The purpose of this paper is to assess the sequence of technological changes occurred in the retail banking sector of the United Kingdom against the emergence of customer services by developing an evolutionary argument. The historical paradigm of Information Technology provides useful insights...

In a vertically differentiated market with cost asymmetries, the risk dominance criterion selects the equilibrium where the high quality is produced by the efficient firm. We show that a sufficiently high Minimum Quality Standard reverses equilibrium selection. Hence, MQS may be used in order to...

This paper analyses oligopolies using the Cournot/Stackelberg framework, but allowing some firms to be pursueing aims other than profit maximisation. The existence of even a single output maximising firm can have dramatic effects on outputs, prices and welfare, even if such a firms faces...

There is a tradition in the literature of transaction-cost economics that seeks to explain the existence of firms in terms of the inherent superiority of firms as an organizational form in some circumstances. The problem with these arguments is that they tend to contrast real firms with an...

This paper analyzes empirically the boundaries of the firm based on Williamson's perspective on what determines firm size. It uses firm performance (risk-adjusted profitability and growth) as dependent variable; and firm organization, diseconomies of scale (atmospheric consequences, bureaucratic...

This paper examines the current conditions in the US telecommunications sector (October 2002). We examine the impact of technological and regulatory change on market structure and business strategy. Among others, we discuss the emergence and decline of the telecom bubble, the impact on pricing...

Inertia in academia sometimes obstructs the development of important insights. That is one reason for the specially long gap separating Coase's seminal paper [1937] that laid the foundations of current Transaction Cost Economics (TCE) and the efforts of scholars to develop his ideas. But as TCE...

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Ensayo sobre cajeros automaticos. La experiencia en la adopcion de ATMs nos sugiere que normalmente la modernizacion tecnologica se asocia con reduccion de costos pero un aspecto frecuentemente olvidado es el caracter estrategico de estas inversiones.

We examine the effects of market structure and the internal organization of firms on equilibrium R&D projects. We compare a monopolist's choice of R&D portfolio to that of a welfare maximizer. We next show that Sah and Stiglitz's finding that the market portfolio of R&D is independent of the...