Value Creation, Value Appropriation, Industry Competitiveness: A Cross Country Analysi

This dissertation investigates the factors that affect the decision of resources allocation between value creation and value appropriation strategies at the industry level. To be specific, it sought to understand the factors in determining the extent to which an industry emphasizes one over the other. More importantly, this dissertation offers an understanding on how such strategic emphasis affects the industry performance under different situations. This can allow us to understand more about the global competitiveness of industry sectors by integrating both value related strategies. Although the trade-off strategic implications have been briefly investigated, research has not offered sufficient insights at the industry level which involves more complicated collaborative and competitive relationships between firms. As such, it can provide another perspective to explain why certain industries in some particular countries perform better than others. Analysis of a comprehensive panel dataset of 9,169 observations covering 19 industries in 47 countries over 29 years from 1987 to 2015 suggests that the perceived cost to conduct collaborative value related strategies would affect the industry strategic emphasis between value creation and value appropriation strategies. On the other hand, this thesis would also investigate how the perceived market opportunities to conduct a particular collaborative value related strategy would affect such industry strategic emphasis. In particular, this thesis theorizes conditions that would motivate firms in an industry to put more strategic emphasis at any end. In turn, this study also identifies collaborative value creation strategies are better-off when the actual transaction cost of conducting collaborative value creation strategies is lower. Alternatively, collaborative value appropriation strategies derive better outcome when the relative bargaining power of the industry is high and the actual cost of building capabilities for conducting collaborative value-extracting activities is low. The relationship between the associated collaborative value related strategies and the industry performance is moderated by few moderators. In particular, the cultural value in terms of the acceptance of market and political power abuse observed in the origin of firms, the distribution of firms in terms of value chain position and the industry's relative bargaining power are found to moderate the relationship between an industry's choice of strategic emphasis between these two value-based strategies and its industry performance. This study not only advances the value creation-appropriation strategy to the industry level, but also highlights the need to incorporate more high level industry and country variables to develop an even more comprehensive understanding in this area. By incorporating the factors affecting the strategic emphasis as well as the moderating conditions and outcome of collaborative value related strategies at the industry level, this dissertation provides a theoretical framework that can help explain the similarities and differences in terms of industry compositeness observed around the globe.