Over the past decade, new approaches to innovation management have become prime drivers of various industries. Considering product quality, product innovation and service innovation in the automotive industry, this study tries to adopt game theory and real option models to analyze competing and consuming behavior among high- quality firms, low-quality firms and rational consumers. With an argument that firms will undertake innovation activities if they produce high-quality products, this study wishes to demonstrate that high quality products will induce both product and service innovations simultaneously. To achieve the research objective, this study divides innovation into product and service innovations, and then, discusses quality¡¦s impacts on product and service innovations separately. Game theory models concerning quality and product innovation indicate that the fixed cost of innovation, the barrier to a firm¡¦s engaging in innovative activities, is overcome only if a firm produces high-quality products. Moreover, another dynamic game also shows the strong relationship between product quality and service innovation. Applying real options models to evaluate service innovations in the automotive industry, including half-price purchase warranty and extended test drive service, also verify that effective service innovations might increase consumer willing-to-buy and enlarge the sales and profits for the innovative firms. Besides quality, this study also reveals that consumer preference to new product or service is another key successful factor for business innovation management. Successful innovation management depends on continuously improving product and service, concerning the status of expected market, and understanding the needs of potential consumers. Even though a general consensus on product and service innovations among different industries remains lacking, this study strongly supports the argument that firms producing high-quality products will be active in innovations. From the broader perspective of process management, total quality management, which increases product quality, undoubtedly supports innovation management.

The acquisition and creation of technological knowledge could be treated as a means to strengthen the innovative capabilities of SMEs. Knowledge management, therefore, plays an important role in company¡¦s performance and innovation. But knowledge transfer and sharing are the most difficult issues when implementing knowledge management. Many companies often encounter setbacks due to neglecting human nature and knowledge trading mechanism within organizations while implementing knowledge sharing. This paper is aimed to propose an integrated knowledge sharing and transfer model by applying network embeddedness, game theory, co-opetition and agent contest to solve the employee¡¦s dilemma and free-rider behavioral problems. This paper exploits the knowledge network to transfer knowledge across organizations, and discusses game theory in depth for knowledge sharing within organization. Based on knowledge sharing mechanism, we categorize high-tech firms into four types of knowledge sharing such as job guarantee, individual performance, team performance, and team learning. Empirical results showed that the type of team learning firm with agent contest and reward systems designed for both team and individual could build a co-opetitive knowledge-sharing environment. Based on knowledge transfer mechanism, the results show that IT, organizational culture, reward system and governmental policies have positive effects on enhancing knowledge network linkages. Steady and robust network linkages can benefit knowledge transfer and learning. The major sources of obtaining external knowledge are frorm academic research and international knowledge network for Taiwanese SMES. This paper suggest that overemphasize on domestic network and ignore the academic research and international networks may impede SMEs to acquire heterogeneous knowledge and innovation. The reward system and governmental policies have positive effects on corporate innovation. High levels of knowledge sharing and knowledge transfer capabilities are the major factors of improving innovation and organizational performance.

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Abstract Information asymmetry in the financial market, especially in the financial organization, usually generates more serious consequences than those in the commodity market. How to reduce or remove the asymmetric information in a bank¡¦s credit rationing has been a challenge for a commercial bank. On the basis of the models developed by Stiglitz and Weiss (1981) and Barro (1986), this study attempts to analyze the issues, faced by a typical commercial bank, of adverse selection, moral hazard, and agent¡¦s reputation, and to simulate the results of such issues in a game-theoretic approach. The study has reached the following conclusions: 1. With regard to the adverse selection issue, this study concludes that if a bank wants to solve the problem of adverse selection on debit and credit, the decision must be made upon the objective evaluation that considers not only the reality and rational assumption but also the external signaling and screening information to assess the enterprise and its investment plan. 2. Regarding the moral hazard issue, this study concludes that if a bank has an effective incentive, the enterprise will automatically select the most beneficial items to the bank on debit. This mechanism reduces the bank¡¦s risk. On the other hand, if a penalty is set forth, then it will be more likely to prevent the moral hazard problem to occur. 3. By the moral hazard model, this study concludes that if an enterprise needs to enter the market to collect funds, it would imply that the game will continue infinitely. Owing to the benefits from reputation is increasing as the number of stage of the game increases, an enterprise will have a strong incentive to build his non-cheating reputation based on a long term consideration. Keywords: Asymmetric Information, Adverse Selection, Moral Hazard, Reputation, Game Theory.

Due to the important role of advertising in marketing practice, its effects have been the research focus since 1920. Among relevant research fields, the issue that has been paid close attention in the economic field is its impact on consumer welfare. Issues focused in the marketing field are its impacts on consumer perception, feelings, attitudes, behaviors, and competitive interaction among firms. However, in these two fields the integrated channel is the focused scenario where the advertising works in vast majority of literatures. Only very few of them investigate effects of advertising in other channel structure context. However, in practice indirect channels are very common. There may be interactions between advertising and channel structure due to the existence of the independent retailer and the specific degree of competition. Since advertising is an important strategic instrument, it deserves to pay more efforts to relate the advertising and channel structure. This dissertation use game-theoretical approach to target three issues relating the advertising and channel structure. The first issue focuses on discussing the differential of choices between informative and persuasive advertising across three channel structure contexts for two competing manufacturers. This dissertation argues that the use of advertising strategy crucially depends on the channel structure. Specifically, it shows that when manufacturers delegate the sales responsibility to dedicated retailers, informative advertising may yield a higher profit for the manufacturers due to its pro-competitive nature. On the contrary, persuasive advertising should be used more extensively when either the manufacturers sell directly to the end consumers or sell through a common retailer. This therefore provides a theoretical foundation for why both advertising strategies can emerge as optimal responses from the manufacturers' viewpoints and subsequently provides handy guidelines for when these advertising strategies should be used in various scenarios. The second issue is about the choice between direct and indirect channels. The introduction of independent retailers has long been recognized as a buffer that alleviates the price competition between channels. If the sales responsibility is delegated to the retailers, the retail prices are driven upwards, thereby allowing the manufacturers to avoid the head-to-head competition. In this dissertation, we argue that this effect may be counter-balanced if the manufacturers are privileged with sufficiently large loyal segments. It shows that, selling directly to the consumers (through the direct channel) may be more beneficial for the manufacturers than delegation with the presence of competition, because the low prices due to the intense competition may help the manufacturers to extract more revenue from loyal consumers. Furthermore, if the manufacturers compete along dimensions that differ from prices, they may be further in favor of the direct channel and less concerned about price competition. In particular, this dissertation shows that if the manufacturers also compete on their advertising strategies, delegating to the retailers may force them to invest on the wasteful advertising, which could be prevented had the manufacturers sold the products themselves. The third issue discusses the combativeness of the persuasive advertising in the common retailer channel. The existing marketing literature suggests that persuasive advertising elicits counteractions from competing manufacturers and consequently leads to wasteful cancellation of the advertising effects. However, recent empirical studies document a surprisingly negative result against this conventional wisdom. To provide a theoretical ground for this empirical puzzle, we propose a novel way to model the advertising effect on the consumers' preference that incorporates two critical driving forces: on one hand, advertising shifts the consumers' preferences towards the advertised product (the "absolute effect"); on the other hand, it also makes the rival product a less desirable substitute from the consumers' viewpoints (the "relative effect"). Through our alternative interpretation of persuasive advertising, we show that channel conflict can be alleviated if a manufacturer adopts persuasive advertising that wisely "targets" appropriate consumers. In stark contrast with the established work, this advertising strategy may give rise to profit increases for every channel member, including the rival manufacturer and the retailer that were previously believed to always counteract/ resist to such persuasive advertising. We further identify the detailed operating regimes within which such a manufacturer-initiated persuasive advertising strategy is no more harmful for other channel members.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Fakultät für Wirtschaftswissenschaften der Universität Fridericiana zu Karlsruhe, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [171]-183).

Thesis (Honors)--College of William and Mary, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf xxxi). Also available via the World Wide Web.

Thesis (B.S.)--Haverford College, Dept. of Mathematics, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.