Bøger i International Management Studies serien

Dr. Marjaana Gunkel's book opens a series of works published in cooperation with Deutscher Universit/ats-Verlag and Gabler. Ute Wrasmann and Claudia Splittgerber were very helpful initiating and organizing the series on the publisher's side. Anita Wilke was in charge of Marjaana Gunkel's book. Their support and cooperation is highly appreciated. The series ,,International Management Studies" aims at circulating insights from - search projects on international corporations. Most of the contributions published here will be characterized by the following features: The New Institutional Economics p- vides the theoretical framework, there is some empirical analysis - mostly based on primary data generated for the respective research project-, and the language of pub- cation can be English. All the contributions published in this series will be written in such a way that not only peers and experts in narrowly defined research fields can be reached but everybody who might be interested in learning about the topic at stake. Readers from other academic disciplines and practitioners are welcome contributors to a discourse that we want to share broadly. Also, the submission of publishable works that could contribute to this series is more than welcome.

Franziska Kruger presents two quantitative cross-cultural studies that examine the generalizability of the Zone of Tolerance and the Confirmation/Disconfirmation-Paradigm across countries.

Managers in international joint ventures work with resources contributed by investors from multiple nationalities. Fan Wu shows through a series of experimental studies among students and managers from China, South Korea, Germany, and the USA that cultural affinity between the manager and one of the investors and career perspectives with one of the investors are strongly motivating managers to make biased decisions. The two mechanisms can be used to balance each other out in staffing key positions in international joint ventures for optimal control over managerial decisions.

Empirical studies show that the reputation of transaction partners affects the economic outcomes of online auction markets. In four studies, Christopher Schlägel investigates the country-specific effects of reputation and the underlying reasons for these differences.

Marco Tulio Zanini examines the effects of different industry-specific institutional framework constraints on the level of trust within business organizations, particularly the possible differences in old and new economy. Based on the results of a survey carried out in seven major companies from different sectors of the Brazilian economy, the author shows that trust is more likely to be found in relatively stable, hierarchical and bureaucratic organizations whereas there is comparatively little trust in new economy firms.