There is a trend in Swedish companies to use team-based organisational design when striving for process orientation. The first question put forth in this paper is whether this design supports a process orientation. Since the teams usually are rather autonomous it is not obvious that they become...

The paper reports a study in which the turnover and employment generated by the production of Direct Marketing in Sweden is measured. What is generated by the use of Direct Marketing is not reported. First, a basis for defining Direct Marketing is presented, based on purpose with the marketing...

Who gains from more information on the quality of pharmaceutical drugs? Are there incentives for voluntary post-approval clinical trials among pharmaceutical companies? Contrary to popular belief, this paper shows that it is not in the consumer interest that clinical evidence establishing the...

Individuals who are unaware of the price do not derive more enjoyment from more expensive wine. In a sample of more than 6,000 blind tastings, we find that the correlation between price and overall rating is small and negative, suggesting that individuals on average enjoy more expensive wines...

"Destructive Creation" is the deliberate introduction of new, perhaps improved generations of durable goods that destroy, directly or indirectly, the usage value of units previously sold inducing consumers to repeat their purchase. This paper discusses this practice by a single seller in an...

We study an asymmetric information model in which two firms are active on a market where buyers only observe the average quality supplied. Quantities and cost structures are exogenously given and firms compete in quality. Before choosing their qualities, they bargain over a perfectly enforcable...

Two firms produce different qualities at possibly different, constant marginal costs. They compete in quantities on a market where buyers only observe the average quality supplied. The model is a generalization of the standard Cournot duopoly, which corresponds to the special case where the two...

The paper considers the pricing decision by a seller who has private information about quality. It is shown that, contrary to widespread belief, high quality products may be sold with positive probability even when buyers have no private information. The separating equilibria have a very simple...

In many developing countries rural industrialization is increasingly perceived to offer an escape from the predicament of diminishing returns to labour in agriculture on the one hand and low employment elasticity in large-scale manufacturing on the other hand. The present study explores the...

There has been a revival of interest in small industries and their linkages with a nation's institutional arrangements, among both academicians and policy makers. Extending the definition of institutions to include formal and informal rules, this paper attempts to identify these linkages using...