We present a new model of employee involvement with incomplete contracts and uncertain monitoring. Distributional considerations limit productivity and generate excessive monitoring under employee control, so co-determination can increase both efficiency and labour's share of the enterprise...

The work of the Oxford Economic Research Group under the chairmanship of George Richardson is taken as the starting point for a new analysis of the limits to small firm growth. Following Richardson's emphasis on costs of organisational change within the growing firm, caused by the need to train...

This paper considers trade secrecy as an appropriation mechanism in the context of the US Economic Espionage Act (EEA) 1996. We examine the relation between trade secret intensity and firm size, using a cross section of 95 court cases. The paper builds on extant work in three respects. First, we...

Protecting intellectual property by trade secrecy has become an increasingly attractive alternative to more conventional modes of IP protection, like patenting and copyright. This paper provides a statistical, econometric and case study analysis of the protection and valuation of trade secrets...

Two components of work activity are considered: observed effort, which can be rewarded directly, and unobserved helping or communication in a team which increases productivity. Positivite spillovers from helping can generate multiple equilibria (as in imperfectly competitive macroeconomies)....