We address the closely related phenomena of corporate venturing and spin-offs in the context of organizational economics, for example, agency perspectives and the evolutionary perspective on firms. These perspectives allow us to say something about both the amount and nature of variety creation...

I discuss the rhetorical dimensions of bounded rationality in two different, yet related, contexts, namely in the practice of organizational economists and in Herbert Simon’s key attempts to persuade economists to take bounded rationality seriously, his Ely lecture and his Nobel Prize lecture....

We argue that the discovery process perspective, developed in the context of Austrian economics, is helpful for understanding the organization of large complex firms, even though the perspective has traditionally been applied to the analysis of market activities. The stress put in the...

Proponents of the knowledge-based approach to the firm argue that organizational economics put all the burden on the allocation of incentives and property rights in the explanation of organizational phenomena, and neglects firm-specific knowledge and processes of learning. We argue that there is...

Although organisational structure has sometimes been mentioned in evolutionary economics as well as in the innovation literature as a possible determinant of innovation performance, very little systematic theoretical and empirical work exist on this issue. In this paper, we take our theoretical...

This report maps research in institutional economics in management science in the European Union for the 1995 to 2002 period. The reports applies Internet search based on a university listing, search on journal databases, key informants and an internet-based survey. 195 researchers are...

Like most economists, Austrians have not shown much interest in the theory of the firm. This paper argues, however, that there is much in Austrian economics that dovetails with contemporary theorizing about the firm. Specifically, Austrian economics (in its Hayekian version) is compared to the...

This paper argues that complementary human resource practices play an important role in the development of a knowledge-based theory of firm differences. We find that firm types and knowledge strategies impact combinations of human resource practices employed in support of current activity...

It is argued that an evolutionary perspective on firm boundaries with its strong focus on knowledge, as well as processes of search, learning and capability development is instrumental in developing a theory of firm boundaries that is close to managerial concerns. Building on insights in...

We discuss contract theory from a combined Austrian/new institutional view. In the latter view, the world is seen as shot through with ignorance and transaction costs, but, as a tendency, entrepreneurial activity responds to the problems caused by these. All modeling must critically reflect...