The last twenty years have witnessed the rise of disaggregated quot;clustersquot; or quot;networksquot; of firms. In these clusters the activities of Ramp;D, product design, production, logistics and selling may be split up among hundreds or even thousands of firms. Different firms will design...

Our goal in this paper is to explain the location of transactions (and contracts) in a larger system of production. We first characterize the system as a network of tasks and transfers. While transfers between agents are necessary and ubiquitous, the mundane transaction costos of standardizing,...

Our goal in this paper is to explain the location of transactions (and contracts) in a system of production. Systems of production are engineered systems, and where to place quot;transactionsquot; is one of the basic engineering problems that the designers of such systems face. We begin by...

The concept of vertical architecture defines the scope of a firm and the extent to which it is open to final and intermediate markets. A firm can make or buy inputs, and transfer outputs downstream or sell them. Permeable vertical architectures are partly integrated and partly open to the...

El fenómeno de la globalización, apoyado por el desarrollo tecnológico y constantes procesos de integración al mundo de multitud de países, ha generando un entorno económico y empresarial más complejo que lleva a considerar la internacionalización como una estrategia factible. Se...

Factory Gate Pricing (FGP) is a relatively new phenomenon in retail distribution. Under FGP, products are no longer delivered at the retailer distribution center, but collected by the retailer at the factory gates of the suppliers. Owing to both the asymmetry in the distribution networks (the...

We use broad-based yet detailed data from the economy's goods-producing sectors to investigate firms' ownership of production chains. It does not appear that vertical ownership is primarily used to facilitate transfers of goods along the production chain, as is often presumed: roughly one-half...

Computer supported teams are capturing the attention of academics and practitioners as organisations increasingly put them into practice as virtual teams. The practical relevance of current research into computer supported teams could be increased if greater attention is paid to organisational...

We analyze two and three-dimensional variants of Hostelling's model of differentiated products. In our setup, consumers can place different importance on each product attribute; this is measured by a weight in the disutility of distance in each dimension.

The paper analyzes voluntary Free Software/Open Source Software (FS/OSS) organization of work. The empirical setting considered is the Debian GNU/Linux operating system. The paper finds that the production process is hierarchical notwithstanding the modular (nearly decomposable) architecture of...