On May 30, 2017, the Supreme Court held that the initial authorized sale of a patented item within or outside the U.S. "exhausts" all rights of the patentee to that item under the Patent Act. This decision goes against the Government's position that a foreign sale authorized by the U.S. patentee...

Der Anstieg globaler Produktion und ausländischer Direktinvestitionen in den vergangenen Jahrzehnten hat erhebliche Auswirkungen auf verarbeitende Unternehmen. Organisationsinterne Fertigungsaktivitäten werden heutzutage in einem Netzwerk von global verteilten Produktionsstandorten...

In der vorliegenden Untersuchung wird die operative Entscheidung über Eigenfertigung und Fremdbezug betrachtet. Exemplarisch wird dargelegt, dass klassische Entscheidungshilfen unwirtschaftliche Ergebnisse hervorbringen. Die qualitative und quantitative Fehlspezifikation der Fremdbezugsprodukte...

The fragmentation of production across borders allows firms to make and export final goods, or to perform only intermediate stages of production by processing imported inputs for re-exporting. We examine how financial frictions affect companies’ choice between processing and ordinary trade -...

The rapid rise in global fragmentation - foreign investment, global supply chains, and 'production sharing' - is fundamentally reshaping the multilateral trading system. This paper uses a simple economic modeling framework to understand how the global fragmentation phenomenon may reshape the...

Betriebliche Arbeitsgruppen sind eine in der deutschen Industrie häufig anzutreffende Form der Fertigungsorganisation. Betrachtet man die innerbetriebliche Organisation aus der Sicht der Neuen Institutionenökonomik, so kann man die Arbeitsgruppe als eine Institution verstehen, mit deren Hilfe...

This study investigates Austria's positions in international production sharing and global value chains exploiting the recently available Global Input-Output Database (WIOD). Researchers and policy-makers become increasingly aware of the fact that production processes are more and more organised...

Since material handling agents in a FMS are most efficient when moving in straight lines, a common layout of machines in a FMS is a single row layout. This allows a floor designer to model the problem of generating an optimal machine layout in a FMS as a single row facility layout problem...

The single row facility layout problem (SRFLP) is the problem of arranging facilities with given lengths on a line, while minimizing the weighted sum of the distances between all pairs of facilities. The problem is known to be NP-hard. In this paper, we present a neighborhood search heuristic...

The theory of the firm suggests that firms can respond to poor contract enforcement by vertically integrating their production process. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether firms' integration opportunities affect the way contract enforcement institutions determine international trade...

This paper examines the involvement of the CEECs into regional and global production networks over the period 1999 to 2009. We employ a theoretically justified gravity model which incorporates the extensive margin of trade and accounts for firm heterogeneity. We first estimate the model for...