Much of socially relevant behaviour does not originate in isolated individuals. It is embedded in institutional arrangements. Embeddedness can be so pronounced that outsiders no longer focus on judgement and decision making of individuals contributing to the course of action. Instead they...

In an incomplete contract setup, past literature has separately emphasized the role of ownership and the role of access in providing incentives. Here, we de-bundle ownership into the right to access (or use) an asset and the right to veto (exclude) others from using it, and define control over...

Based on interviews and a questionnaire administered to 25 factory directors in November 1988, this study investigates factors that determine the bargaining power of large and medium-sized Chinese factories. It shows that directors of larger, higher-ranking factories are more successful in...

In a model where privatization of inefficient SOE's is performed by allocating shares to different types of agents in society we analyze the conflict between shareholder and stakeholder interests. In particular, some of those that receive shares in a firm that suffers from inefficiency do have a...

This paper sheds light on the realization of synergies through an appropriate allocation of property rights. We utilize the Property Rights theory of the firm developed by Grossman, Hart and Moore (GHM). In this theory, ownership of an asset provides'residual rights of control'. This can improve...

Some of the most recognizable companies, including Land O’Lakes, REI, the Associated Press, Ace Hardware, and State Farm Insurance, are organized as cooperatives – firms owned by their suppliers, workers, or customers. Yet aside from isolated areas of the economy, cooperatives constitute...

We characterize how the size distribution of plants, within narrowly defined industries, changed in Italy over a ten-year time span, and relate this to the stock of civic capital at the provincial level. Data on plant size come from the 1991 and 2001 Italian censuses. Civic capital turns out to...

We develop a theory of sustainability-driven stakeholder governance to study how stakeholders with pro-social preferences influence organizations' sustainability—their social outcomes. While stronger pro-social preferences render a stakeholder's project choice more sustainable and increase her...

From the legal point of view, "person" is not co-extensive with "human being." Nor is it synonymous with "rational being" or "responsible subject." Much of the confusion surrounding the issue of the firm’s legal personality is due to the tendency to address the matter with only these, all too...

This paper shows that logarithmic transformation of the number of employees in an organization is nothing other than an approximation of the number of levels of hierarchy in that organization. Since the log of the number of employees has been used extensively in the literature as a measure of...