The literatures on bounded and ecological rationality are built on adaptationism—and its associated modular, cognitivist and computational paradigm—that does not address or explain the evolutionary origins of rationality. We argue that the adaptive mechanisms of evolution are not sufficient...

The impact of information technology (IT) on the stability of market equilibrium is explained from a simple microeconomic standpoint. Attributes of a dynamically stable “virtual” market equilibrium are described assuming consumer rationality, an elastic supply curve, and minimum static...

This paper analyzes the design of innovation contests when the quality of an innovation depends on the research approach of the supplier, but the best approach is unknown. Diversity of approaches is desirable because it generates an option value. In our main model with two suppliers, the buyer...

This paper analyzes a sequential game where firms decide about outsourcing the production of a non-specific input good to an imperfectly competitive input market. We apply the taxonomy of business strategies introduced by Fudenberg and Tirole (1984) to characterize the different equilibria. We...

This paper explores the incentives of competing firms to outsource to a common supplier and shows that firms outsource even when the supplier does not have a cost advantage in input production. The suppliers contract offers generate cost asymmetry, alter product market competition, and improve...

This paper analyzes a sequential game where firms decide about outsourcing the production of a non-specific input good to an imperfectly competitive input market. We apply the taxonomy of business strategies introduced by Fudenberg and Tirole (1984) to characterize the different equilibria and...

This paper explores why competing firms can choose to outsource to an external common supplier that does not have a cost advantage in input production. The supplier, through its contract offers, manages to generate asymmetry, to alter product market competition, and to extract profits from the...

Cooperative aspects of multiple criteria decision making with respect to cost allocation in a network will be studied. The vector valued costs of a graph that connects a group of geographically scattered users to a common source have to be distributed among the users. Here a specific class of...

Even though smalland mediumsized firms (SMEs) were believed not to proceed beyond exporting in their internationalization routes, we can observe new types of cooperation intensive entrepreneurial firms, so-called "micromultinational enterprises" (mMNEs), entering the global landscape. These...

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the problem of optimally partitioning a design process of a complex product, and to derive several comparative statics results by utilizing the technique developed by Topkis (1998). By partitioning the product design and assigning each sub-design to a...