In this paper we analyze the incentive of the German postal service (Deutsche Post AG, DPAG) to increase quality in the light of the upcoming liberalization of the postal services market. Currently, there would be no incentive for DPAG to increase its quality if the market were not to be...

This paper examines the publication of quality indicators in service markets with public finance systems, such as education and healthcare markets. We provide a spatial model of product differentiation in which the reporting of such indicators increases consumers’ decision weight on quality...

In the context of yardstick regulation with long-lived assets, the influence of heterogeneous investment cycles on the ability to recover capital is found to be important. The application of efficient firm standards-based on historic (straight-line) depreciation-given heterogeneous investment...

Enterprise systems, i. e. company-wide packages of enterprise software for planning, calculating and managing business processes, are widely used in various industry branches throughout many countries. In general employed to replace firms’ usually poorly connected legacy software, enterprise...

Economic theory suggests that financing constraints may occur due to capital market imperfections. These particularly affect investments in innovation projects as such projects are typically characterized by a high degree of uncertainty, complexity and specificity. Financing innovation...

This article considers cognitive distance and combined competence as predictors of success in co-operative Research and Development (R&D) projects of firms. The concepts of cognitive distance and combined competence are operationalised based upon a dedicated survey, answered by matched pairs of...

Competition forces firms to find new ways to advance in the market and be innovative in order to differentiate themselves from rivals. Design activities may be one of several key factors contributing to new product development. The success story of Apple's iPod has shown that the right design...

The resource-based view of the firm is characterized by the idea that capital, labor and natural resources are the factors influencing the economic growth of a company. In the last decades, the awareness of knowledge as an important driver of economic growth has increased, and led to the...

The internationalisation of corporate R&D is an opportunity for firms to reach local knowledge and expertise which is distributed globally. Firms' innovation activities which are carried out abroad comprise either the localization of uniform products to local needs with locally available...

Recent Internet technologies and web-based applications, such as social software, are being increasingly applied in firms. Social software can be employed for knowledge management and for external communication enabling access to internal and external knowledge. Knowledge in turn constitutes one...