This essay brings fiscal federalism theory into contact with the knowledge perspective to economic organization. The question addressed is: can a central government be justified in the context of fiscal federalism on grounds of economic organization? We point out that if one looks at the...

The paper analyzes voluntary Free Software/Open Source Software (FS/OSS) organization of work. The empirical setting considered is the Debian GNU/Linux operating system. The paper finds that the production process is hierarchical notwithstanding the modular (nearly decomposable) architecture of...

It has been argued that collusion among the members of an organization or a vertical structure creates efficiency losses, and hence should be prevented. This paper shows that whenever collusion takes the form of co-insurance agreements, here called `friendships', among the members of a vertical...

When more than one component or activity is needed to produce the final product, a firm may use proprietary standards or adopt a common standard to integrate these components. We call these closed and open firms respectively, and develop a model of industry evolution to study the process by...

Many European countries have faced the erosion of the competitive advantage in the international market with a mixed strategy of productivity increase at home and labour cost reduction abroad, through the international fragmentation of production and subcontracting in low wage countries. Italy...