Knowledge transfer (KT) has been identified as an essential element of innovation that drives competitive advantage in increasingly knowledge-driven economies and in which small firms have an important part to play. A number of recent UK Government reports have sought to increase awareness of...

The culture and attitudes of any institution are shaped by history and this may affect absorptive capacity and adjustment to change or responses to challenge or opportunity. The article explores how responses to policy initiatives played out within individual universities and the implications...

We develop a theory that explains the difference between public and private ownership for the case of firms that are well approximated by an owner\managed or closely held form of firm. The theory is based on government monitoring and control of actions that potentially allow managers to divert...

A socially optimal structure of application and renewal fees for patents would encourage the maximal number of applications while reducing effective patent length. We find, however, that when patent offices are required to be self-funding, resource constraints can distort this fee structure....

Recent concern has arisen with regard to the potential for introducing competition in previously protected sectors as customer switching costs may make entry (and hence, aggressive price competition) difficult to achieve. An excellent example of this arises telecommunications deregulation with...

We survey recent theoretical research on the effects of short-term share-price based marginal incentive schemes. Such schemes can induce inefficient managerial behaviour in both hidden action and hidden type contexts. These problems arise from informational asymmetries: managers take actions to...

There has been considerable public debate over the effect of interchange fees on credit card transactions. Regulators in Australia and Europe have argued that these fees can be set by banks to have an anticompetitive effect. In the US, it has been argued that these fees, together with a rule...