The paper aims at providing the conceptual building blocks of a theory of the firm which addresses its "ontological questions" (existence,boundaries and organization) by placing production at its core. We draw on engineering for a more accurate description of the production process itself,...

By exploiting a new rich firm-level dataset, this paper investigates the decision to subcontract production activities (outsourcing) with respect to vertically integrate them. In particular, we aim at identifying the main factors underlying the decision to either fully or partially decentralise...

Because different people can develop different skills, a knowledge rich society must be an ecology of specialists; knowledge is distributed within each human brain, within each organisation and within the economic and social system; and being distributed it can grow, provided that it is...