We discuss and empirically examine a firm-level equivalent of the ancient problem of "tying the King<92>s hands", namely how to maximize managerial intervention for "good cause", while avoiding intervention for "bad cause". Managers may opportunistically intervene when such intervention produces...</92>

We analyze a key problem in organization theory and design, namely the potential tension between authority (i.e., the power to make decisions which guide the decisions of another person) and the discretion of employees (i.e., the ability of an agent to control resources including his own human...

The aim of this paper is twofold: firstly to highlight how the current “hybridisation” of the academic and industrial rationales exerts its influence over the new production of young scientists; secondly to compare, between five OECD countries (USA, France, Great Britain, Japan and Germany),...

Knowledge management has emerged as a very successful organization practice and has been extensively treated in a large body of academic work. Surprisingly, however, organizational economics (i.e., transaction cost economics, agency theory, team theory and property rights theory) has played no...

Important aspects of leadership behavior can be rendered intelligible through a focus on coordination games. The concept of common knowledge is shown to be particularly important to understanding leadership. Thus, leaders may establish common knowledge conditions and assist the coordination of...

The notion of distributed knowledge is increasingly often invoked in discussions of economic organization. In particular, the claim that authority is inefficient as a means of coordination in the context of distributed knowledge has become widespread. However, very little analysis has been...

This study makes use of the results of a postal questionnaire sent to a sample of large private sector companies in Britain and France to address two key issues in the new institutional analysis of the firm. The first is the way the institutional environment supports and constrains the design of...

This paper considers the relationship between innovation, ownership and profitability for a panel of manufacturing plants in Ireland and Northern Ireland. Previous literature suggests that innovators are persistently more profitable than non-innovators, but little is known about how this link is...

This paper explores a scientific community of mainly academic researchers within the discipline of robotics. Data are constructed wholly from web-based resources such as web pages, electronic CVs and bibliographic search engines to identify teams of people working together, career patterns, and...

This paper investigates innovating firms’ determinants of R&D collaboration with domestic universities and public knowledge institutes in Finland and the Netherlands. Three questions – relevant for innovation policies - constitute the central part of this paper. First, are innovating foreign...