The “mushroom treatment� is a common metaphor for the practice of “keeping employees in the dark and feeding them a steady diet of bull manure.� We develop a model of this practice of information suppression and misrepresentation within organizations,...

This paper models the tradeoff between increased autonomy from self-employment and the generally higher income that traditional employment offers. While the demand for autonomy is a purely psychological construct, the economic tradeoffs involved in its achievement are eminently amenable to...

Designing a firm’s boundaries can lead to substantial strategic regeneration. But the question is, how? Moving beyond transaction-level analysis, we consider how the design of the firm’s overall boundaries (rather than individual make-vs-buy choices) yield strategic advantages in addition to...

This paper considers how ideas from evolutionary theory and the neo-Schumpeterian tradition can be fruitfully combined with ideas from Herbert Simon and the Carnegie tradition on decomposability and cognitive limits. Rather than focusing on any one individual issue, this paper outlines a...

When do firms expand abroad? Theory to date suggests that global expansion happens when firm-specific competitive advantages outweigh country-specific difficulties in operating abroad. Differences in culture, in legislation, in administrative practices, and in the overall institutional...