The future of electronic commerce will be shaped by open, heterogeneous and complex structures, consisting of networked marketplaces. Software agents will interact and negotiate on behalf of their human (or organizational) principals. Principals will be able to implement fraudulent strategies in...

Tipping is a phenomenon that illustrates the importance of social norms and psychological reasons in motivating economic behavior. People tip because this is the social norm and disobeying norms results in psychological disutility. Tipping is also economically important: in the United States...

Tipping illustrates the importance of social norms in motivating economic behavior. People tip because this is the social norm and disobeying norms results in social disapproval that creates emotional disutility. Tipping is also economically important: in the United States alone, millions of...

THE CONCEPT OF AN INDUSTRY IS IMPORTANT FOR ECONOMIC ANALYSIS. HERE, WE DEFINE SUGAR INDUSTRY AS GROUP OF FIRMS PRODUCING SUGAR THAT ARE CLOSE SUBSTITUTES BY THE USE OF IDENTICAL PRODUCTION PROCESSES AND RAW MATERIALS. HOWEVER, SUGAR INDUSTRY IN NIGERIA WAS STILL IN ITS PIONEERING STAGE. THIS...

Technology transfer agreements between universities and industrial companies usually involve royalties, sublicensing considerations and allocation of equity. This article extends the analysis of my previous one ("The Economic Sense of Royalty Rates", ewp-fin/970903)to deal with sublicensing...

(forthcoming Journal of Political Economy). Part ownership of a takeover target can help a bidder win a takeover auction, often at a low price. A bidder with a "toehold" bids aggressively in a standard ascending auction because its offers are both bids for the remaining shares and asks for its...

The question of why individual investors want dividends is investigated by submitting a questionnaire to a Dutch investor panel. The respondents indicate that they want dividends partly because the cost of cashing in dividends is lower than the cost of selling shares. Their answers provide...

This paper empirically examines how changes in the hierarchical structure of a large organization can affect incentives. The empirical analysis exploits a change in the hierarchical structure of the Corporate Division of a private foreign commercial bank in Argentina between 1999 and 2001. Using...

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...

The financial systems in continental Europe are subject to profound changes in the institutions of market exchange. Banks traditionally holding close relationships with firms are substituted by non-bank institutional investors. The present paper examines whether this implies a substitution of...