When production is carried out by many geographically clustered small firms specialised in particular production phases that subcontract one another, what are the prospects of B2B electronic commerce? Prato, Italy, is home to thousands of textile firms as well as the locus of an early and...

Evidence Theory is a branch of the mathematics of uncertain reasoning that entails profound epistemological differences with respect to Probability Theory. In fact, its paradigmatic situation is the judge who must evaluate testimonies, rather than the gambler who must evaluates odds. Unlike a...

Purpose This article aims to provide a theoretical unifying framework for flexible organizational forms, such as so-called adhocracies and network organizations. Design/methodology/approach In this article, organization practices that are typical of the software industry are analyzed and...

Organizational theory has construed complexity as an objective characteristic of either the structure or the behaviour of an organization. We argue that to further our understanding it should be understood in terms of human cognition of a structure or behavior. This cognitive twist is...

This article presents an agent-based modelof Prato, an Italian textile district where thousands ofsma1l firms specialise into tiny phases of the whole production process. It is an empirical model atscale 1: 1 that reconstructs the information flows between economic actors and connects them...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the significance of bounded rationality for innovation research. It does so by expounding the structure and the assumptions of an agent-based model where boundedly rational actors engage in knowledge development and imitation. It is a conceptual...

Several recent papers argue that contracts provide reference points that affect ex post behavior. We test this hypothesis in a canonical buyer-seller relationship with renegotiation. Our paper provides causal experimental evidence that an initial contract has a highly significant and...

We present an international trade model with multiproduct firms. Firms are heterogeneously endowed with two types of capabilities that jointly determine the trade-off within firms between managing a large portfolio of products and producing at low marginal cost. The model can explain many of the...

This paper reports data from a laboratory experiment on two-period moral hazard problems. The findings corroborate the contract-theoretic insight that even though the periods are technologically unrelated, due to incentive considerations principals can benefit from offering long-term contracts...

We study a continuous-time game of strategic experimentation in which the players try to assess the failure rate of some new equipment or technology. Breakdowns occur at the jump times of a Poisson process whose unknown intensity is either high or low. In marked contrast to existing models, we...