This paper presents a framework to analyze the potential changes in transaction costs due to theintroduction of e-commerce on transactions between businesses. It then illustrates and applies thisframework using internal data from an Internet-based firm to measure process improvements,marketplace...

Large companies are usually organized into business units, yet some activitiesare almost always centralized in a company-wide functional unit. We firstshow that organizations endogenously create an incentive conflict between functionalmanagers (who desire excessive standardization) and...

Recent events involving major insurance companies and insurance brokerage firms highlight substantial incentive problems in commercial and reinsurance markets where intermediation takes place. We show that in markets with informed as well as uninformed consumers and heterogeneous risk profiles...

The Peter Principle captures two stylized facts about hierarchies: first, promotions often placeemployees into jobs for which they are less well suited than for that previously held. Second,demotions are extremely rare...

Empirical studies on information communication technologies (ICT) typically aggregate the“information” and “communication” components together. We show theoretically and empirically thatthese have very different effects on the empowerment of employees, and by extension on wageinequality....

Technological change is often hypothesized as one of the main drivers of mergeractivities. This paper analyzes the role of technology in mergers and acquisitions(M&As) at the firm level. Based on a newly created data set that combines financialinformation and patent data for public limited...

Mergers and acquisitions (M&As) constitute a disruption to the workingenvironment of the inventive labor force of the acquired company. If inventors wouldrespond with a decline of their patent productivity or departure from the firm thiscan be detrimental to the innovative process within the...