The article explores joint consumption equilibrium environments. It illustrates network formation through one-to-one directional synapses. Family (couple) arrangements, spontaneously generated under a decentralized general equilibrium price system are suggested - involving link and...

Coase’s theory of the firm has become a familiar tool to analyze the structure and organization of businesses. Such analyses have increasingly focused on property based theories of the firm, including intellectual property. In previous work we have discussed the application of this model to...

The property-rights theory assumes that trade is non-contractible ex-ante and focusses exclusively on the allocation of property-rights. We derive foundations for this focus on property-rights by identifying scenarios where only one of the simple ownership structures is optimal even though trade...

It has become commonplace in management research to refer to “transaction cost theory,” a joint Coase-Williamson approach to economic organizing. This off-the-cuff usage overlooks their differences by treating Coase as a pre-Williamsonian. I argue that their theoretical frameworks are...

The most influential approach of corporate governance, the view of shareholders' supremacy does not take into consideration that the key task of modern corporations is to generate and transfer firm-specific knowledge. It proposes that, in order to overcome the widespread corporate scandals, the...

We develop in this paper a knowledge-based theory of the firm. While existing knowledge-based theory focuses on the efficiency of hierarchy in economizing on knowledge exchange, we develop a theory of the firm which focuses on the efficiency of alternative organizational forms in generating...

In 1977, when Alfred Chandler's path-breaking book The Visible Hand appeared, the large vertically integrated "Chandlerian" corporation had dominated the organizational landscape for nearly a century. In some interpretations, possibly including Chandler's own, The Visible Hand and subsequent...

While the literature on firm boundaries has been greatly influenced by transaction cost economics, strategy scholars often emphasize the importance of capabilities considerations in these decisions. This has led to a debate that, we suggest, has generated more heat than light. We argue that the...