While we have been preoccupied with the latest i-gadget from Apple and with Google's ongoing expansion, we may have missed something: the fundamental transformation of whole firms and industries into giant information-processing machines. Today, more than eighty percent of workers collect and...

This paper assesses the relevance of intellectual property rights (IPRs) in the knowledge economy (KE)-finance nexus using the four variables identified under the World Bank's knowledge economy index (KEI) and seven financial intermediary dynamics of depth, efficiency, activity and size. Three...

This study comes to grips with the industrial outranking problem, one of the major outstanding problems of current operations research and managerial decision-making. The problem, simply stated, is this: given a large but finite set of criteria, and a large but finite number of alternatives, how...

What happens when fire strikes the manufacturing plant of the sole supplier for the brake pressure valve used in every Toyota? When a hurricane shuts down production at a Unilever plant? When Dell and Apple chip manufacturers in Taiwan take weeks to recover from an earthquake? When the U.S....

This paper surveys recent contributions on the Internalisation issue, based on different theories of the firm, to show how the make-or-buy decision, at an international level, has been assessed through the opening up of the "black box" - traditionally explored by the theorists of the firm - and...

This article examines the incentive to merge in a Bertrand competition model with generalized substitutability and price competition. The model suggests that acquisition of firms by their rivals can result in maximal concentration of the industry.

This note shows that when products are complements in the mixed duopoly market, both public and private firms choose excess capacity. This contrasts with substitute case, where public firm strategically chooses under-capacity while private firm keeps holding excess capacity.

In a vertically differentiated oligopoly, firms raise cost-reducing alliances before competing with each other. It is shown that heterogeneity in quality and in cost functions reduces individual incentives to form links. Furthermore, both differentiated Cournot and Bertrand competition...

The aim of this work is to test the Gibrat's Law hypothesis for Brazilian firms. Gibrat''s Law establishes that firm growth is a random walk, it means that the probability of a given proportionale change in size during a specified period is the same for all firms in a given industry. This work...

This note uses a three-stage delegation-licensing-quantity game to study the licensing of a cost-reducing innovation by a patent-holding firm to its competitor. It is shown that licensing is less likely to occur under strategic delegation compared to no delegation.