The scope of the activities performed by the platform sponsor vis-à-vis the complementors is one of the key decisions that platform sponsors must continually make. Yet, the implications of alternative scope decisions are not well understood. This article delves deeper into platform sponsors’...

There is a tradition in modern business scholarship to see the corporation as a political actor. S.P. Waring argues that the modern business corporation is a polity, Herbert Kaufman views political theorists and management theorists as merely quot;different species of the same genus,quot; while...

Exploration-exploitation research to date has understudied the issue of multiple performance dimensions and their potential trade-offs, which leaves the application of its theory to the context of start-ups exposed to blind spots. The importance of acquisition likelihood as a performance outcome...

In this paper we investigate the ways in which new forms of organization enabled by digital technologies such as crowdsourcing and digital marketplaces are allowing firms to circumvent and defy traditional knowledge constraints. This is part of the broader question of when and why these forms of...

I review Change and Development in organizations within the framework that Van De Ven and Poole (1995) put forth. (Van De Ven and Poole, 1995) is instrumental in many respects. While emphasizing that organizational change processes can be driven differently and so can possibly be observed at...

We show that decision making in organizations is typically more complicated than simply choosing either to delegate or to centralize. Firms have to consider not only the level at which a decision is made (authority location) but also how many people are involved (authority diffusion), and the...

Is top-down organization design worth attempting at all, or should organizations simply let their members learn which patterns of interaction are valuable by themselves, through a bottom-up process? Our analysis of an agent-based computational model shows that weak enforcement of even a randomly...

A tying arrangement is a seller’s requirement that a customer may purchase its “tying” product only by taking its “tied” product. In a variable proportion tie the purchaser can vary the amount of the tied product. For example, a customer might purchase a single printer, but either a...

The present work examines the evolutionary theories set forth by Armen Alchian in his 1950 paper, Uncertainty, Evolution and Economic Theory; and furthered by Geoffrey Manne and Todd Zywicki in their recent paper titled Uncertainty, Evolution, and Behavioral Economic Theory. Alchian’s thesis...

Since even before Copperweld Corp. v. Independence Tube Corp., 467 U.S. 752 (1984), it has been thought that antitrust needs some "theory of the firm" to inform its application of a "single-entity" defense in Sherman Act section 1 litigation. Not only is that sense mistaken, it is emblematic of...