
This paper is one of the first to focus specifically on the process of resources “becoming,” using a systemic and institutional perspective to grasp the complexity of the phenomenon.
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Suvi Nenonen, Johanna Gummerus and Alexey Sklyar
Service-dominant logic acknowledges that actors can influence how service ecosystems evolve through institutional work, but empirical research is only nascent. This paper advances…
Abstract
Purpose
Service-dominant logic acknowledges that actors can influence how service ecosystems evolve through institutional work, but empirical research is only nascent. This paper advances understanding of ecosystem change by proposing that dynamic capabilities are a special type of operant resources enabling actors to conduct institutional work. Consequently, the purpose of this paper is to explore which dynamic capabilities are associated with proactively influencing service ecosystems.
Design/methodology/approach
Drawing on service-dominant logic, institutional work and dynamic capabilities, this exploratory study assumes an actor-centric perspective and proposes a conceptual model with a hierarchy of dynamic capabilities as the antecedents for successfully influencing service ecosystems. The research model was tested with survey data using partial least squares structural equation modeling.
Findings
Among the dynamic capabilities studied, “visioning” and “influencing explicit institutions” directly affect “success in influencing service ecosystems,” whereas “timing” does so indirectly through “influencing explicit institutions.” The other dynamic capabilities studied have no significant effect on “success in influencing service ecosystems.” “Success in influencing service ecosystems” positively affects the “increased service ecosystem size and efficiency.”
Practical implications
In addition to reactively positioning and competing at the marketplace, firms can choose to proactively influence their service ecosystems’ size and efficiency. Firms aiming to influence service ecosystems should particularly develop dynamic capabilities related to visioning, timing and influencing explicit institutions.
Originality/value
This research is the first service-dominant logic investigation of the linkage between the actors’ dynamic capabilities and their ability to influence service ecosystems.
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Roderick J. Brodie and Linda D. Peters
For service research to develop as an applied social science there is the need to refresh the process of theorizing so it focuses not only on increasing new academic knowledge but…
Abstract
Purpose
For service research to develop as an applied social science there is the need to refresh the process of theorizing so it focuses not only on increasing new academic knowledge but also on knowledge that is managerially relevant. This paper aims to provide guidelines to achieve this.
Design/methodology/approach
A theorizing process that integrates general theoretic perspectives and contextual research to develop midrange theory is developed. The process is based on the philosophical foundations of pragmatism and abductive reasoning, which has the origins in the 1950s when the management sciences were being established.
Findings
A recent research stream that develops midrange theory about customer and actor engagement is used to illustrate the theorizing process.
Practical implications
Practicing managers, customers and other stakeholders in a service system use theory, so there is a need to focus on how theory is used in specific service contexts and how this research leads to academic knowledge that is managerially relevant. Thus, as applied social science, service research needs to explicitly focus on bridging the theory–praxis gap with midrange theory by incorporating a general theoretic perspective and contextual research.
Originality/value
The contribution comes from providing a broader framework to guide the theorizing process that integrates general theoretic perspectives and applied research to develop midrange theory. While general theories operate at the most abstract level of conceptualization, midrange theories are context-specific and applied theory (theories-in-use) is embedded in empirical research.
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Alexandre Schwob, Ronan de Kervenoael, Valentina Kirova and Tan Vo-Thanh
Recent substantial developments of consumer-to-consumer social commerce platforms (C2C-SCPs) emboldened consumers/users to be involved as sellers. Considering C2C social networks…
Abstract
Purpose
Recent substantial developments of consumer-to-consumer social commerce platforms (C2C-SCPs) emboldened consumers/users to be involved as sellers. Considering C2C social networks that privilege local reach, this paper aim to explore how the practice-based view informs non-professional sellers' involvement.
Design/methodology/approach
Underpinned by data from 29 semi-structured interviews with non-professional sellers on Kaskus, one of the largest local Indonesian C2C-SCPs, the study reveals the emergence of a novel structural practice that we call casual selling.
Findings
The findings show that casual selling allows non-professional sellers' involvement in C2C-SCPs through three broad categories of practices: priming oneself, producing commercial operations and valuing others. Within these three categories, non-professional sellers are found to generate both personal and collective involvement along nine situated market practices.
Research limitations/implications
This paper adds to previous research by introducing the practice-based view to social commerce literature. In doing so, it deals with the under-investigated seller's perspective and activities that prevail in C2C-SCPs.
Originality/value
In C2C-SCPs, casual selling constitutes a distinct mode of involvement in social commerce in which established professional selling standards are suspended. As a structural practice, it entices non-professional sellers to consider a wider variety of situations in which they are in dialogue with other individuals (buyers and sellers) to shape s-commerce potential. In doing so, C2C-SCP users draw on a dynamic intertwining between digital technology and the socio-cultural environment surrounding s-commerce.