Strategic decision making in international firms: effect of top management team internationalization on international strategic decision process

In this research project, I have integrated two research streams on international strategic decisions making in international firms: upper echelons or top management teams (TMT) internationalization research and international strategic decision making process research. Both research streams in international business literature have evolved independently, but there is a potential in combining these two streams of research. The first empirical paper “TMT internationalization and international strategic decision making process: a decision level analysis of rationality, speed, and performance” explores the influence of TMT internationalization on strategic decision rationality and speed and, subsequently, their effect on international strategic decision effectiveness (performance). The results show that the internationalization of TMT is positively related to decision effectiveness and this relationship is mediated by decision rationality while the hypotheses regarding the association between TMT internationalization and decision speed, and the mediating effect of speed were not supported. The second paper “TMT internationalization and international strategic decision rationality: the mediating role of international information” of my thesis is a simple but logical extension of first paper. The first paper showed that TMT Internationalization has a significant positive effect on international strategic decision rationality. The second paper explicitly showed that TMT internationalization affect on international strategic decision rationality comes from two sources: international experience (personal international knowledge and information) and international information collected from managerial international contacts. For this research project, I have collected data from international software firms in Pakistan. My research contributes to the literature on upper echelons theory and strategic decision making in context of international business and international firms by explicitly examining the link between TMT internationalization and characteristics of strategic decisions making process (i.e. rationality and speed) in international firms and their possible mediating effect on performance.

Essays on Information Economics

This thesis consists of three essays on information economics. I explore how information is strategically communicated or designed by senders who aim to influence the decisions of a receiver. In the first chapter, I study a cheap talk game between two imperfectly informed experts and a decision maker. The experts receive noisy signals about the state and sequentially communicate the relevant information to the decision maker. I refine the self-serving belief system under uncertainty and Ι characterise the most informative equilibrium that might arise in such environments.In the second chapter, I consider the case where a decision maker seeks advice from a biased expert who cares also about establishing a reputation of being competent. The expert has the incentives to misreport her information but she faces a trade-off between the gain from misrepresentation and the potential reputation loss. I show that the equilibrium is fully-revealing if the expert is not too biased and not too highly reputable. If there is competition between two experts the information transmission is always improved. However, in cases where the experts are more than two the result is ambiguous, and it depends on the players’ prior belief over states.In the last chapter, I consider a model of strategic communication where a privately and imperfectly informed sender can persuade a receiver. The sender may receive favorable or unfavorable private information about her preferred state. I describe two ways that are adopted in real life situations and theoretically improve equilibrium informativeness given sender's private information. First, a policy that suggests symmetry constraints to the experiments' choice. Second, an approval strategy characterised by a low precision threshold where the receiver will accept the sender with a positive probability and a higher one where the sender will be accepted with certainty.

Seismotectonic study on two strategic infrastructures in Southern Italy

With the entry into force of the latest Italian Building Code (NTC 2008, 2018), innovative criteria were provided, especially for what concerns the seismic verifications of large infrastructures. In particular, for buildings considered as strategic, such as large dams, a seismotectonic study of the site was declared necessary, which involves a re-assessment of the basic seismic hazard. This PhD project fits into this context, being part of the seismic re-evaluation process of large dams launched on a national scale following the O.P.C.M. 3274/2003, D.L. 79/2004. A full seismotectonic study in the region of two large earth dams in Southern Italy was carried out. We identified and characterized the structures that could generate earthquakes in our study area, together with the definition of the local seismic history. This information was used for the reassessment of the basic seismic hazard, using probabilistic seismic hazard assessment approaches. In recent years, fault-based models for the seismic hazard assessment have been proposed all over the world as a new emerging methodology. For this reason, we decided to test the innovative SHERIFS approach on our study area. The occasion of the seismotectonic study gave also the opportunity to focus on the characteristics of the seismic stations that provided the data for the study itself. In the context of the work presented here, we focused on the 10 stations that had been active for the longest time and we carried out a geophysical characterization, the data of which merged into a more general study on the soil-structure interaction at seismic stations and on the ways in which it could affect the SHA. Lastly, an additional experimental study on the two dams and their associated minor structures is also presented, aimed at defining their main dynamic parameters, useful for subsequent dynamic structural and geotechnical studies.