New institutional economics (NIE) studies institutions and how they emerge, operate, and evolve. They also include organizational arrangements, intended as modes of governing economic transactions. Universities offer an exciting ground for testing the role of different institutional arrangements...

This paper focuses on the relationships between firms and stakeholders and provides a theoretical explanation for the emergence of phenomena such as stakeholder activism and socially responsible behaviors by firms. We start by drawing an original distinction between weak and strong stakeholders...

Trust, trustworthiness and ethical norms of reciprocity and cooperation have been receiving more and more attention in economic analysis. In particular, two concepts have been widely used in order to study the socio-economic effects of these factors: the concept of social capital (hereafter also...

In the debate surrounding various reforms in higher education systems, performance, along with how universities should be governed, have been main issues. We argue that the demand for shared governance, i.e., faculty participation in decision‐making vs. concentrated or top‐down decision‐...

Drawing on the theoretical and experimental literature on distributive justice, we put some assumptions of the contractarian argument to an empirical test by means of an experiment which investigates the influence that explicit agreement under the veil of ignorance may have on individuals’...