Purpose – The presented research aims to explain, describe and analyze the process of dynamic strategy development in high growth firms. Accordingly the research seeks to investigate how dynamic strategies are used within high growth firms and how strategic learning affects the process. Design/methodology/approach – The authors presents a review of theoretically relevant studies of high growth related to strategy, and two original studies examining the impact of dynamic strategy on high growth. A theoretical framework for the study of dynamic strategy processes is developed. The study comprehends eight interviews divided over five high growth firms, where high growth is defined by the OECD (2008) standard. Findings – In the study, the researchers finds significant evidence for the active and deliberate use of dynamic strategy in the high growth firms of the study. The implication of strategic learning on the dynamic strategies is found to be substantial. The findings shows that dynamic strategy development are used to a large extent and considered vital for achieving growth within in the high growth firms of the study. Research/theoretical implications/limitations – The findings demonstrate that dynamic strategy development is actively used in high growth phases of the firms studied. This has implications on the extension of previous research, as it shows the actual use of dynamic strategy and further emphasizes the importance of strategic learning within this process. With the important limitation that the study is considered too small to generalize over a larger population, which implies that further research on the subject is needed. Managerial implications – The findings provide guidelines for managers of how to handle strategy development in high growth, however due to the previous limitation this is presented as the way the high growth firms within this study handles this development. The guidelines could be used by anyone in managerial positions, thus increasing the understanding of how high growth firms handle strategy.

Online auctions are arguably one of the most important and distinctly new applications of the internet. The predominant player in online auctions, eBay, has over 18.9 milllion users, and it was the host of over $5 billion worth of goods sold in the year 2000. Using methods from approximate dynamic programming and integer programming, we design algorithms for optimally bidding for a single item online auction, and simultaneous or overlapping multiple online auctions. We report computational evidence using data from eBay's web site from 1772 completed auctions for personal digital assistants and from 4208 completed auctions for stamp collections that show that (a) the optimal dynamic strategy outperforms simple but widely used static heuristic rules for a single auction, and (b) a new approach combining the value functions of single auctions found by dynamic programming using an integer programming framework produces high quality solutions fast and reliably. / Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA)

Organizational downsizing has been a popular business strategy widely used by enterprises all over the world since the 80¡¦s. Unfortunately, according to the findings of many investigations and researches, the results of downsizing are both positive and negative. Not only the improvements of firms¡¦ performance can¡¦t be ensured, it also brings the devastated consequences to employees. They eventually create chaos to the employees¡¦ families and to the entire society. In order to solve this important issue of the societies, this research reviewed the relative literatures across different research fields, such as organization change, strategy and strategic human resource management field. It found that firm¡¦s dynamic strategy capability and strategic human resource management practices, asserted by strategy and strategic human resource management field as the essential mechanisms for ensuring firm¡¦s competitive advantage, are the two key interventional variables between downsizing strategies and post-downsizing firm performance. Therefore, 110 MNCs and local Taiwanese companies were chosen as the samples to empirically prove the relationships among these variables. The insights and findings in this research may contribute to the theory development in organization change, strategy and strategic human resource management field and to the managerial practice as well.

Although the operations of enterprise includes four perspectives ¡V finance, customer, internal business processes, learning and growth, the content of each perspective can be further divided into many subjects according to the different characteristic of each enterprise or business field. Among each perspective, they all have causal relationship directly or indirectly. Very often, the other perspectives will be impacted when the strategy or performance of one perspective has been changed, and the final overall performance of enterprise will also be affected via this kind of relationship. Because the relationship among these perspectives is complicated and the problem of time delay is serious, it is difficult for a manager to make correct decisions in this complicated operation system. Once the wrong strategy is taken, the growth of enterprise will be postponed, or even worse, the enterprise will be out of business by the potential risk that caused by the wrong strategy. For instance, the magic development stories of Wonder Techs and People Express are both very typical examples. This research takes A Corporation as the object of case study. Through the collection and study of domestic and foreign relative literature, paper and theses, this case study will help the object company find out the opportunity and its orientation on the present and future market environment by STEP analyzing, inspect the company¡¦s competition and threat by Michael E. Porter¡¦s Five Basic Competitive Forces Analysis, and survey the strength, weakness, opportunity and threat of the company on the market by SWOT method. And finally, the causal relationship diagram of the enterprise operations can be drawn by system thinking methodology with the four-perspective framework of balanced scorecard from the overall view of enterprise. The analysis of this causal relationship feedback diagram will check the influence of the whole enterprise¡¦s operation system by all kinds of operation activities, and even, can set up the enterprise¡¦s Dynamic Strategy Map based on this study. The Dynamic Strategy Map will help the manager analyze the operation strategy through the angle of the whole system operations to avoid just emphasizing on the short-term performance and neglecting the necessary of the long-term fundamental measures required for running the enterprise forever. Moreover, it can also assist the manager to pursue the high leverage point from the causal feedback diagram to be the key performance indicator for improving the enterprise¡¦s operation quality and enhancing its competitiveness, and to allocate the limited resources on the most suitable places to create best benefit. This case study takes the present condition of A Corporation as the research scope. Restricted by company¡¦s specific characteristic and present operation condition, the findings of this research cannot be applied to the other enterprises directly. But by comparing with the similar operation activities of the other enterprise or group, the causal relationship feedback among these operation activities still have the same direction of trend with the object enterprise logically. Therefore, the analysis in qualitative aspect will still have its reference value for the other enterprise.

This paper considers dynamic optimal portfolio strategies of utility maximizing investors in the presence of risk constraints. In particular, we investigate the optimization problem with an additional constraint modeling bounded shortfall risk measured by Value at Risk or Expected Loss. Using the Black-Scholes model of a complete financial market and applying martingale methods we give analytic expressions for the optimal terminal wealth and the optimal portfolio strategies and present some numerical results.

The paper investigates dynamic optimal portfolio strategies of utility maximizing portfolio managers in the presence of risk constraints. Especially we consider the risk, that the terminal wealth of the portfolio falls short of a certain benchmark level which is proportional to the stock price. This risk is measured by the Expected Utility Loss. We generalize the findings our previous papers to this case. Using the Black-Scholes model of a complete financial market and applying martingale methods, analytic expressions for the optimal terminal wealth and the optimal portfolio strategies are given. Numerical examples illustrate the analytic results.

This paper considers dynamic optimal portfolio strategies of utility maximizing investors in the presence of risk constraints. In particular, we investigate the optimization problem with an additional constraint modeling bounded shortfall risk measured by Value at Risk or Expected Loss. Using the Black-Scholes model of a complete financial market and applying martingale methods we give analytic expressions for the optimal terminal wealth and the optimal portfolio strategies and present some numerical results.

The paper investigates dynamic optimal portfolio strategies of utility maximizing portfolio managers in the presence of risk constraints. Especially we consider the risk, that the terminal wealth of the portfolio falls short of a certain benchmark level which is proportional to the stock price. This risk is measured by the Expected Utility Loss. We generalize the findings our previous papers to this case. Using the Black-Scholes model of a complete financial market and applying martingale methods, analytic expressions for the optimal terminal wealth and the optimal portfolio strategies are given. Numerical examples illustrate the analytic results.