Research on the recent European financial crisis has prompted exploration of the harmonic and disharmonic views of international economic relations. The former, more liberal view is based on the Ricardian and Neoclassical trade theories. The latter is derived from pre-Smithian mercantilist...

The European crisis appears as the n-th “this time is different” episode of the financial liberalisation sequence cum fixed exchange rates, capital flows from the centre to the periphery, housing bubble, current account (CA) deficit and indebtedness, default. In the author’s view, although...

Contributions to Brancaccio and Fontana (2011) look at a variety of aspects of the current crisis, some of them focusing on the contingent financial causes, others on the underlying contradictions of capitalist economies. In this context, less attention has been paid to the role of Europe and...

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 Coasean theory of the firm (Coase, 1937) has flourished with the theory of incomplete contracts. Transaction costs in the form of enforcement costs have been deemed to be the main determinants of the decision to ‘make’ versus ‘buy’. Surprisingly, this stream of literature has almost...

Many real world transactions occur in a common agency environment in which an agent interacts with several principals having competing interests. The hold-up literature, however, has so far neglected to investigate common agency transactions. In this paper, we consider the hold-up problem that...

This paper extends the framework provided by the so-called GHM approach to a context of endogenous outside options, showing how the optimality of property rights assignment might be reversed. In some cases, non-owners could over-invest in specific assets while having mere access to property...

Taking value as the socio-economic analogue of biological or cultural fitness, in this paper I start a study of the interaction between individual-level and group-level explanatory mechanisms by looking for what kind of intra-group relationships obtains given the nature of inter-group...

F/OSS software has been described by many as a puzzle. In the past five years, it has stimulated the curiosity of scholars in a variety of fields, including economics, law, psychology, anthropology and computer science, so that the number of contributions on the subject has increased...

This paper introduces a notion of exploitation according to which participants in a cooperative production process are exploited to the extent that their earnings coincide with what they would earn from independent participation in the production process. This notion is then used to show that,...