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...

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...

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...

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...

The existing debate about policies designed to foster the development of a stakeholder economy have largely avoided a fundamental question. How large is the financial stake employees currently hold in their companies? This paper addresses this question using data from the Datastream database,...

This paper evaluates the intensity of the value-maximization incentives for average employees generated through wage, salary, and bonus mechanisms. This is accomplished through estimation of the elasticity of average employee hourly compensation with respect to changes in firm performance. This...

Although most of the predicted consequences of the internet-revolution in the 90s did not become reality, the internet has lead to sustainable hanges in the organization of most industries. In particular, this is true for business-to-business (B2B) relations between firm. An obvious `proof' for...

The financial systems in continental Europe are moving from bank intermediation to intermediation by non-bank institutional investors. The present paper examines to what extent this implies a substitution of relationship finance by arm’s length finance or just of one form of relationship...