The organization of information production is undergoing a deep transformation. Alongside media corporations, which have been for long time the predominant institutions of information production, new organizational forms have emerged, e.g. free software communities, open-content on-line wikis,...

Proponents of minority shareholder protection state that national legal institutions protecting small investors boost stock markets and, in turn, long-term countries’ performance. In this paper, we empirically challenge this argument. We perform three-stage least-square estimation on a sample...

This paper is concerned about the adoption of work teams and the factors that facilitate team adoption. It focuses on four factors - trade union, technological change, training of the workforce and shared mode of compensation. Both parametric and semiparametric estimation methods are used to...

We consider the exercise of power in competitive markets for goods, labour and credit. We offer a definition of power and show that if contracts are incomplete it may be exercised either in Pareto-improving ways or to the disadvantage of those without power. Contrasting conceptions of power...

When renegotiation under incomplete contracts follows the outside option principle, hold-up may occur as the ex-post degree of competition increases on investor’s side. However, under this framework, asset specificity may play the counterintuitive role of an entry deterrence device, thus...

This paper studies the relationship between trademarks and economic activity. We compare the distribution of product classes across national, EU, and international trademarks deposited by Italian firms. In relation to EU trademarks, we analyze some characteristics of the deposits of major...

This paper analyses the concept of organizational forms, and derives some implications for the economics of production organization. To this end, after pointing out the role of knowledge in the organization of production, we discuss the theories based on technology (new institutional economics)...

In standard neoclassical theory a double neutrality holds: the nature of the technical assets employed in production does not influence property rights and vice versa the property right structure does not influence the technology adopted by the organization. However, empirical evidence shows...

The firm can be seen as a centralization of market transactions and as a decentralization of a public ordering which allows the management of joint liabilities. The paper advances the view that the main reason for the firm’s existence is the unification and the internalization of liabilities....