This paper studies the impact of innovation on the organizational structure. The theoretical framework predicts that a larger parental pool of knowledge raises the probability of offshoring. This holds in a national as well as an international context. However, when the producer loses territorial protection, the changeover from non-integration to integration is delayed. Employing data on German...

This work aims at demonstrating how the integration of the social responsibility in corporate strategy is a factor of competitiveness in the market, achieved through the full involvement of all stakeholders. The corporate social responsibility issue, still very controversial and difficult to univocally define, has been, in the latest years, of a fundamental importance in the business management...

This paper presents a model in which resource allocations are calculated in real time by boundedly rational members of an administrative staff. We consider a class of hierarchical procedures in which information about payoff functions flows up and is aggregated by a hierarchy, while allocations flow down and are disaggregated by the hierarchy with decentralized decision making. We assume that t...

We show that the allocation of ownership matters even in long-term relationships where problems of opportunism are less severe unless the agents are very patient. Ownership structure is chosen to give agents the best incentives to cooperate. The optimal ownership structure of the static game restricts the gain from deviation to be the lowest but also the punishment will be minimal. The worst ow...

In this paper I offer necessary and sufficient conditions for implementability in a quasi-linear principal-agent model with arbitrary type spaces. I extend Rochet’s Theorem by allowing the principal to observe information that may be correlated with the agent’s type. By viewing the agent’s gains from misreporting as payments in a hypothetical zero-sum game, I show that an allocation is implemen...

The fiber shaft of human adenoviruses (HAdVs) is essential for bringing the penton base into proximity to the secondary cellular receptor. Fiber shaft sequences of all 53 HAdV types were studied. Phylogeny of the fiber shaft revealed clustering corresponding to the HAdV species concept. An intraspecies recombination hot spot was found at the shaft/knob boundary, a highly conserved sequence stre...

In this paper, I consider a specific channel through which trust between parties to an exchange can go on to affect nations’ comparative advantage in certain industries. My approach revolves around the autonomy that employers (principals) grant to workers (agents), which is a key feature of workplace organization. I hypothesize that social trust generates a comparative advantage in industries w...

We analyze ways in which heterogeneity in responsiveness to incentives (“drive”) affects employees’ incentives and firms’ incentive systems in a career concerns model. On the one hand, because more driven agents work harder in response to existing incentives than less driven ones—and therefore pay is increasing in perceived drive—there is a motive to increase effort to signal high drive. These ...

This paper presents a principal-agent model in which the agent has imprecise beliefs. We model this situation formally by assuming the agent’s preferences are incomplete as in Bewley (1986) [2]. In this setting, incentives must be robust to Knightian uncertainty. We study the implications of robustness for the form of the resulting optimal contracts. We give conditions under which there is a un...

From the real options perspective the firm is conceived as a portfolio of real options. However, the theory of the firm traditionally argues into a similar direction by viewing the firm as either a set of institutions, as set of property rights or as a set of contracts. Due to this similarity, the question arises how far real options analysis can contribute to the theory of the firm and to an u...