| Michael porter put forward the concept of value chain in Competitive Advantage in 1985. It refers to the chain structure consisting of enterprise internal value-added activities. In the last three decades, economic globalization and information technology contributed to the uncertainty of external environment of business. Market work-dividing deepened. Enterprises have to focus on their core competence. The relationships between enterprises are more complicated and their interdependence increase. Diversification, complication and externalization of value-creating activities highlight the strategic significance of external value relations. The traditional thought and theories of value chain of research has been developed. Some scholars put forwarded the concept of value system, which is usually seen as the extension and cross of value chains. Also, some scholars put forwarded the concept of value net, which is the flexible organization consisting of enterprises connecting to each other. Both of the thoughts evolves from value chain theory, however their main perspectives are different. Enterprise’s decision on external value activities often concerns its external relations. It has become an interesting question why and how an enterprise establishes and maintains connections with others in value-added system. Social network embedded mechanism may provide a useful perspective to this problem.Overall, Chapter 3&4 redefine the concept of value-added system, establish a research framework of value-added system and expounded a series of basic views.In Chapter 5, it analyses of the mechanism of value creating mechanism based on network embedded theory. Based on it, Chapter 6&7&8 studies the influence of network embeddedness mechanism on enterprise policy and decision making, respectively from aspect of collective punishment mechanism, relational embeddedness and structural embeddedness. The former one has influence on enterprises’decision of honest behavior. The latter two have influence on the establishing of value relationships. Specifically, the main content, conclusions and achievements of this thesis are as follows.Chapter 3&4 proposed a series of basic views about enterprise value-added system. Based on existing ideas and theories, Chapter 3 defines and analyzes the connotation of enterprise value and then establishes its basic implementation path and mode.And then a definition of enterprise value-added system by this thesis is put forward. It has the characteristics of duality from aspects of its functional expression and physical expression. Two structure representation methods from different perspectives are described and compared. And then this thesis points out that physical structure and functional structure reveal each other and can be converted mutually through some technique. They common form a complete value system. Further, a basic research framework of enterprise value-added system is proposed. Chapter4 discussed three essential elements of the structure of enterprise value-added system, including the agent, value activities and value relations. Based on it, the physical structure and functional structure are analyzed, as well as the overall structure. And then, this thesis discussed the basic function of value system and synergistic effect of collaboration. Realizing coordinated effect is an important way to improve the system function. In this thesis, recognized common value is seen as a controllable order parameter while common value is an objective order parameter.Chapter 5 analyzed value creating mechanism in enterprise value-added system based on the perspective and theory of network embeddedness. Firstly, after putting forward the third kind of structure about value system, social structure, network embeddedness pattern in value system is analyzed. Social structure and physical structure are different and meanwhile they influence each other. The latter is the subset of the former in content. The former is the object enterprises embed. Through the discussion about social structure, two levels and two dimensions of network embeddedness mechanism in value-added system are analyzed. Therefore, this thesis presents the idea that the value created by enterprise value-added system comprises two aspects, the pure economic value and the derived embedding in the social structure. The latter can be converted to the former. In this thesis, generalized network rent is regarded as the extra profit acquired from relational embeddedness and structural embeddedness. Through coupling it with dynamic capability and inter-organizational resources, enterprise gains the actual network rent. By this, a formation path of network rent is proposed. At last, the influencing factors of this kind of economic rent and its quantitative laws are discussed and summarized based on theoretical perspectives and existing empirical researches.According to Chapter 5, network embeddedness in enterprise value-added mechanism results in reputation effect and collective punishment mechanism broadly. The mechanism is born within the system and affects the behavior and policy decision of the enterprises. In Chapter 6,three game models are proposed to analyze the influence of collective punishment mechanism on enterprises decision of honest behavior. The collective punishment mechanism is introduced under different situations, including deceit in equal relations of cooperation and in principal-agent relationship and free riding behavior in multilateral cooperation. The models show that, under the condition of appropriate individual rationality, collective punishment mechanism will constrain and even avoid opportunism behaviors such as deceit and free riding behaviors in a cost-effective way. At least it makes the game easier to achieve pareto equilibrium.According to Chapter 5, relational embeddedness generates additional value. Chapter 7 studies how relational embeddedness may affect the establishing of value relationship between enterprises focusing on binary relation between enterprises. Firstly, it defines the quantitative expression of relational rent and builds the revenue function. Then the game model based on relational rent is carried out. It proves the convergence of game strategies when relational rent is different through model analysis and simulation.The results show that the probability and rate of converging to cooperation increase with relational rent. Relational rent depends on both the strength of current value relation in physical structure and the accumulation of historical relation in social structure. It promotes the continuity and stability of value relations. However, there is an upper limit for relational rent. The decision of establishing value relation also depends on other factors, including dynamic capability and inter-organizational resources.According to Chapter 5, structural embeddedness depends on the overall structure of the value-added system and enterprise’s position in it. It generates additional value. Chapter 8 studies how structural embeddedness may affect the establishing of value relationship among enterprises through four multilateral game models, in which the profit gained by enterprise from value system depends on different aspects of structural embeddedness respectively, including network density, degree centrality, closeness centrality and betweenness centrality. The research reaches a series conclusions about the solution and its properties such as fairness and effectiveness. It reveals the influence of the structural embeddedness, as a kind of natural value production and distribution mechanism, on the establishing of value relationship. In the four models, the profit functions and the parameters influence the solution, including the form of income function f in the first model, the coefficient α of income on degree in the second model, decay rate δ in the third model, intermediary advantage (1-p) in the fourth model and link cost c. When network density or link quantity or path length becomes the key to obtaining income in a value system, complete network can be the effective and stable solution. When path length or intermediary advantage is the key to obtaining income, star network can be the effective equilibrium. Combining the four models and discussion about comprehensive consideration of relational rent and structural rent, complete network and star network play the important roles under structural embeddedness mechanisms. Then the star structure is further discussed.Overall, there is a theoretical and practical significance of this thesis. In theory, it improves the theory of value-added system and provides new perspectives for researches on enterprise policy about external value activities. Some new results are reached. In practice, value system analysis framework, as a relatively new management tool, as well as the results and conclusions from the research provides a comprehensive management view and perspectives for managers.
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