Flexibility in response to competitive pressure from globalized markets and increasingly individualized customer desires has become vital for firms. A common strategy to address this challenge is to employ a dynamic concept of organization and reach beyond the boundaries of the firm....

We introduce the proto-entrepreneur as an economic agent who must first — i.e., before acting entrepreneurially — coordinate non-price information with others in order to reveal exploitable opportunities. Entrepreneurship, therefore, involves dual economic discovery problems, each of which...

By employing modularity theory, we study the general phenomenon of open-source collaboration, which includes, e.g., collective invention and open science besides open-source software production. We focus on how open-source collaboration coordinates the division of labor. We find that open-source...

By analyzing production with a continuum of tasks subject to common stochastic effects, the analysis shows that tension between business commonality and standardization is an important source of product cycles. The paper addresses the question of whether business commonality and standardization...

This paper introduce a list of desirable efficiency properties that any a patent system should have in order to enhance innovation, trade competitiveness, employment mobility and economic growth. We briefly overview the literature on patents and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the...

In the context of the WTO, intellectual property rights (IPR) are codified in the TRIPS-agreement. While covering all the different types of IPR, landmark cases of the still young history of TRIPS have dealt with commercial copyrights. This paper summarizes the basic economics of the IPR branch...

In the context of the WTO, intellectual property rights (IPR) are codified in the TRIPS-agreement. While covering all the different types of IPR, landmark cases of the still young history of TRIPS have dealt with commercial copyrights. This paper summarizes the basic economics of the IPR branch...