The participation of firms in Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) communities is growing and is increasingly debated among scholars. As Ousterhout (1999) explained, ?FLOSS needs profit? and we do not know of any successful FLOSS products without firms in their ecosystem, either through the...

To disentangle the relations between standards, innovation and competition, this paper examined the processes and effects of standardization in Japanese firms. The realities of their activities were provided by a postal questionnaire sent to progressive large firms in Japanese industries....

To explain the success of different distribution strategies in the life insurance industry, we analyze the performance of single- and multichannel distribution firms in the German life insurance industry. We estimate cost and profit efficiency for three groups of life insurers: multichannel...

Mandatory Country of Origin Labeling (MCOOL) was implemented on seafood in the United States on April 4, 2005. MCOOL exempts the foodservice sector and excludes processed seafood from labeling. This paper contributes to understanding the economics of the MCOOL law for seafood by showing that...

A vast literature has emphasized that small banks are at a comparative advantage in small business lending. In this paper, we show that apart from size, which is negatively correlated with bank specialization in small business lending, organizational characteristics affect bank loan portfolio...

Cooperatives are of particular interest to economists because of their unique ownership structure and the incentives this structure creates. In addition to the so-called property rights problems (e.g., free-rider, horizon, and portfolio problems), the analysis of agricultural cooperatives has...

This market research aims to provide an overview of the Eco Building (or Green) activity in the European market. Energy efficiency is today at the top of the European political agenda, as from the analysis of chapter one (Legal Framework). It is part of the triple goal of the '20-20-20'...

Our paper deals with free-riding issues in product safety control at the collective marketing level. It focuses on the empirical findings of the exhaustive face to face survey that has been conducted in 2007 by the authors with the quality managers of the tomato growers'unions of France. Our...

Contract stipulations tend to be subject to commodity standards. Standards make it clearer what transactors have agreed upon. They also bring stipulations from different contracts under a common denominator. The lower the cost of measuring an attribute and the wider the range of its application,...

Disruptive innovation can be described as the introduction of a new conceptual idea or meme into an existing system that causes the system to be fundamentally altered. Assembly lines, air conditioning, digital film, and personal computers represent such innovations, all of which led to...