We apply the property rights theory of Grossman-Hart-Moore in the music industry and study the optimal allocation of copyright between the artists who create music and the labels who promote and distribute it. Digital technology opens up a role for new intermediaries. We find that entry of...

Empirical research has shown tremendous productivity differences, even within narrowly defined industries. A great host of studies is explainsing this productivity disparity by factors such as idiosyncratic technology shocks, input price differences, management skills, or international trade....

We study interfirm price competition in the presence of horizontal and vertical intrafirm conflicts in each firm. Intrafirm conflicts are captured by a principal-agent framework with firms employing more than one agent and implementing a tournament incentive scheme. The principals offer premium...

We analyze the emergence and spatial evolution of the German laser systems industry. Regional knowledge in the related field of laser sources, as well as the presence of universities with physics or engineering departments, is conducive to the emergence of laser systems suppliers. The regional...

We study interaction effects between intra-firm conflicts and interfirm competition on a duopolistic market with seller firms employing one or more agents and implementing tournament incentives. We show that inter-firm competition leads to higher incentive intensity, higher efforts and output...

Human resources are a key factor for firm success, particularly nowadays when most industrial economies face an increasing shortage of qualified labour. With their pooled labour markets, regional clusters have been shown to be a preferable location for firms in order to satisfy their demand for...

Incentives and assistance provided by TTOs, university policies, patent legislation and scientific disciplines are certainly part of the explanations for academic entrepreneurship. But they are only one facet of the story. Another facet is related to the scientists' motives, expectations and...

In this paper, we analyze the problem of congestion and quality loss of data transmission through the Internet from an economic perspective. We show that due to the congestion problem, quality sensitive services are likely to be crowded out by high volume but less quality sensitive applications...

Ever since its introduction in the 1990s, the systems of innovations (SI) concept has received a great deal of attention from researchers and politicians. The systems of innovation policy (SIP) approach, which is based on the SI concept, is considered an alternative to neoclassical theory. Its...

We conjecture that the mobility of academic scientists increases the propensity of such agents to engage in academic entrepreneurship. Our empirical analysis is based on a survey of researchers at the Max Planck Society in Germany. We find that mobile scientists are more likely to become nascent...