Systematic managerial ignorance (SMI) is concealed as a dark secret especially to protect the rule of outsider executives. SMI is terra incognita, an unknown land that evades usual research methods. A longitudinal semi-native anthropological study of automatic processing plants by a management...

A growing literature on professional service firms is hindered by the ambiguity of its central concept, which leads to an overly-narrow empirical focus and to over-generalizations that may tout inefficiencies as best practice. To address this ambiguity, I develop a theory of the distinctive...

We develop a financial-contracting theory of the cooperative firm where production requires three generic tasks: working, managing, and monitoring. Workers provide an intermediate input (or labor directly); managers convert the workers' input into a final output; and directors monitor managers....

Cooperatives have evolved significantly over the last 200 years and are of increasing importance to economies throughout the world. Yet, cooperatives are marginalised and treated as inefficient and ineffective organisational types. This paper discusses the significance of cooperatives over...

We empirically examine the hypothesis that the gender of firm decision makers, i.e., small firm owners and large firm board directors, significantly affects within-firm wage disparity, defined as the ratio of decision makers’ to average employees’ compensation. Using unique data for both...

We develop a simple incomplete-contract model of the relationship between worker participation to revenue sharing and innovation performance of firms, under firing regimes with different stringency. Stronger worker participation to profits is shown to increase innovation probability when...

There is a fault line running through classical liberalism as to whether or not democratic self-governance is a necessary part of a liberal social order. The democratic and non-democratic strains of classical liberalism are both present today — particularly in America. Many contemporary...

Many firms use equity-based profit sharing to boost participation in employee stock purchase plans (ESPPs). Using a large panel data set (N=262,824) of a multinational firm, we compare the reactions of former ESPP participants and non-participants to a profit sharing distribution (PSD). We find...

Economists believe that a problem of team production results from the desirability of production in (sometimes large) groups, the difficulty of rewarding individual group members based on their (difficult or impossible to measure) individual contributions, and the presumed interest of each...

Reciprocity is one of the main basic social relations that constitute societies. It consists of being favourable to others because others are favourable to you (and not from an exchange in the strict sense). It rests on three possible rationales: (1) balance (comparison, matching), often related...