In this paper, we analyze the effect of M&A investment strategy on company performance, considering the level of diversification. Firstly, we built datasets that control environmental factors by using propensity score matching. Then we analyzed the matched data by multivariable regression analysis. The ratio of M&A investment to internal investment has a significant positive effect on Return on Invested Capital, or ROIC, when companies are highly diversified. When the level of diversification is low, the effect becomes negative. Therefore, M&A strategy is considered to be an effective diversification mode for highly diversified companies.

The aim of this study is to investigate a performance of collaborative researches between academia and the pharmaceutical industry. We conduct an empirical study with a dataset of patent applications and a directory service of academic researchers. The study measures the qualities of technology development (TD) and product development (PD), by using such multiple indexes as number of citations, patent grants, and foreign applications.
The empirical results suggest that TD quality has a positive effect on PD quality, while industry-university (IU) inventions have a lower TD quality than the industry-alone inventions. In certain disease areas, however, IU inventions receive more citations than the industry-alone inventions, meaning that IU inventions enjoy better TD quality. These findings also indicate that we can expect better achievement from collaborative researches by focusing on appropriate disease areas.

In this paper, we clarify the firm behavior related to the consensus-based standardization from the viewpoint of Knowledge-Based View (KBV). As a result of analyzing “AUTOSAR,” a standardized architecture of in-vehicle software, it is indicated that the firms which participate in the standard-setting consortium tend to implement the standard architecture, while the firms with more component knowledge in the standardization target area tend not to implement the standard architecture. Based on this finding, we classify the firm behavior on consensus-based standardization into the following four groups: promoters, free riders, watchers and inhabitants.

Recent social psychology researches reveal that power has various effects on human cognition and behavior. This paper aims at revealing how a sense of social power affects decision-making under uncertainty. Specifically, the following two elements have been predicted: (1) The individuals with high social power tend to be risk-loving; and (2) those with less power prefer moderate-risk alternatives, rather than being risk-aversive.
To verify these hypotheses, a psychological experiment was conducted in which 86 MBA students participated. To manipulate a sense of social power, participants were asked to recall and write their own personal events. They were also asked to make a choice on a vignette related to an investment decision by a private firm. The participants were told that these two tasks were independent studies with different research purposes. The results support the two aforementioned predictions. Some managerial implications from the findings are also discussed in this paper.

Adopting a multilevel approach, this paper aims to study mechanisms underlying employee attitudes through an investigation on the interactions of identity orientations and internal and external environmental dynamism, which have not been sufficiently explored so far. The results show that relational and collective identity orientations directly affect employee attitudes. Furthermore, the moderating effects of internal and external environmental dynamism on employee attitudes vary in directions for employees with individual, relational or collective identity orientations.