The paper addresses the effect of technological progress on the frontiers of the firm, building on transaction cost theory and agency theory. The model incorporates four types of costs: production, coordination, management, and transaction costs. The market has lower production costs, but higher...

The analysis of organizational change and particularly of its impacts on incentives is neither simple nor easy. We consider here four contexts (choosing a level of decentralization, choosing the level of responsibility for pollution damage, choosing a level of technological or organisational...

This survey presents within a single model three theories of decentralization of decision-making within organizations based on private information and incentives. Renegotiation, collusion, and limits on communication are three sufficient conditions for decentralization to be optimal. Cet article...

Why do larger corporations have more layers in their hierarchy? My contention in this paper is that hierarchies arise because economic agents have limited ability to anticipate and ascertain every possible contingency they are faced with. As a result, the complete contract may become too complex...

In order to cope with an increasingly difficult environment, organizations adopt more efficient and more flexible structures. These structures include delocation, divestment, strategic alliances and even the virtual organization. These modifications often seek to centre the organization on its...

This paper explores the aggregation problem and illustrates its relevance using data for the Netherlands from the third Community Innovation Survey (CIS3), and production and financial statistics. It compares the results of an innovation output equation that was estimated using data on...

A model of location choice by Cournot oligopolists is presented, under the assumption that R&D spillovers depend on the distance between firms. We show that a variety of patterns emerge. Agglomeration is optimal under certain assumptions. Geographical dispersion in a two-dimensional plane is...

From cross-sectional data of 460 firms that responded to both the 1988 and the 1992 Dutch innovation surveys we have reexamined the causality direction between R&D and patents, using data on contemporaneous and four-year lagged patent applications and R&D expenditures. The two equations have...

I develop a model under which workers with different marginal productivities self-select into firms based on the firm's seniority reward policy. I show how this may bias upwards the estimates of returns to seniority in cross-sectional and even some longitudinal studies, when differences in...

There exists no formal treatment of non-renewable resource (NRR) supply, systematically deriving quantity as function of price. We establish instantaneous restricted (fixed reserves) and unrestricted NRR supply functions. The supply of a NRR at any date and location not only depends on the local...