The present paper develops a basic framework for evaluating and optimizing profits in a business operation. In developing a business we are often faced with an infinity of choices ranging from what products or services to sell and what customers to target to how to structure and manage the...

We model knowledge-trading coalitions in which the transfer of tacit knowledge is unverifiable and requires face-to-face contact, making spatial proximity important. When there are sufficient “complementarities” in knowledge exchange, successful exchange is facilitated if firms can meet in a...

We characterize asymmetric equilibria in two-stage process innovation games and show that they are prevalent in the different models of R&D technology considered in the literature. Indeed, cooperation in R&D may be accompanied by high concentration in the product market. We show that while such...

The study estimates the rate of capacity utilization for the Indian paper industry for the period 1973-74 to 1997-98 on the basis of the theoretical framework of variable cost function. It is based on the basic premise that deviation from full utilization of capacity takes place as the levels of...

Among practitioners, inventory is often thought to be the root of all evil in operations management. The stock market hates it, the media abhors it, and managers have come to fear it. But high inventory levels can also be the result of strategic buying and high-availability strategies. The...

This paper aims at analysing, both theoretically and empirically, possible determinants of firm's demand of occupations. Even if traditionally neglected within economics literature, this issue can, in fact, be very useful for Economics, as this paper tries to shows. The theoretical analysis...

We discuss the formation of technical standards platforms in industries with network externalities where firms are free to choose their degree of technical compatibility with competitors. In our model, firms choose affiliation to a technical standards coalition in the first stage of a game, and...

The Malmquist productivity index has many attractive features. One is that it decomposes into a technical efficiency change index and a technical change index. Under constant returns to scale, its technical efficiency change index has been decomposed into a "pure" technical efficiency change...

This paper assesses the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and their impact on the economic performance of small- and medium-scale enterprises (SMEs) of three East African countries: Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. Findings of the paper suggest that the diffusion of ICT among...

When asymmetry or non-verifiability of information, or non- excludability of users, makes contracts incomplete or unenforceable, and where for these and other reasons there are impediments to efficient bargaining, we show that private contracting will not generally assign the control of assets...