Electronic communication media and electronic commerce have become substantial components of economic interaction. Buyers and consumers are increasingly integrated in processes of product and service specification. More and more coordination processes are conducted digitally or partly automated....

Cooperative business firms are prevalent in agribusiness, yet no concise generalizedmodel exists to demonstrate how and why cooperative firms differ from, and may beselected over, the more common investor owned business firm. It is shown within ageneric transaction game that cooperatives fill...

This paper incorporates hierarchical structure into the neoclassical theory of the firm. Firms are hierarchical in two respects: the organization of workers in production and the wage structure. The firm's hierarchy is represented as a sector of a circle, where the radius represents the...

This paper presents a model of the joint venture that is grounded in the stylized facts we found from a sample of 200 joint venture contracts. The model incorporates the revenue-sharing contract into the incomplete contract frameworks of Grossman-Hart-Moore Property Rights Theory and the...

We study the location-specific component in research productivity of economics and finance faculty who have ever been affiliated with the top 25 universities in the last three decades. We find that there was a positive effect of being affiliated with an elite university in the 1970s; this effect...

This dissertation views firms as systems of interdependent activities and investigates the role of coordination costs in setting limits to firms’ growth strategies and organization structure. It contains three interrelated studies. Study I examines the impact of coordination costs on firms’...

This paper incorporates hierarchical structure into the neoclassical theory of the firm. Firms are hierarchical in two respects: the organization of workers in production and the wage structure. The firm’s hierarchy is represented as the sector of a circle, where the radius represents the...

University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. December 2009. Major: Economics. Advisor: Patrick L. Bajari. 1 computer file (PDF); vii, 98 pages, appendices A-B.

Economics

This paper introduces a unified model for organizational change that is designed to help change analysts think through the decision-making process. Most organizational leaders do not manage change effectively because they fail to acquire the minimum amount of information necessary to make a...