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...

Une entreprise doit-elle faire elle-même ou faire faire : doit-elle utiliser ses ressources financières et son know-how organisationnel pour exécuter une tâche ou en confier l'exécution à une autre entreprise (possiblement spécialisée dans cette activité) ? Quand elle décide de faire...

We provide sufficient conditions for existence and uniqueness of a Cournot equilibrium. The contraction mapping approach is used. Equilibrium is characterized in terms of marginal costs. The result is useful for applications to two-stage games, where, in the first stage, firms incur costs to...

We use agency theory to shed light on a complex, multi-year outsourcing contract between an important public organization and three major information services outsourcers. The contractual arrangement shows that innovative contracts can be drawn that reduce the scope of supplier opportunism. Nous...

This paper analyzes a class of two-stage Cournot games where rival firms, in the first stage, incur real resource costs in jointly manipulating their marginal costs of production, so as to influence the outcome of game they want to play in the second stage. Marginal costs may be manipulated by...

This paper addresses the effects of peer pressure in work teams. Many empirical studies have shed light on the efficiency of peer pressure. Peer pressure can be defined as mechanisms of mutual monitoring and sanction established within a group of agents by the agents themselves in order to...

Outsourcing decisions, and contractual arrangements of the type required by an IT outsourcing deal, entail risks. This is not to say that outsourcing is bad in itself. It only means that, as in other risky business ventures such as new product development, capital investments, and IS projects,...

We show that the growth of the service sector facilitates outsourcing, or fragmentation of production. Services link production blocks, and allows the breaking up of integrated production. The cost of aggregate service decreases as the number of specialized services increases. A country with a...

While it can bring several benefits, IT outsourcing entails some risks. As it is the case in other types of investments or business ventures, the risk associated to an IT outsourcing project must be evaluated and managed. This paper proposes a framework for the management of IT outsourcing risk,...

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...