The phenomenon of offshoring, that is, the outsourcing of highly- qualified services into low wage countries was until now considered an economy-specific solution to counteract the constant rise in costs caused by the intensified global competition. At the same time, this form of cross-country...

Inertia in academia sometimes obstructs the development of important insights. That is one reason for the specially long gap separating Coase's seminal paper [1937] that laid the foundations of current Transaction Cost Economics (TCE) and the efforts of scholars to develop his ideas. But as TCE...

Transaction Costs Theory has been considered the 'new orthodoxy' in the theory of the firm, being this the very same reason for wide criticism by different schools of economic thought. However, there seems to be signs of complementarity between TCT and evolutionary approaches to the firm. Some...

This paper presents a model of two competing local telecommunications networks, similar in spirit to the model of Laffont, Rey and Tirole(1996). The networks have different attributes which we assume are fixed and the consumers have idiosyncratic tastes for these attributes. The networks are...

When more than one component or activity is needed to produce the final product, a firm may use proprietary standards or adopt a common standard to integrate these components. We call these closed and open firms respectively, and develop a model of industry evolution to study the process by...

This paper analyzes optimal pricing for information goods under incomplete information, when both unlimited-usage (fixed-fee) pricing and usage-based pricing are feasible, and administering usage-based pricing may involve transaction costs. It is shown that offering fixed- fee pricing in...

Wine brokers are wholesale intermediaries. They belong to the category of the matchmaker intermediaries. These middlemen are not well known. Their role is to help buyers and sellers of bulk wine to meet and transact. Assuming that wine merchants appeal to brokers because they reduce transaction...

This paper investigates the long-run effects of average revenue regulation on an electricity transmission monopolist who applies a two- part tariff comprising a variable congestion price and a non-negative fixed access fee. A binding constraint on the monopolistfs expected average revenue lowers...

In this paper we address the possibility of horizontal foreclosure in markets for complementary services (software) where the consumption value of durables (hardware) depends on the availability of software. Horizontal foreclosure occurs when a hardware firm merges with a software firm and the...

Information intermediaries deliver information about a supplier's product. They are paid by those same suppliers they certify. This introduces conflicts of interests as the intermediaries want to retain customers by delivering truthful information about suppliers, while suppliers would want the...