The purpose of this paper is to re-examine the notion of price determination in A.-R.-J. Turgot’s writings. Consideration is given to the evolution of the concept of market during the 18th century. It is argued that Turgot provided a model of multiple exchanges with merchants, called General...

Customers' needs are changing and organisations across all sectors are increasingly being asked not only to provide products in the first instance, but also to support them throughout their service life. At the same time, many engineering companies in defence, civil, aerospace and construction...

Incentive contracts must typically be based on performance measures that do not exactly match agents’ true contribution to principals’ objectives. Such misalignment may impose difficulties for effective incentive design. We analyze to what extent implicit dynamic incentives such as career...

This paper examines Adam Smith's explanation of the stability of a competitive market. An initial hypothesis in the paper holds that the mechanism described in <i>The Wealth of Nations</i> has nothing to do with production costs, longterm, or sympathetic relationships. My proposal draws on the...

We consider a cheap-talk setting that mimics the situation where an incumbent firm the sender is endowed with incentives to understate the true size of the market demand to two potential entrants the receivers. Although our experimental data reveals that senders messages convey truthful...

Small-scale farming involves millions of households in the EU and plays an important role in the rural economy. A significant percentage of these farms produce commodities for the market. This productive dimension is often overlooked, however, as is the technical support needed by these farms....