This paper examines the economic organization of the trans-Saharan slave trade between the fourteenth and the nineteenth centuries on those routes that moved slaves from Sudanic Africa via entrepôts in the Sahel and Sahara to the Maghrib. The commercial framework of this trade was integrated...

One of the key goals of political economy is to understand how in-stitutional arrangements shape policy outcomes. This paper studiesa comparatively neglected aspect of this - the forces that shape het-erogeneous performance of autocracies. The paper develops a simpletheoretical model of...

Theoretical analyses of (optimal) performance measures are typically performed within therealm of the linear agency model. This model implies that, for a given compensation scheme,the agent's optimal effort is unrelated to the amount of noise in the performance measure...

Market imperfections may cause firms and workers to under-invest in specific training. Thispaper shows that profit sharing may be a suitable instrument to enhance specific traininginvestments, either by enhancing wage flexibility or by increasing the returns to training...

This paper empirically analyzes whether the character-based approach, which is based onthe personality structure and the human capital of business founders, allows prediction ofentrepreneurial success...

We examine whether founders backgrounds influence new firm survival in the early years after start-up. We develop hypotheses linking founders back-grounds to pre-entry capabilities associated with entrepreneurial human capital, highlighting the cases of spin-offs and habitual entrepreneurs. The...

In one-shot investment game experiments where each player's payo is a convexcombination of own and other's prot, trust remains unaected by the extent of interdependencewhereas trustworthiness reacts positively to it.

The fact that an electronic market (EM)belongs to a specific market place operatorresults in specific objectives of itsmarketing. The main question is: How canan operator promote the performance ofhis market place ?The central task of an EM is the coordinationof supply and demand....

Electronic commerce is on the way! Thegrowth of worldwide data networks isopening an enormous potential for commercialtransactions in virtual marketplaces.Now that the Internet and otheron-line services have grown so rapidly,business activities aided by electroniccommunications and information...

The paper proves that in two-player logit form symmetric contestswith concave success function, commitment to a particular strategydoes not increase a player's payo, while in contests with more thantwo players it does. The paper also provides a contest-like game inwhich commitment does not...