Competition in the emerging multimedia market currently focuses on setting standards for storing, retrieving, processing, (de)compressing, and transmitting information. Each multimedia system or architecture combines several standards, some proprietary. This paper uses selected insights from...

Co-determination refers to a set of rules and institutions which form an interlocking system and as such provide the unique structure of German corporate governance. This essay deals with the reasons responsible for bringing the structure about. In particular, the decision making process leading...

In this paper we enrich the Brabander (1981) and Brander and Krugman (1983) model of reciprocal entry by placing it i a setting of two-sided asymetric information. Following the limit pricing methodology of Milgrom and Roberts (1982), we show that the limit price is affected by a firm''s desire...

Bresnahan and Reiss (1991) derive entry thresholds (equilibrium numbers of firms) for local markets but do not investigate actual entry and exit flows. This paper investigates for thirteen Belgian retail and service industries whether markets with actual numbers of firms higher (lower) than the...

The paper shows that Bertrand competition and contestability can be reconciled with sunk costs. When average total costs are constant over a range of output, marginal cost pricing does not conflict with the budget constraint faced by firms. Empirical observations support the notion of constant...

A number of recent empirical studies of firm-level productivity (growth) have been concerned with establishing potential complementarity between multiple organizational design practices. These papers have drawn conclusions on basis of the effect of the interaction term between each possible pair...

In the information technology industries there are several instances of a division of labour between research companies and manufacturers, who apply the researcher''s know how in production. Firms use several different ways to organise the decision making and transfer of know how. The paper...

This paper analyzes the question whether traders learn to coordinate on a trading institution that guarantees market clearing, or whether other market institutions can survive in the long run. While we find that the market clearing institution is indeed always stable under a general class of...

In the multimedia market, mergers and alliances are alternative ways to coordinate decision making about, especially, technology policies. Salient characteristics of multimedia explain why the amount of mergers and alliances rose during the 1990s. They may also effect the choice by firms among...

The presence of synergies in recurrent procurement auctions leads to an exposure problem and asymmetries among bidders. We consider sequential first- and second-price auctions with synergies in a setting with four bidders. In a series of experiments we compare the performance of the two pricing...