The globalisation of the agri-food system and the growing variety of food products and technologies have made it increasingly difficult for nation-states to regulate food safety and quality practices, giving rise to a shift from public to private governance, essentially in the form of private...

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....

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...

The standard model of optimal deterrence predicts that the probability of wrongful conviction of the innocent is, at the margin, as detrimental to deterrence as the wrongful acquittal of guilty individuals. We extend the model in several directions: using expected utility as well as nonexpected...

Both relational and positional goods are based upon an idea of joint consumption - thought with opposite signs. In both cases, agents are not self-regarded, but their consumption choices are other-regarded. Moreover, relational good lies on identity of its consumers. It implies a certain degree...

Control is becoming increasingly frequent in cyberspace, to an extent that puts into question the latter’s traditional openness. In order to investigate the origins and effects of such change the paper formally model the historical evolution of digital control. In the model, the economy-wide...