We investigate the optimal R&D portfolio of a single-product monopolist investing in cost-reducing activities accompanied by efforts improving the quality of its product. There emerges that the firm's relative incentives along the two directions are conditional upon market affluency, measured by...

Purpose – To show that necessary condition hypotheses are important in operationsmanagement, and to present a consistent methodology for building and testing them.Necessary condition hypotheses (“X is necessary for Y”) express conditions that must bepresent in order to have a desired...

We present a dynamic model in which an employee of a firm searches for business projects in a changing environment. It is costly to induce the employee who found a successful project in the past period to search for a new project. Past success can therefore result in profitreducing corporate...

Knowledge is still considered to be power and its externalization makes it possible for others to use that power. In this paper, we examine the theory of brainstorming, and the claim by father Alex Osborn that in a group session an individual can think of twice as many ideas than working alone....

In this paper, we analyze the problem of congestion and quality loss of data transmission through the Internet from an economic perspective. We show that due to the congestion problem, quality sensitive services are likely to be crowded out by high volume but less quality sensitive applications...

An indivisible good is an ideal type with interesting properties and strong implications about public policy. It is a good - such as a heart transplant or a treatment for AIDS - that must be consumed in a fixed amount or not at all. The community's demand curve for an indivisible good is a...

Ever since its introduction in the 1990s, the systems of innovations (SI) concept has received a great deal of attention from researchers and politicians. The systems of innovation policy (SIP) approach, which is based on the SI concept, is considered an alternative to neoclassical theory. Its...

This paper argues that growth theory needs a more general notion of “regularity” than that of exponential growth. We suggest that paths along which the rate of decline of the growth rate is proportional to the growth rate itself deserve attention. This opens up for considering a richer set...