This paper presents a multi-agent framework intended to animate scenarios of compliance and non-compliance in a normative system. With the purpose of describing social human behaviour, we choose to reduce social complexity by creating models of the involved agents starting from stories, and completing them with background theories derived from common-sense and expert knowledge. For this reason,...

The demands on academic staff in all sectors to adopt best ODL practices to create effective and efficient models of learning in the face of increasing external pressures show no signs of abating. The massification of higher education, diversified access, and pressures to meet institutional visions and research objectives demand of teaching staff an increasingly public design process subject to...

To better understand the development of e-commerce across countries we utilize competing theories to examine information and communication technology (ICT) adoption, a critical foundation of global e-commerce. On the one hand, economic institutional theory predicts that strong national institutions will engender trust and thus foster arms length business transactions in a society, such as those...

We test predictions from theories of tournament, fairness and tastes for skewness about the effects of pay spread and skewness on employee effort and firm productivity. The data come from the population of 6,501 medium-to-large sized Danish private sector firms matched with all their employees during 1992-95. Potential simultaneity problems are addressed by instrumental variables provided by in...

In this article, we investigate developments in Danish health care policy. After a short presentation of its historical roots, we focus on the decades after the administrative reform of 1970, which shaped the current decentralized public health care system. Theories of path dependency and institutional inertia are used to explain the relative stability in the overall structure, and theories of ...

Voluntary management standards have become popular in many industries, but theories disagree about why firms adopt such standards. A central element of the debate concerns the extent to which managers exercise strategic rationale in making adoption decisions. Game theoretic models from economics suggest that managers anticipate future adoption to make adoption choices. New institutional theorie...

Social science theories can become self-fulfilling by shaping institutional designs and management practices, as well as social norms and expectations about behavior, thereby creating the behavior they predict. They also perpetuate themselves by promulgating language and assumptions that become widely used and accepted. We illustrate these ideas by considering how the language and assumptions o...

The story of the growth of emerging economies is about the growth of their marketing institutions. Marketing channels are the key marketing institution in enabling the flow of goods and services. However, marketing scholars typically rely on models and theories devised in the developed economies to study the marketing channels in emerging economies, and these include theories based on political...

Firms’ boundary choices have undergone careful examination in recent years, particularly in information services. While transaction cost economics provides a widely tested explanation for boundary choice, more recent theoretical work advances competing knowledge-based and measurement cost explanations. Similar to transaction cost economics, these theories examine the impact of exchange attribut...

Received: 22 August 2008 Revised: 29 August 2009 Accepted: 3 September 2009 Online publication date: 11 February 2010 Abstract Consumers’ conceptions of a market’s institutional logic affect mechanisms of firm–consumer relationships, but are generally neglected in comparative studies of international marketing. This study bridges institutional and relationship marketing theories to examine two ...