Oliver E. Williamson is the 2009 co-recipient (with Elinor Ostrom) of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, awarded ‘for his analysis of economic governance, especially the boundaries of the firm’.

This paper examines the Transaction Cost Economics (TCE) theory of capital structure and finds that for the case of equity the usual TCE logic is not fully worked out. In particular, an analysis of the key issue of bilateral dependency between the firm and its shareholders is absent. To fill...

A central aspect of the industrial evolution in the advanced economies is the phenomenon called servitization. In general, the term servitization or product-service transition is used to highlight the change, where the tangible offering of a manufacturing firm is augmented with intangible...

Early services literature and the original service-dominant logic (SDL) work of Vargo and Lush (Journal of Marketing 68(1):1–17, <CitationRef CitationID="CR24">2004a</CitationRef>) have suggested a dyadic customer and company relationship in the value creation process. While extant literature increasingly acknowledges more complex...</citationref>

The aim of this contribution is to discuss the evolution of marketing, arguing whether it is accomplishing a paradigm change. Starting from previous definitions of paradigm, we adopt the viable systems approach (<i><sc>v</sc>S<sc>a</sc></i>) as a general interpretation key useful for interpreting the evolution of...

The objective of this paper is to review recent developments in service theory and systems theory with a view to identifying common features between the two. In particular, the study explores the issue of whether so-called `smart service systems' can be understood in terms of the `viable systems...

Service science is an emerging discipline concerned with the evolution, interaction, and reciprocal cocreation of value among service systems (Maglio and Spohrer [Maglio, P. P., J. Spohrer. 2008. Fundamentals of Service Science. <i>Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science</i> <b>36</b>(1) 18-20.]; Spohrer...

The purpose of this research is demonstrating that the network strategy influences the complex tourist product quality and if the firms pursue a co-planning value strategy, this latter affects marketing choices of tourist product. Authors propose a theoretical model which represents an...

The purpose of this paper is to empirically study challenges faced by product and service providers when innovating openly with customers in business-to-business (B-to-B) markets. The study aims to fill the research gap of how the challenges vary in different types of customer involvement in...

Service systems engineering (SSE) focuses on the systematic design and development of service systems. Guided by a value proposition, service systems enable value co-creation through a configuration of actors and resources (often including a service architecture, technology, information, and...