The `corporation' is by far the most successful legal concept of organization among large business firms. Yet there are numerous examples of firms operated in corporate form that were troubled either by internal problems arising from divergences of interests between the firm's various...

Market economy has become today the predominant economic system in the world. One of the tasks of the book is to define analytically the essential features of a market economy. The other purpose is to investigate the very working of a market economy which rests on firms defined as organizations...

Biographical note: MokyrJoel: Joel Mokyr is the Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences, and Professor of Economics and History, at Northwestern University. He is the author of the widely acclaimed "The Lever of Riches" and editor of the "Oxford University Press Encyclopedia of Economic...

Adopting a critical stance towards North's recent theory of institutional change and economic performance, the paper proposes a concept of global efficiency which encompasses not only standard allocative efficiency, but also the efficiency of political institutions in competition among groups. A...

This paper studies an economic contest with identical prizes. We consider the effects of division of the contest. When the contest designer divides the contest symmetrically, each participant competes in each assigned division. The main result is that division is sometimes profitable for the...