Due to their particular characteristics, transnational companies (TNC) face numerous challenges, in particular dealing with uncertainty in both external and internal transactions. In this paper, we investigate whether and how far individual and inter-personal interactions among members of the...

The burgeoning literature on informal governance has shed new light on the workings of international organizations and the hidden rules of the game. The common thrust of these studies is that informal governance is the result of an implicit agreement among states that, in order to sustain...

This article uses the informal governance framework to elucidate the connection between regime transition and participation in regional international organizations (IOs). In particular, this study focuses on non-democratic regional IOs and examines the empirical case of the Commonwealth of...

The renaissance in the theoretical analysis of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) has focused on formal IGOs (FIGOs), but many IGOs are subject to no formal treaty and/or have no permanent secretariat. Important examples of informal IGOs (IIGOs) include the G-groups that are the locus of...

Trust is an informal mechanism of governance that seems to work in family businesses differently from other types of companies. This conceptual paper analyzes the impact of internal trust on the competitiveness of firms over time. To this end, we introduce different modes of intra-firm trust,...

Internationalization is a strong challenge that firms have to face today. However, small and medium-sized family firms internationalize their business after consolidating their position in domestic markets. Family SMEs approach international markets usually through export activities....

The conventional wisdom emphasizes agency slack or bias as the central problem of international delegation. I show that the possibility of a unilateral influence contest is equally problematic. States can exert unilateral influence on autonomous international bureaucrats, either through rewards...

We present a theoretical model postulating that the relationship between crime and governance is “hump-shaped”, rather than linearly decreasing, when criminals need access to markets. State collapse, violent conflict and a lack of infrastructure are not conducive for the establishment of any...

States often create international institutions that impose legally binding rules on member states, and then do not even attempt to enforce these rules. Why? In this article, we present a game-theoretic model of moribund hard law in international institutions. We show that if some states face...

Der Weltverband der Spielzeugindustrie hat sich bereits 1995 einen Verhaltenskodex zur Sicherung der Arbeitsbedingungen in China gegeben, dem jedoch jahrelang von den meisten relevanten Unternehmen wenig Beachtung geschenkt wurde. Seitdem er seit 2004 von den globalen Marktfuehrern aus Industrie...