Early modern information exchange was a potentially costly transaction with little legal infrastructure available to enforce cooperation. We analyze patterns of informal information exchange to assess the role of relational and institutional governance systems and uncertainty in encouraging...

Studies have consistently found that social structure influences who transacts with whom, and that actors appear to benefit when exchange occurs embedded within these relations rather than in an unstructured market. This paper argues that the apparent benefits of embedded exchange can arise from...

The diffusion of knowledge plays an important role in both the creation and distribution of wealth. Attempting to construct a competitive advantage, managers of firms often seek to spread valuable knowledge widely across subunits of the organization, while simultaneously preventing its diffusion...

An extensive literature on venture capital has studied asymmetric information and agency problems between investors and entrepreneurs, examining how separating entrepreneurs from the investor can create frictions that might inhibit the funding of good projects. It has largely abstracted away...