For three decades a handful of giant American Corporations dominated the world computer industry. In the late 1980s a host of relatively small firms seized industry leadership. Many saw in this astounding reversal of fortune the birth of an open, progressive, highly competitive and democratic...

This dissertation has a twofold objective: to extend the Williamson asset specificity hypothesis and to empirically test both the asset specificity hypothesis and the extension. The Williamson asset specificity hypothesis asserts that the financial leverage used by firms is a function of the...