Chapter 1
Rule-Based Versus
Relation-Based Systems
After a daylong meeting in New York, we—a group of Chinese businesspeople—went to a restaurant to eat. It was fun. “Together or separate checks?” The waitress asked us when we were almost done. “Together!” Someone shouted, and then a war broke out between us over who should pay. But if you think that we were trying to get someone else to pay, then you are wrong. Each of us competed for the bill.1
Why do the Chinese always compete to pay while most Americans “go Dutch” when a group of people eat out? Does this mean that in general the Chinese are more generous than Americans? Similar puzzles abound. For example, why do strangers usually smile or nod at each other when they pass each other on streets in America while unrelated people don’t acknowledge each other’s existence when they pass each other through a narrow alley in China? Does this mean that Americans are friendlier than the Chinese?
What is the economic significance of all those differences? Are these differences due to culture? If they are, what is behind the culture? With rapid globalization and cultural interaction, will the Americans adopt the Chinese way, or vice versa? In general, how can we explain the differences between the East and West in social and economic interactions in their societies, and what do these differences mean when the East meets the West?
In search of answers to these puzzles, I have been studying different social systems for the past 10 years and, based on new findings by myself and others, have developed a theoretical perspective that can offer some not-so-obvious and yet consistent explanations to these puzzles. These solutions not only greatly satisfied my own intellectual curiosity but also helped others to understand these puzzles from a new perspective. During more than a decade of teaching international business, I have asked many of my students the above puzzles and have gotten all sorts of answers, ranging from a tautological explanation (e.g., “This is just how things are”) to a totally ridiculous response (e.g., “Americans are dumb so that they greet everyone”). And most of the answers did not make logical and consistent sense. I would then offer them my simple but not-so-obvious answers that can consistently and logically explain the reasons behind these seemingly unrelated patterns, and I could see my bright students’ eyes light up and they would exclaim, “Aha! Now I see it.”
Their favorable reaction to my view on the patterns of social economic interactions across countries over the years eventually made me sit down and write this book, which is not a boring academic book (at least I try not to make it boring). This book is for people who have a broad interest in learning how societies differ in certain fundamental ways and for people who always want to identify systematic patterns in what appear to be random differences. More importantly, the book is also written for business executives who need to understand the reasons behind different business practices across countries. In an increasingly globalized marketplace, such understanding is vital in order to effectively and efficiently navigate through different business environments and successfully operate and manage international business.
Now, let’s leave the “together or separate checks” and the “street encounter” puzzles for the time being and think about a more direct economic question: What made the “East Asian economic miracle” possible? The reader may wonder how such an economic question of considerable significance has anything to do with those puzzles. As I will show in the book, they are closely related.
What Made the “East Asian Economic Miracle”?
The “East Asian economic miracle” usually refers to the sustained rapid economic growth achieved by the East Asian countries, including Japan after World War II, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan between the 1960s and 1980s, and China from the late 1970s to the present. A common feature in the political economy2 of these countries is that to various degrees they are (or have been) ruled by a government not subject to effective checks and balances and a legal system that lacks independence and is influenced by the ruler(s), undermining its ability to protect property rights. As a result of those shortcomings, these countries are characterized by a powerful state and a high level of corruption.
Thus the main puzzle about the “East Asia economic miracle” is how these countries achieve an economic miracle under political rule that seems detrimental to economic development.
A great deal of research and scholarship has been devoted to offering explanations of what made the “East Asian economic miracle” possible. Rich and expanding literature has been produced on this debate. A novice reader can easily be led into a jungle and get lost in the vast amount of articles and books offering complicated and often conflicting views. Here I attempt to offer a map to navigate in this jungle, and I provide a unique path for the reader to walk out of the jungle and see the puzzle differently.
Perhaps the best known theory to explain the “Asian miracle” is the political explanation. It has been argued that under a (benevolent) dictator or authoritarian ruler who is not too corrupt and is pro business, a country’s economy can be more effectively and efficiently developed. While this argument seems to fit the political experience of some of the countries within the “Asian miracle” set, such as South Korea under the military dictator Park Chung Hee and Taiwan under the rule of Chiang Kai Shek and his son Chiang Chin Kuo, it fails to explain what makes a dictator benevolent and not too corrupt. For example, why is it that Park and the Chiangs were not interested in accumulating personal wealth, while their counterparts in the Philippines (Marcos) and Indonesia (Suharto) were busily transferring huge amounts of public funds into their Swiss bank accounts? In general, according to the study by Przeworski and associates, the chance that a country will embark on a rapid economic development is the same under either dictatorship or democracy.3
Another dominant view on the “East Asian economic miracle” is offered by the cultural theorists who try to explain the miracle from a cultural perspective.4 According to the cultural view, Asian countries are able to achieve high economic growth despite poor political systems (e.g., lacking democracy and the rule of law) because of the deeply rooted Confucian values in their societies that emphasize long-term economic views (e.g., save today for greater consumption value tomorrow; study hard today for a greater payoff in the future) and reciprocity in interpersonal relationships (e.g., you give me one drop of water when I am in need, and I will return with a water fountain in the future when I am able). While attributing the “East Asian economic miracle” to the Confucian culture may help us to see the link between a strong work ethic and economic growth, it only provides a partial explanation because there are still important questions left unanswered by culture. Even scholars who believe that culture makes almost all the difference in economic development admit that culture alone cannot consistently predict how an economy will develop. For example, China has had the Confucian tradition for about 2,000 years. Why hasn’t its economic development always been positive? Why has it been on and off from time to time? Moreover, this approach fails to answer what shapes a culture. How does culture interact with the political, legal, and economic institutions in a society to collectively affect economic development and business activities in the society?
Unsatisfied with either the authoritarianism argument or the cultural-deterministic view briefly described above, scholars of social sciences have been searching for more convincing answers from different perspectives. Increasingly, these efforts converge to one aspect that is very important for economic activities and yet has been overlooked by the mainstream scholars in addressing what made the “East Asian economic miracle”: governance.
Governance can be defined as a mechanism people use to protect their interest in social and economic exchanges. For example, in a society with a fair, open, and effective legal system, people would resort to the courts or public arbitrations for a ruling if disputes arise. On the other hand, when the law is biased and judges are corrupt, then people may not choose the public rule as their means of settling disputes. Instead, they may look for a private way to solve it, which may include mediation or even violence (such as kidnapping). Interestingly, scholars observe that what governance mechanism people or firms choose in a society is not entirely up to the individual or firm; it is primarily determined by the dominant governance environment of the society in which they live or conduct business.
Governance environment refers to the set of political, legal, and social institutions that collectively facilitates or constrains the choice of governance mechanism the individual or firm has in a society. Scholars of social sciences have now come to a consensus that, broadly speaking, all societies can be grouped into two major camps in terms of governance environment: the ones that have good public ordering, or rule of law, and the ones that do not have good public ordering.5 While readers from the West are familiar with the first type, they are unfamiliar with the latter, for some obvious reasons, which we will discuss in more detail in this book.
What do people rely on to protect their property rights and other interests in economic exchanges if the public laws are no good? Well, it really depends. If the public ordering (i.e., public laws and government enforcement) is ineffective, the society must rely on some sort of private ordering in order to make certain (minimally) necessary economic activities feasible. But private ordering can have many forms. Some may be conducive to business, and others may be hostile or even dangerous to conducting business. For instance, ordering can be based on a dictatorship imposed by a military strongman who monopolizes all business opportunities. Ordering can also be in a state of complete anarchy, in which bandits roam and rob people and make business activities based on free and voluntary exchange virtually impossible.
Ordering can also be based on an extensive informal social network among businesses maintained by tradition or private enforcement, which may function effectively and efficiently under certain conditions. It is this type of particular private ordering that has drawn increasing attention from social scientists. Among the efforts at studying private ordering, a new and useful approach is to compare the two major types of governance system to reveal not-so-obvious yet important patterns that may help us understand systematically how different countries conduct economic exchanges in their particular ways of interacting. This approach is called “rule-based versus relation-based governance.”
A New Perspective: Rule-Based and Relation-Based Governance Systems
The framework of rule-based and relation-based governance systems was first proposed by Shuhe Li and later was expanded on by others.6 According to the framework, if we examine the governance environment at the societal level from political, legal, economic, and social perspectives, we can derive two contrasting systems, rule-based versus relation-based, in terms of how people protect their property rights and contracts.
In most developed societies, we observe that firms and individuals primarily rely on public rules—laws and government regulations—to resolve disputes and enforce rights and contracts. We call this reliance on public ordering a rule-based governance system. A rule-based governance environment must satisfy the following conditions: the public rules governing economic exchanges (such as laws, state policies, and regulations) are fairly made; the rule-making, rule-adjudication, and rule-enforcement are separate; rule-enforcement is fair and efficient; and public information infrastructure (such as accounting, auditing, and financial rating) is highly reliable and accurate. That the public information must be of high quality and trustworthy is vital for a rule-based economy to function smoothly and efficiently. Firms and people must be able to rely on publicly available information such as financial analyses and auditing reports in order to conduct business and make decisions, saving the cost of privately collecting information and investigating its quality for every potential business transaction. An important feature of relying on public information is that the information must be explicit and verifiable by a third party; otherwise, it cannot be admitted in court if disputes arise. The court can only enforce the agreements between the parties that are publicly (third-party) verifiable; any implicit agreements privately made between them that cannot be verified by the court are not admissible to the court and thus cannot be enforced. As a result, business agreements in a rule-based society are usually formal and clearly written in explicit language. Because of the above conditions, citizens and organizations predominantly rely on public ordering in governing transactions.
The above features imply that rule-based societies tend to be mature democracies. For instance, for the laws and rules to be fair, a society must ensure fair participation of all interest groups in law making, which requires a representative democracy. For legal interpretation to be impartial, judges must be independent of political influence, which implies checks and balances between different branches of the government, and for the enforcement to be impartial and efficient, the executive branch has to be answerable to the constituents and be checked by the legislative and judiciary branches. This is why mature democracies share many commonalities, while nondemocracies may take many forms, ranging from monarchy, to military rule, to communist rule, to civil war and anarchy. Rule-based societies tend to have similar rules, yet non-rule-based societies may take different forms of private enforcement mechanisms to govern transactions (e.g., community enforcement, private network enforcement, kinship enforcement, or mafia-dominated enforcement). In other words, while rule-based societies converge to the profile described above (e.g., highly rule-based societies are all mature democracies), societies that lack a rule-based governance environment vary widely, ranging from warring states with complete chaos to tightly controlled societies under highly efficient authoritarian rules.
We observe that a specific group of non-rule-based societies that rely on private ordering (e.g., the East Asian societies in general and the Chinese society in particular) are quite effective and efficient at governing the social exchanges that have been experiencing rapid economic growth. In addition to the absence of fair and efficient public rules due to the lack of any of the above-mentioned conditions necessary to a rule-based governance system, these societies have the following in common: They all have a governance environment based on private enforcement that can effectively and efficiently regulate markets and resolve disputes. This is what we call a relation-based governance system.
A relation-based society has the following characteristics: public rules (laws, government policies, and government regulations) are less fair because they are usually biased in favor of certain privileged groups (due to the lack of checks and balances); the executive branch of the government usually overshadows the legislative and judiciary branches and is likely to be controlled by a dictatorial ruling elite; courts and judges are controlled by the ruler(s); government operations are secretive and public information and press are controlled and censored by the government; industries and markets tend to be controlled by a small number of insiders (e.g., people who have connections with the ruler) and are closed to outsiders; officials and business insiders are usually locked in a corruption-bribery relationship; and the informal network among the insiders in an industry is so closely knit and powerful that if one of the insiders is said to have broken the (unwritten) norms of the trade, the word of mouth by other insiders will effectively put him out of business.
For example, in Thailand, a relation-based society, there exists a class of powerful businessmen called “chao pho,” or godfathers.7 They “cultivate close links with local officialdom… to secure the licenses, permits, land deeds… to corner the lucrative government contracts.”8 These godfathers also provide “some measure of security [and] justice… more speedily and more accessibly than officialdom.” Also, “whenever these [ordinary] people have any problems they go to the chao pho.”9 Similar private social networks have also existed in Malaysia. Historically, because the government was unable to provide many public services, residents, especially the Chinese there, began to form a sherh-hui-tarng, commonly known as a “secret society,” to help each other in political, economic, and legal matters.10 Vietnam, as a seasoned business writer summed up, relied on an “informal system of rule by people, rather than rule by law.”11
How Do People Govern Transactions in a Relation-Based Society?
Unlike a rule-based society, where public information is credible and heavily relied upon by citizens and businesses (making the protection of business transactions by public ordering feasible and efficient), public information in a relation-based society is usually untrustworthy. As a result, people and firms rely on private information to govern their transactions. There are several reasons why public information is not trusted. First, the government controls public information and the media in order to support its rule and agenda. For instance, it is well known that the governments in China and Vietnam (both are relation-based societies) tightly control the media and decide what news can be published.12 They even doctor news stories and time news releases in order to reinforce their rules. For instance, news of major scientific discoveries is often saved and released on major political holidays (e.g., the National Day, the Communist Party’s birthday). The practice of manipulating public information at the national level by the government does not help firms to report accurate information. As we will show later in the book, there is strong evidence that firms in relation-based societies such as China manipulate their income reports.13
Another reason why public information is rarely useful as a means for firms to govern their transactions is the nature of these transactions. When the scale of the economy is small and business people predominately deal with people they know, they rely on private information between the transacting parties and they do not want to make their information available to a third party because the private business relationship is their most important asset. It is a small wonder that when researchers in Thailand interviewed successful business people about their political activities, few were willing to talk about it.14 Similar patterns were also found among successful Chinese business people.15
Such private relationships and information usually are local and implicit, and the agreement (e.g., a handshake or a pat on the shoulder) is most often informal and cannot be verified by a third party such as a judge in a court. These practices, as we discussed earlier, are the opposite of rule-based governance, and as a result, business people must rely on private means to protect their transaction. Specifically, firms in a relation-based society rely on three private monitoring mechanisms to govern their rights in transactions: These mechanisms are ex ante monitoring capability, interim (also called ex nunc) monitoring capability, and ex post monitoring capability.
Ex ante means “before the event” and is used in economic analysis to forecast the results of a particular action. Private ex ante monitoring capability refers to the effort invested by a transaction party before a business deal is made. In the absence of public information and enforcement, a firm must privately investigate its prospective transaction partner in terms of his or her track record and reputation. If the prospect has cheated, do not deal with him. If the prospective partner does not have a stable pool of business partners or clients, it implies that he may have a bad reputation and is avoided by other insiders. Such a prospect should be ruled out.
Interim monitoring is the ability of one party to obtain ongoing business and operational information about the other party, specifically whether the other party is on track with a project’s schedule or whether the other party has any financial trouble or disputes. In a relation-based society, such information is not publicly available through credit investigating agencies. This is why news of financial insolvency of a firm in a relation-based society tends to cause large-scale panic. Due to the lack of reliable public financial data, people do not know whether other firms may also be involved with the insolvent firm and are thus adversely affected. As a result, people stop lending to or withdrawing deposits from firms likely to be involved with the insolvent firm (a snowball effect). Therefore, one must invest in the capability of obtaining private and reliable information.
The third monitoring mechanism, private ex post capability, is the most important of the three. Ex post, Latin for “after the fact,” is used here to refer to the ability to remedy or deter cheating or other opportunistic behaviors by the other party, in the absence of resorting to public regulators such as the courts (which tend to be corrupt, unfair, and inefficient in relation-based societies). In a relation-based society it is not uncommon for a promisee to resort to kidnapping in order to force a promisor to fulfill a promissory obligation (which may be an implicit, oral promise). For relation-based governance to work efficiently, private ex post monitoring must be effective and efficient. A New York Times report about informal, relation-based lending in China vividly describes such ex post monitoring:
Borrowers default on nearly half the loans issued by the state-owned banks, but seldom do so here on money that is usually borrowed from relatives, neighbors or people in the same industry. Residents insist that the risk of ostracism for failing to repay a loan is penalty enough to ensure repayment of most loans… [As one lender puts it], “If it weren’t a good friend, I wouldn’t lend the money…” Violence is extremely rare, but the threat of it does exist as the ultimate guarantor that people make every effort to repay debts. “Someone can hire a killer who will chase you down, beat you up and maybe even kill you.”16
In Thailand, the powerful business people—godfathers—“built up networks of associates and gangs of subordinates.” Because they took the law in their own hands, the areas in which they dominated “acquired a reputation for hired gunmen, sporadic violence, and regular newspaper reports of murders ‘arising out of a business dispute.’”17
In Vietnam, experienced business people all know that a formal contract is not very useful. “If the contract is not conducted satisfactorily,” a successful Vietnamese entrepreneur commented, “we have the option to sue them, but that would be ridiculous. You know the legal system here.”18
The Costs and Benefits of a Relation-Based Governance System
Since we observe that all advanced countries rely on public rules for governance, we may be tempted to rush to the conclusion that relation-based governance is categorically inefficient and thus detrimental to economic development. However, such a conclusion is premature. Relation-based governance systems are not all inefficient and thus hinder economic growth. Under certain conditions, relation-based governance can be quite effective and efficient due to its differing cost structure.
A well-functioning rule-based system is not free of cost to build and use. Imagine, for instance, the public ordering in the United States, one of the most advanced rule-based countries, and the infrastructure it must have in order for public ordering to function effectively and efficiently. In general, public ordering needs the establishment of the three-branch government. First of all, the country must build a legislative body, which in the United States means establishing and organizing the House and the Senate in Congress, the election system in all 50 states to select all the senators and representatives, and the infrastructure that supports the operations of legislation in Congress. Second, the country must build a court system ranging from the Supreme Court to local courts that are autonomous and well funded. This infrastructure compels the society to invest in an education system that can train a sufficiently large number of judges who are professional, ethical, impartial, and well paid. The society must also invest in training an army of lawyers and other legal workers with high professional and ethical standards. Last but not least, public ordering requires a credible and powerful law enforcement branch—the executive branch of the government, including a police force that must be well trained, adequately paid, and thus uncorrupted.
Simply put, a well-functioning rule-based system requires a large investment in legal infrastructure that is costly and takes a long time to build. From a cost accounting perspective, such an investment at the national level can be viewed as a fixed cost That does not vary regardless of how many people use it. Once the legal infrastructure is built and functioning, the incremental cost of drafting and enforcing one more contract is relatively low. In other words, whether the legal system enforces one contract or 1 million contracts, the fixed, upfront investment for the legal infrastructure is the same (and sunk in the sense that it cannot be recovered), and the marginal cost (the incremental cost of enforcing an additional contract) is minimal.
Meanwhile, in a relation-based society, business can thrive with minimal social order. As long as crimes such as robberies are not out of control, business can be conducted and governed by well-functioning social-industrial networks maintained by private players (individuals or firms). In Thailand, where the public protection of business is not very effective or efficient and the formal channel of financing (through banks) is expensive because of stringent rules, the Chinese Thai business community has resorted to informal financing among themselves. As one researcher observed, “Chinese [Thai] merchants… could inform themselves much more efficiently than branch offices of Bangkok banks about the credit status of other local Chinese… Their businesses were based on personal relationships… They arranged [private financing] to cut down fellow businessmen’s transaction costs… Ultimately, they helped to increase the efficiency of Chinese business transactions and to redress a resource allocation distorted by economic regulation.”19
Another interesting difference in contract fulfillment and enforcement between the two systems is that, unlike public enforcement of contracts, which relies on third-party verifiable information that may be only part (the written part) of the general agreement between two parties, private enforcement is based on private information, which may not need to be verified by a third party. In this sense, private enforcement can be more complete than public enforcement, even including implicit agreements based on mutual understanding, the spirit of cooperation, or past practices.
In general, compared to the cost structure of the rule-based system, the relation-based governance system incurs few fixed costs (since it does not rely on a nationwide legal infrastructure). But the marginal (incremental) cost of privately enforcing contracts increases as the scale and scope of one’s business expands. For example, if one only does business with his siblings, the marginal cost of the three types of monitoring (ex ante, interim, and ex post) is low, because he knows their reputation, their ability to deliver, and where their assets are (in case he needs to seize them). But when his business grows and he runs out of family members, he may have to deal with people he does not know as well, such as neighbors or distant relatives, and his marginal cost of monitoring increases. In general, the marginal (incremental) cost of establishing new relationships rises because cultivating new relationships becomes more and more expensive and time-consuming when one’s private network expands from family members to strangers. For this reason, in a relation-based society people first do business with family members and then with friends and people they know. They try to avoid dealing with strangers because it takes a long time to develop close relationships, and the costs of private monitoring and enforcement are high.
Therefore, when the scale and scope of the economy are small, relation-based governance may be effective and efficient, as the society avoids costly investment in developing and maintaining the legal infrastructures. People and firms are constrained to and content with dealing with family members, friends, and people in closely knit circles. As illustrated in Figure 1.1, when the market is small, the average governance cost is lower in relation-based societies, giving them a comparative advantage during the take-off stage of their economy.
Figure 1.1. The governance cost of rule-based and relation-based systems
However, when an economy expands from local to national and international scope, the relation-based governance becomes inefficient. The average cost of finding and establishing new relationships rises, and thus the average cost of governance surpasses that of rule-based economies, as illustrated at the turning point in Figure 1.1. At this point, a relation-based society begins to lose its comparative advantage in governance costs to a rule-based society. It faces the pressure to evolve into a rule-based governance environment. A postponement of the transition caused by resistance from people who are deeply entrenched and vested in the existing relational network hinders a country’s economic development. This point will be further elaborated later.
We now have a clearer idea regarding the question on the “East Asian economic miracle”: These countries have extensive informal social networks that enable them to rely on the relation-based system to govern economic activities. This system has helped them to save the huge fixed costs of building an effective public governance system. In other words, they did not have to wait until they could build a vast, expensive legal infrastructure for their economy to take off. These countries have relied on private governance mechanisms maintained and enforced by family members, friends, cronies, and related people in high places (possibly through bribery) to protect their business interests and operations. The “East Asian economic miracle” has been achieved with the help of the relation-based governance system.
Furthermore, we can now see that the Chinese heavily rely on guanxi (Chinese for connection and relation) in business activities not only because of their cultural heritage but also and more importantly, because the public rules are not effective and efficient in providing fair protection for their property rights and interests. Relying on the relation-based way to conduct business activities is not merely a cultural phenomenon, it is fundamentally determined by the stage of political and economic development in a society. Relying on private relations to settle business disputes is not unique to East Asian societies. Historically, feudal Europe and the United States were primarily relation-based societies.20 Contemporarily, many developing and transition economies such as Mexico, Mali, and Zambia are relation-based even though they do not have the Chinese or East Asian cultural heritage (see chapter 2).
Table 1.1 highlights the main contrasting features of the two systems we have discussed so far. We will discuss them in more detail in the book.
In Table 1.2, we examine the interface of the two systems. Based on the rule-based versus relation-based framework, we can make a typology of four types of societies: (a) societies that rely on rule-based governance system (most developed countries); (b) societies that lack fair and efficient public rules and rely on relation-based governance environment (developing countries with strong relation-based networks); (c) societies that are rule-based and yet have strong relation-based networks (such as Hong Kong); and (d) societies that lack fair and efficient public rules and do not have efficient and effective relation-based networks either (e.g., countries in civil war or chaos).
Caution: Rule-Based Versus Relation-Based Societies Are Not Black and White
It should be noted that all human societies, including relation-based ones, have various degrees of formal rules. When we say a country is relation-based, it does not mean that this country has no formal laws. Even the most lawless country must have a set of published legal codes of some sort. But the state may not follow the laws and the ruler may simply ignore them. What distinguishes relation-based societies from rule-based ones is not who has the most comprehensive written laws, it is that people in relation-based societies tend to circumvent formal rules because the rules and the enforcement tend to be unfair, particularistic (depending on who has better relationship with people in power), and corrupt.
Another caveat is the distinction between the relation-based governance system and the relational business practice. By our definition, relying on a relation-based governance system is to use private means to fulfill the social function of protecting property rights, such as enforcing contracts, usually done by the government in societies where public ordering functions well. Thus, strictly speaking, relying on relation-based governance is to ignore the public law at best or violate it at worst, even though the law itself may be unfair or inefficient. In other words, resorting to the relation-based governance system implies that one must break existing laws in some way.
Relational business means conducting business though private relationships, such as knowing one’s customers in person and matching individual customer’s need with a service uniquely tailored for the customer. It does not necessarily mean to circumvent the law. Thus the relation-based governance system, which is the main focus of this book, is different from relational business (such as relational marketing).
Throughout the book, we will show that the relation-based governance system is distinctive and yet intertwined with its counterpart, the rule-based system, and the relationship between the two is complicated. As the book unfolds, the reader will be able to see that the logic we use to explain the relationship is rather simple and powerful. Some economic phenomena that apparently contradict economic theories, such as why foreign investment pours into countries with a poor legal system, can be more logically and convincingly explained.