This paper focuses on the following U.S.-Japanese differences in work organizations and labor market practices: in Japanese firms, (i) real decision-making authority is delegated more to lower hierarchical levels, (ii) employees are multiple-skilled, (iii) human capital accumulation is more...

Fishermen around the world are usually remunerated by shares. Iceland is no exception in that respect. The fixed wage systems,that have been tried out, have been short- lived and their utilization limited. The fundamental question asked in this paper is: Why do almost all vessel owners use the...

We aim at investigating to what extent reciprocal considerations, exhibited by employers and employees, should lead to stable gift exchange practices in the labor contract, giving rise to non- compensating wage differentials among industries. We use the concept of Sequential Reciprocity...

Labor contracts that result in dismissals are quite common in the real world. The question that arises is why employers do not just offer reduced wages instead of asking workers with low realized productivity to leave. This paper argues that such behavior can be explained by workers'...

This article investigates the factors that have induced and shaped the process of industry evolution of banking in the United Kingdom and, in particular, the reorganization of the retail payments system. It will look at how the effects of technical progress within a changing regulatory framework...

Nous proposons un cadre d’analyse unifié des liens de complémentarité entre usage de l’informatique et pratiques organisationnelles innovantes ainsi que des principes de sélection qui sous-tendent leur diffusion au niveau des postes de travail. Nous montrons que les principes communs de...

The present paper shows why information asymmetry and bivariate stochastic demand and spot price induce different behaviours and economic inefficiency in a carrier – shipper relationship. An example is offered of a single period, single echelon, shipper-carrier transport model where demand...

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...

This paper contains a model of waste elimination through design. It argues for the importance of managing design complexity in improving cost, quality, variety, and time--to--market performance variables. Management of design complexity is identified with creation, choice, and application of...

Family businesses carry the weight of economic wealth creation in most economies. In the U.S. alone, family businesses account for 80 to 90 percent of the 18-million business enterprises in the United States, and 50 percent of the employment and GNP. In many ways, the family business is...