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PurposeThe purpose of this article is to establish a strategic management framework that supports the integration of corporate social responsibility principles and stakeholder approaches into mainstream business strategy.Design/methodology/approachA top‐down and bottom‐up approach was used to develop the proposed framework. The top‐down approach focused on analyzing the main strategic management theories including social responsibility movements to identify complementary concepts and create a relevant topology. The bottom‐up approach was based on empirical research on the views of business companies on corporate social responsibility, a review of best practices and case studies mainly in Greece.FindingsThe paper describes a stakeholder‐oriented integrative strategic management framework linking the main strategic management theories across value, responsiveness and responsibility dimensions. A mathematical model is presented describing the synergistic development of advantage‐creating knowledge and advantage‐creating stakeholder relations in accordance with the criteria of the resource‐based theory.Research limitations/implicationsThe proposed management framework is based on the results of research projects and is not fully developed and tested. The approach will be refined, exploiting results from ongoing research including further empirical research and testing in business organizations.Originality/valueThe paper defines a novel conceptual framework extending the resource‐ and stakeholder‐based approaches by introducing two interlinked concepts: advantage‐creating knowledge and advantage‐creating stakeholder relations.

There are few industries in modern market economies that do not manufacture differentiated products. This book provides a systematic explanation and analysis of the widespread prevalence of this important category of products. The authors concentrate on models in which product selection is endogenous. In the first four chapters they consider models that try to predict the level of product differentiation that would emerge in situations of market equilibrium. These market equilibria with differentiated products are characterised and then compared with social welfare optima. Particular attention is paid to the distinction between horizontal and vertical differentiation as well as to the related issues of product quality and durability. This book brings together the most important theoretical contributions to these topics in a succinct and coherent manner. One of its major strengths is the way in which it carefully sets out the basic intuition behind the formal results. It will be useful to advanced undergraduate and graduate students taking courses in industrial economics and microeconomic theory.

In most jurisdictions, antitrust fines are based on affected commerce rather than on collusive profits, and in some others, caps on fines are introduced based on total firm sales rather than on affected commerce. We uncover a number of distortions that these policies generate, propose simple models to characterise their comparative static properties and quantify them with simulations based on market data. We conclude by discussing the obvious need to depart from these distortive rules of thumb that appear to have the potential to substantially reduce social welfare.

We present a new welfare-based framework for optimally choosing legal standards (decision rules). We formalise the decision-theoretic considerations widely discussed in the existing literature by capturing the quality of the underlying analysis and information available to a regulatory authority, and we obtain a precise necessary and sufficient set of conditions for determining when an Economics or Effects-Based approach would be able to discriminate effectively between benign and harmful actions and consequently dominate per se as a decision-making procedure. We then show that in a full welfare-based approach, the choice between legal standards must additionally take into account, (i) indirect (deterrence) effects of the choice of standard on the behaviour of all firms when deciding whether or not to adopt a particular practice; and (ii) procedural effects of certain features of the administrative process in particular delays in reaching decisions; and the investigation of only a fraction of the actions taking place. We therefore derive necessary and sufficient conditions for adopting Discriminating Rules, as advocated by the Effects-Based approach. We also examine what type of Discriminating rule will be optimal under different conditions that characterise different business practices. We apply our framework to two recent landmark decisions -Microsoft vs. EU Commission (2007) and Leegin vs. PSKS (2007) -in which a change in legal standards has been proposed, and show that it can powerfully clarify and enhance the arguments deployed in these cases.