The purpose of this work is to understand and comprehend how performance measurement system is used to accomplish these two roles of influencing and facilitating decisions at the corporate and divisional level. The first paper is a literature review that analyses the use of performance measures to enhance innovation focusing on its decision facilitation role. The next two papers are empirical and focus on the decision influencing role of performance system through its link with incentive systems. I conclude that there is no universal measurement system, nor universal criteria that model the differences. For innovation activities the role of performance measurement is mainly facilitating decisions while for corporate and divisional performance are use to influence activities by aligning the executives with the shareholder interest, but the criteria recommended by the theory to develop a measurement system does not find empirical support in my dataset. Additionally, the companies with performance measurement system that promote cooperation instead of competition between executives seem to be the ones with higher corporate return. Comite: Advisor: Prof. Antonio Davila (IESE Business School) Committee: Prof. Fernando Peñalba (IESE Business School) Prof. Albert Fernandez Terricabras (IESE Business School) Prof. Miguel Canela (University of Barcelona) Prof. Jordi Carenys (EADA) Prof. Josep Maria Argilés i Bosch (University of Barcelona)

This study attempts to contribute to the understanding of strategic leadership as a process in a particular organisational setting—Business Schools, from a political perspective. Different reasons justify such interest: on one hand, three flaws in the theoretical and empirical literature on the leadership field—firstly, scholars’ failure to view strategic leadership as a process, embedded in an organisational and environmental context (House & Aditya, 1997; Boal & Hooijberg, 2001); secondly, scholars’ failure to link leadership and strategy (Hambrick, 1989; Chakravarthy et al., 2003). In this regard, the study intends to shed light on the synergies between the strategic leadership process and the strategy process. Finally, it intends to give an answer to the call for more studies on leadership from a political perspective (Ammeter et al., 2002).   On the other hand, Business Schools—knowledge intensive institutions, which fuelled by globalisation trends, they have shown an outstanding growth during the last decades. In an era where the knowledge revolution is gaining momentum with far-reaching strategic implications for organisations in both corporate and private sectors (Lorange, 2005), Business Schools need to make focus on a specific and clear direction that will enable their rapid response to the marketplace. It is only through strategic leadership that Business Schools will be able to succeed in setting key priorities and continue to develop value creation.

The research area covers two main Operation Management’s issues. The first is related with the role of Innovation within Service Firms, while the second faces the topic of firms delivering experience content as a major part of service firms’ offer. Regarding Inovation issues in Service Firms, the focus was centred on the study of New Service Development (NSD) processes with an Operations Management perspective. Empirical information about the use of NSD in service firms was collected, so as to understand whether and how standard methodologies for NSD are applied in firms where innovation is a strategic priority. For solving the problems presented by environmental challenges and heterogeneity, that distinguish the service sector, the focus was placed just on a particular type of service firm: on Experience Based Services, that aim to deliver services with high experience content as a central part of their outcome. The objective was to better understand how to help these firms to innovate in order to follow the trends of the called Experience Economy: to deliver value creating a memorable event, using services as stage and goods as props, and managing design elements in order to engage customers on an emotional, physical and intellectual level. Two sectors have been selected to achieve the research objectives: Services of the Theme Park Destination Industry: These type of firms deal with considerable level of operational and marketing complexity, and require very frequent investments in innovation, characteristics that make them interesting for studying innovation dynamics. Nine firms of the European Theme Park Industry have been studied, but after a first exploratory study three of them have been rejected, due to mismatch in some structural characteristics (too small organizational structure, economic variables depending excessively on price changes, together with instable price strategy, too different decisional factors, marked cultural disparity with the other firms of the sample). In addition, a group of providers, consultants, camera delegates and experts of this sector from Italy, UK, Germany, Belgium and Spain have been interviewed, so as to collect information from complementary sources. Services delivered by Commercial Centers: Increasing competition pushes these Centres to differentiate, and many see in frequent new service proposals a strategic response to this challenge. Six of the most important Italian Commercial Centres have been selected for constituting the sample, and studied in depth. Furthermore, two consultants and three of the four Italian Designers of Commercial Centres have also been interviewed. After consulting the main actors of the industry a deep familiarity with the sector was accomplished. Finally, problems related with methodologies for innovation, measuring and prediction of results, have been faced. A comprehensive framework was outlined, with the objective of offering a guide to help managers in the introduction and management of service innovations more effectively.

 The literature on organizational learning curves has established that plants improve their performance at very different rates of learning. Several empirical studies have identified some of the factors affecting productivity improvement with cumulative experience. Most of these empirical studies have focused on productivity improvement, with the plant as the unit of analysis. However, few empirical studies have focused on quality improvement learning curves, and to our knowledge, no study has analyzed disaggregated intra-plant quality problems as the unit of empirical analysis. This dissertation examines quality improvement within 17 automotive assembly plants within one company that set company-wide quality improvement objectives. Combining field observations with statistical analysis of panel data consisting of intra-plant micro-data on quality faults along the production process, we were able to deconstruct elements of the “learning black-box,” to understand how, and under what circumstances, different production areas within each plant were able to improve their quality performance. In this dissertation we arrived to the following three main conclusions: 1) The problem population within a complex manufacturing process under competitive pressure to improve quality performance (at an aggregated level) is characterized by a large number of problem categories and low rate of defect creation within each problem category. Under these circumstances, the diversity of the plants’ problem population tends to be high, and the higher it becomes, the more it hampers organizational learning. Organizations attempting to fuel their learning through root cause problem solving need to develop robust and relatively decentralized, low-cost root cause problem solving capabilities. 2) Management at the plants was usually biased toward framing the “organizational quality problem” in terms of the aggregated quality defect rate, rather than in terms of the quality problem categories underlying the overall defect rate. This framing of the “organizational quality problem” seems to have biased decisions on quality improvement resource allocation toward “containment countermeasures,” with few resources allocated to follow up containment with root cause problem solving. 3) Some “lean manufacturing system” techniques may improve quality fault feedback, increase organizational responsiveness to quality faults and provide the opportunity to begin root cause problem solving in the context of the problem. However, if the organizations do not develop decentralized root cause problem solving capabilities, those lean manufacturing techniques may result in a “containing organization,” instead of supporting a “learning organization.”

This work consists in three essays on boards of directors and directorship action. In the first paper our interest is directorship action, where multiple theories and different views create confusion about this issue. We first describe the development of corporate governance. Then we describe the different theoretical perspectives and the practices of boards of directors. Finally, we propose a classification of directorate’s roles, to shed some light onto the corporate governance “Tower of Babel”. In the second paper, we move to the study of Interlocking directorates. This work conceptualizes interlocking as a rational decision of the owner/controller of a company, as a dependent variable of board’s design, and applies the concepts in an emerging market business environment. We found significant associations between interlocking and firm characteristics such as ownership structure, industry and regulation, and we finally draw some conclusions on the direct application of corporate governance theories in developing countries. Finally in the third paper, we move to the study of the practices within the board of directors. There is still little understanding of the processes by which these new practices or models are adopted. Moreover, there is a growing consensus that the most important challenge is improving not only the more structural and visible attributes of the board but the internal dynamics that are much harder to monitor by a third party. This work seeks to bring some light into this discussion by analyzing the role of the environment in the adoption of specific board features. We propose a model that relates the different institutional pressures to the key observable (body) and non-observable (soul) attributes of a board of directors. A number of practical and research recommendations are derived from the model.

Coalition Building and reform: A three-party model with private information This paper presents a dynamic bargaining game in which three parties decide when to enact reform and the resulting policy level. The decision is enacted after a coalition of two is created. A source of delay in reform comes from the need to build a coalition with a party whose preferences are private information. The costly delay serves as a way to narrow the type distribution of the centrist party. There are two rounds of negotiations among the three different parties and the decision about public policy can be made in both rounds. A unique perfect Bayesian equilibrium is found and characterized. The impatience of the parties and the size of the losses have an ambiguous effect on the probability of delay –defined as reaching the second round. However, whenever the preferences of the moderate lean more to one extreme, delay is less likely. Also, higher polarization decreases the probability of delay. The probability of radical reform is equal to the probability of moderate reform when the distribution of types covers the entire political spectrum. In this case, when the status quo party is unable to profit from a delay, the expected payoffs of the parties at the extreme of the spectrum is the same. Otherwise, the probabilities and the gains of the more similar parties increase. The policy outcome –represented by a decision variable that can take any value over a continuum– depends on the distribution of preferences, impatience, losses stemming from delay, and how much of the status quo value can be extracted in the first round by those benefited by it. In a variation of the model in which the status quo provides benefits to some of the parties, then the ones that can extract more value from the status quo are able to demand more in equilibrium. The reformist typically loses from its discomfort with the present situation and the reform proposals become more moderate. The persistence of the current account surplus following an external sector crisis- This paper addresses empirically the duration of the period of current account surplus that follow a current account reversal. Analyzing quarterly data from 1980 it identifies fast current account reversals –defined as episodes of a reduction of more than one percentage point of GDP in the current account deficit in just one quarter– effected simultaneously with a period of high distress in the foreign exchange market. Using a Cox proportional hazards model in which the episodes are stratified by country it finds that GDP growth and the change in international reserves both have an effect on the hazard rate. The effect is also of non trivial magnitude: the hazard rate is reduced by 5% per each additional percentage point of GDP growth and by 9% per each additional percentage point in the reserves to GDP ratio. These surplus periods that follow crises episodes reflect the rebalancing of the external position of countries. The amount of the correction and the length of the period of surplus have not been addressed thoroughly in the literature. The results of this paper suggest that countries are more likely to end the surplus period when the growth falters and when the reserve accumulation weakens. This finding is in line with episodes of recovery with no outside credit -called by Calvo et al () Phoenix miracles- and presents the puzzle of why the regained access to external finance is not accompanied with stronger growth. Somewhat surprising is that it is not a surge in imports that drive the rebalancing to end. The political economy of current account reversals: An empirical study This paper addresses empirically whether institutions and politics play a role in the genesis of current account reversals. It also identifies which political factors matter and the importance of their influence. In a binary outcome model, it finds that (1) institutional checks –when interacting with the ratio of the net international reserves to GDP-, (2) election frauds and intimidation to candidates, and (3) executive control over the legislature, increase the probability of experiencing a reversal. It also shows how including political economy variables in the model helps to identify the impact of the economic variables. Moreover, the quantitative relevance of the political factors is high. Their impact is of the same order of magnitude than the current account balance and the level of external debt. Also, a policy recommendation can be extracted: when facing unsustainability of the current account, careful consideration must be given to events that could deteriorate the political climate. Policy measures that may improve some economic variables, but could trigger political violence can be very risky.

The bolstering effect, or how people strategically distort their memories and evaluations about past choices in order to justify them, is an important phenomenon for consumer behavior and decision making. Previous literature has shown the robustness of the effect and suggested its negative consequences for consumer choice, consumer memory and learning from past experiences. Surprisingly, little research has been done to disentangle the psychological processes underlying the effect. Prior research uncovered two sources of bolstering: choice-supportive evaluative distortions and choice-supportive memory distortions. Choice-supportive evaluative distortions refer to instances in which people alter the valuation of their preferred alternatives in order to bolster their choices. Choice-supportive memory distortions refer to instances in which people distort their attributions (i.e., beliefs) about the source (i.e., the chosen or the forgone product) of an attribute in order to bolster their choices. In this dissertation, we bring an integrative view of the bolstering effect. We present a parsimonious model to understand the psychological processes underlying the effect and how bolstering influences consumers’ preferences. Our results show that choice-supportive memory for past options is driven by biased information processing when consumers encode the information about competing products, such that they pay more attention to their preferred products; and by choice-supportive guessing at retrieval for not recognized negative features, such that consumers are more likely to guess that a negative feature belongs to the not chosen product than to the chosen one. Consistent with the view that bolstering is a strategic mechanism used by consumers to justify their choices, findings also showed that people bolster attribute importance ratings based on their bolstered beliefs about chosen and not chosen products only when they are highly confident about such beliefs. Finally, we find that both sources of bolstering (i.e., choice-supportive memory and choice-supportive evaluative distortions) play a role in shaping consumer preferences for products’ attributes. We conclude discussing theoretical and managerial implications and directions for future research suggested by our findings.

This dissertation develops and tests the first theoretical model to understand and explain the differential impact of clusters and industrial agglomerations on both entrepreneurship and the relationship between entrepreneurship and development at the regional level. Clusters and entrepreneurship face high visibility among academics and policymakers, given that similar historical conditions explain their resurgence, and similar potential impacts on employment and innovation highlight their socio-economic importance. Yet conceptual, theoretical, and methodological constraints prevent the study of their relationship and joint impact on regional development. This dissertation aims to make theoretical and practical contributions addressing these constraints. Defining entrepreneurship as the creation of new organizations and a cluster as a geographically proximate group of interconnected firms and institutions in related industries, this study creates an intrinsic paradigm in which clusters, creation of organizations, and regional development are distinguished from industrial agglomerations, entry, and industry growth, respectively. Based on this intrinsic paradigm and a socio-economic approach, it elaborates a theoretical model that hypotheses a synergy between the liability of newness faced by new firms and the provision of external economies, established relationships, legitimization processes, and complementary linkages by clusters. To empirically test the model, this study uses the 97 German Planning Regions as units of analysis, a multiple method and data approach to measure and identify clusters, and an OLS fixed-effect model to test the hypotheses. Clusters are measured using both quantitative secondary data and qualitative data from the existing literature on clusters and a survey of German regional experts in 31 regions. Entrepreneurship is measured using a four-year (2000-2003) pooled data taken from the German GEM dataset. The results show that clusters matter to entrepreneurship and to the relationship between entrepreneurship and regional development, but industrial agglomerations do not. Based on the theoretical elaboration and these results, this dissertation outlines theoretical contributions, practical implications for academics and policymakers, and directions for future research.

Su tesis es un estudio sobre la evolución y desarrollo de la Supply Chain de Empresas Italianas en el proceso de expansión en el Mercosur, y la influencia de las políticas corporativas y de las similitudes culturales con las filiales, en el logro de los resultados de la gestión en la Cadena de Valor del Negocio.

. economic welfare, the relationship between ownership structure and economic efficiency and the consequences of consolidation and banks’ geographic diversification on multimarket contact and market entry dynamics. Chapter 1 introduces the main issues discussed in the thesis and Chapter 2 describes the contextual industry framework and the post-deregulation developments that form the basis for the empirical analysis undertaken in the remaining chapters. Chapter 3 explores the effects of consolidation on market power, cost economies and economic welfare using bank-level data for Argentine retail stock banks over the period 1993-2000 to estimate a cost-function based model incorporating deposits- and loans-market pricing behaviour. The results provide evidence of market power exploitation in the market for loans but not in the market for deposits and also the presence of significant cost economies. The findings further show an increase in consumers’ surplus and banks’ profits over the period possibly associated with the exploitation of scale economies and technical change, which may have counteracted the effect of market power. Chapter 4 uses different approaches to measure cost and profit efficiency as well as scale economies and technical change for different ownership types in the banking industry over the 1993-2000 period. The results indicate that within the domestic-owned banking sector, stock banks seem to be more cost efficient than mutual and public-owned banks, that all banks operate under increasing returns to scale but that only stock banks benefited from technical progress. The findings also reveal that domestic-owned stock banks appear to be as efficient as foreign-owned banks in terms of both costs and profits. The results also indicate an increase in efficiency for all ownership types over the sample period, however, the most significant improvement appear to be that of mutual and public-owned banks. Chapter 5 examines the impact of multimarket contact on entry into new markets in the banking industry over the 1994-2000 period using survival analysis techniques. The results suggest that banks with large asset bases and greater experience are more likely to expand into new markets when the level of demographic variables such as population density, demand or market growth are favourable. The findings tentatively imply that multimarket contact reduces the likelihood of entry into new markets and that other factors such as market dominance and market concentration also have a negative impact on entry. Finally, the results reveal that strategic similarity among multimarket competitors possibly amplifies the negative effect of multimarket contact on the hazard of entry. Chapter 6 summarises the findings of the thesis and discusses avenues for future research.