Organizational Forms in the Knowledge Economy: A Comparative Institutional Analysis

This paper attempts to provide an analytical framework to analyze organizational forms in the knowledge economy. We first outline some historical trends that have transformed the organization of production over the last few decades. We show that this transformation has taken place not only in the realm of intellectual property rights (IPRs) regime, but also in technology. Finally, by recourse to a formal model, we study the determinants of the distribution of alternative institutional arrangements in this new environment. We argue that organizational ecology is mainly determined by knowledge network effects, and complementarities between IPRs and technology.