Globalization has been identified by many experts as a new way firms organize their activities and as the emergence of human capital as the new stakeholder of the firm. This paper surveys recent work which examines the role of trade integration for these changes in corporate organization. More...

The aim pursued in this business history study is to assess whether LOEWE - an originally German-Jewish producer of consumer electronics - had the possibility as well as the capacity to build and preserve a learning base throughout the national-socialist period. Learning base is understood here...

In this paper, we discuss the main economic aspects of the European Microsoft case; in particular, Microsoft’s refusal to supply the necessary information to make the competitors’ work group server systems interoperable with Windows Operating System. The case can be seen as an example of...

The outcome of non-binding reverse auctions critically depends on how information is distributed during the bidding process. We use data from a large European procurement platform to study the impact of different information structures, specifically the availability of quality information to the...

We extend Akerlof ’s (1970) “Market for Lemons” by assuming that some buyers are overconfident. Buyers in our model receive a noisy signal about the quality of the good that is at display for sale. Overconfident buyers do not update according to Bayes’ rule but take the noisy signal at...

It is often argued that certifiers have an incentive to offer inflated certificates, although they deny it. In this paper, we study a model in which a certifier is paid by sellers, and may offer them inflated certificates, but incurs costs if doing so. We find that the certifier may face a...

Internal organization relies heavily on psychological consistency requirements. This perspective has been emphasized in modern compensation theory, but has not been extended to organization theory. The idea is developed by starting from Williamson's discussion of idiosyncratic exchange. The...

The paper studies the regulatory design in an industry where the regulated downstream provider of services to final consumers purchases the necessary inputs from an upstream supplier. The model is closely inspired by the UK regulatory mechanism for the railway network. Its philosophy is one of...

Recent years have witnessed an enormous amount of reorganization of the corporate sector in the US and in Europe. This paper examines the role of market competition for this trend in corporate reorganization. We find that at intermediate levels of competition the CEO of the corporation decides...