Alliances for new product development have been studied extensively in the operations management literature. Alliances between an innovator and a partner create value by utilizing their complementary capabilities. In this paper, we seek to understand what drives the alliance structure: The...

Purpose: In this paper, I explore the determinants, transactional alignment and performance outcomes of franchise contract length using transaction costs and resource-based theories. Design/methodology/approach: I hypothesize that franchisors choose contract length according to transaction cost...

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to recent efforts to ground evolutionary theory in economics in the principles of Universal Darwinism. The paper will contrast two views of evolution, based on the Ultra-Darwinian and Naturalist theory of biological evolution, both of which are...

This paper adopts transaction costs perspective to explain why growth of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) may vary across regions of an emerging economy. Furthermore, it is argued that young and small firms gain more from improvement of local governance than old and large firms do. In...

Research in the “theory of the firm” tradition has often characterized firms as subeconomies in which economic exchange is shaped by a central authority. We propose an expanded view of firms as subsocieties in which authority is further responsible for establishing principles that shape...

The article formulates the information theory of firm, introduces the concept of firm as an operating system, which controls the firm’s operation by the means of the information resources processing, in an analogy with the operating system at a microprocessor in the computing devices,...

Global value chains have fundamentally transformed international trade and development in recent decades. We use matched firm-level customs and manufacturing survey data, together with Input-Output tables for China, to examine how Chinese firms position themselves in global production lines and...