This article describes the benefits and pitfalls of starting a firm with an entrepreneurial team, drawing on a longitudinal empirical analysis of the life course of 90 team start-ups and 1196 solo start-ups in the Netherlands. In the first three years of their existence, team start-ups perform...

I analyse firms organisational choices when they face uncertainty about institutional conditions in foreign locations with heterogeneous final good producers and incomplete contracts. As firms learn about the conditions abroad, the increasing offshoring activity increases competition in the...

We address four empirical questions in this paper. Is there empirical support for: 1) the risk-incentives tradeoff predicted by agency theory? 2) a positive relationship between authority and incentives? 3) a positive relationship between risk and authority? 4) the main testable implication of...

A fundamental requirement of market economies is the security of ownership claims to property. Yet history is littered with cases of challenges to these claims. A large literature has found contradictory evidence for the effect of income and income inequality on revolt, possibly due to omitted...

In many situations the individuals who can generate some output must enter a contest for appropriating this output. This paper analyses the investment incentives of such agents and the role of incumbency advantages in the contest. Depending on the advantages, an increase in the productivity of...

A hierarchically structured rent-seeking contest may be associated with lower equilibrium expenditure than a corresponding flat contest. In this chapter we discuss how this fact may be used to explain the structure of organizations such as firms, including why firms commonly have outside owners.

Standard economics omits the role of narratives (the stories that people tell themselves and others) when they make all kinds of decisions. Narratives play a role in understanding the environment; focusing attention; predicting events; motivating action; assigning social roles and identities;...

This paper discusses various ways to organise these consultations, so that a compromise agreement is reached on the solution of the (re)distribution problem. These institutionalised structures of consultation are referred to as 'matching zones' here. Practical experiences, mainly from the...

An evolutionary tool kit is applied in this paper to explain how innate social behavior traits evolved in early human groups. These traits were adapted to the particular production requirements of the group in human phylogeny. They shaped the group members' attitudes towards contributing to the...

In this paper, a formal rent-seeking theory of the firm is developed. The main idea is that integration (compared to non-integration) facilitates rent-seeking for the integrating party, but makes it harder for the integrated one. In a one-period model, this implies that the rent-seeking contest...