Small and medium enterprises have strengthened their importance during the last decades in most industrialized countries, including the United States, Germany, Japan and Canada. The province of Quebec makes no exception as firms of less than 200 employees generate a substantial portion of its...

This paper analyzes abuse of authority in a principal-supervisor-agent hierarchy under moral hazard. We characterize the optimal contracts when the supervisor takes advantage of his authority by blackmailing the agent. We show that the optimal policy for the principal is to deter abuse of...

The relative importance of the benefits derived from the adoption of computer-based administrative and production applications depends to a large extent on the level of technological penetration attained by a particular firm. This evolutionary perspective is investigated in an empirical study...