This conceptual paper starts with a question regarding the nature of the firm: is the firm a nexus of contracts or a real entity? To answer this question, the article departs from a critique of firm contract theory that usually focuses on moral personification to propose some theoretical...

This paper aims to investigate the impact of interpersonal networks on the innovativeness of inventors. A significant amount of literature has been devoted to the analysis of network effects in the economic and managerial sciences. The main research works in this field have emphasized the strong...

The firm was evicted from economic analysis for a long time. It appeared as a particular and substantial "scope" thanks to the economist R.H. Coase at the end of the 1930'S but sunk into oblivion for three decades. This paper deals with the 1970's renewal of interest in the theory of the firm,...