Research On The Evolution Of Industrial Organization From The Perspective Of Firm Boundary

Industrial organization refers to the reciprocal link of firms within an industry, reflecting its market structure and organizational status of enterprises on a certain stage of economic development. Since1980s, the ongoing occurrence of the new industrial organization theories has accelerated the further study on the evolution of industrial organization. However, the process and trends of industrial organization evolution, have taken some new features owing to the proliferation of industrialization and post-industrialization worldwide as well as fast growing information and service industries, which becomes a recent focus of academics and industialists. This dissertation, from the perspective of enterprise boundary, conducts a systematic study on the driving forces and regular pattern of industrial organization.Based on the theories of industrial organization, firm boundary theory and the evolution of economic system theory, this dissertation applies the methods of normative analysis, case studies and empirical model to elaborate the driving forces and the path of the industrial organization evolution. Furthermore, it is also analzed the evolution mechanism of industrial organization how from the perspective of the firm’s inner boundary as well as inter-boudary.The first chapter describes the background and significance of the research and related literatures. The second chapter is the theoretical basis of this study, explaining an overview of the progress of the theories of industrial organization, the connotations and system of the firm boundary theory. Chapter three expands on the general laws and features of the evolution of industrial organization and regards that there exists path-dependent in the evolution of the industrial organization. Although there are different reasons for the evolution of industrial organization, it contains the idea of interactions between enterprises promoting the evolution of industrial organization, which confirms the feasibility of studying on the industrial organization from the perspective of firm boundary. This dissertation attempts to summarize the driving force of promoting the evolution as the internal power of boundaries and power between boundaries, namely, technological innovation, mergers and acquisitions and government management. Chapter four reveals the specific law of how technological innovation promotes the evolution of industrial organization. In reference to the alternative decisions by firms to build a dynamic game model of intellectual property rights protection, this study identifies that in the growing period, firms do not bother to protect their intellectual property, but with more and more firms taking intellectual property protection during the industry growth, an new standard alliance will be formed and the industry will be mature. The fifth chapter demonstrates the law of mergers and acquisitions promoting the evolution of industrial organization. From the perspective of mode of assets disposal of the merged enterprise, this study puts forward that at the initiate stage or with the weak merger power, the firm assets usually were on sale and making the industry concentration is maintained at a lower level. When the industry is mature or merged enterprise gets stronger, more of the merged enterprise assets are retained or closed, making the industrial concentration arise to a higher level. Chapter six illustrates the impact of government regulation on the evolution of Chinese aluminum industry organizations and points out the lack of Chinese industrial organization policy and proposes policy recommendations of optimizing the industrial organization.This study proposes an alternative analysis angel and viewpoints than ever:a) it carries on in-depth study on technological innovation, business growth and boundary integration, market behavior and performance of the industry and its life cycle impact on the dynamic evolution of industrial organization evolution according to the Rocky Christi and penetration model. It analyzes the driving forces from perspectives of technological innovation inside firm boundary, mergers and acquisitions and government management between firm boundaries, describing the dynamic industrial organization evolution; b) by introducing intellectual property protection as a marginal value parameters, it modifies the difficulty that dynamic game model is hard to determine the decision timing to take protection of intellectual property rights, and concludes that technological innovation and diffusion are the decisive factors for enterprises to take the protection of intellectual property rights. It is evidenced that whether or not the enterprises take action of protecting intellectual property will affect industrial organization within the boundaries; c) it studies on the mutual influences between firms’boundary integration and industrial organization evolution by improving the Logit Model and analyzing the factors of merger. On the basis of analysis of China’s software industry and by the establishment of a number of influential factors, this study extends the single analytic path of Logit Model; d) it is concluded that technical standards alliance can realize the positive and negative influence by avoiding a certain degree of competition with the aid of case analysis.