This study examines the role of national culture on an issue which is central to competitive strategy: whether to maintain flexibility or commit to a strategic direction. We consider that equity investments in foreign partners may be initiated as the first step in a sequential acquisition...

The present paper studies the impact of information sharing and contractual instruments on a shipper and her transport suppliers through a monte carlo simulation. After reviewing the literature, we propose a model to measure the benefits in terms of expected transport cost and variance of this...

This paper studies the existence of single-price price equilibrium from a given initial distribution of money holdings in a search-theoretic model of money where agents have no time preference. The model is similar to the authors' recent models of search economies with no constraints on money...

This paper presents a model of an economy in which traders use social capital to reduce transaction costs. A key assumption is that there are two types of social capital: “village” capital relies on personal networks and repeat play to guarantee contracts; “market” capital relies on...

Agency costs are a cost of production, and firms that do a better job of minimizing these costs should exhibit better performance. This paper tests this hypothesis by calculating the performance elasticity of average employee hourly compensation for U.S. manufacturing firms. This elasticity...

A core question addressed in this paper is: Can mainstream economic methodology be improved, and if so, how? In the process, it also considers the following questions: Is there much scope for improvement of intellectual property strategy? Is such improvement valuable? Can economics, and in...

The rent-sharing literature and the agency literature both predict a link between pay and performance. The rent-sharing literature relies on short-term market power to explain this link, and the agency literature bases its prediction on the importance of incentives in principal-agent...