Technological and organizational change in the automotive sector is pushing the outsourcing of production to limits which would probably be astonishing a few years ago. Whereas vehicle brand owners tend to specialize in design, research and marketing, their suppliers produce components and...

After some two years of deliberations, in July 2006 the SEC released its long-awaited Guidance on the scope of the soft dollar safe harbor. Passed as part of the Securities Acts Amendments in May, 1975, the safe harbor has protected fund advisers and other money managers for over 30 years from...

This paper relies on the economics of transaction costs to assess the likely effect on investor welfare of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC's) prohibition on an innovative business practice known as directed brokerage. Its key insight is that the quality of a broker's execution...

Interorganizational trust is an important factor affecting the actions and performance of organizations engaged in strategic alliances and in other dyadic and network relationships. In this article, we examine and consolidate the empirical scholarship on interorganizational trust in the...

Acquiring knowledge on a partner’s pre-existing resources plays an important yet ambiguous role in collaborative relationships. We formally model how contracts trade off productive and destructive uses of knowledge in a buyer-supplier relationship. We show that, when the buyer’s pre-existing...

Existing studies, largely based in the transaction cost economics tradition, approach the issue of vertical scope from the point of view of the decision faced by the individual firm about whether to make or buy, given a set of existing markets and well-defined vertical segments. However, recent...

Web2.0 users can create new services by combining existing Web2.0 services that offer open programming interfaces. This system of service composition forms a network, which we call the Web2.0 service network. A node of the Web2.0 service network represents a service. A link between two nodes...

One of the important characteristics of Web2.0 is the collaboration between Web2.0 service providers. They allow users (i.e., providers, developers, consumers) to combine their services. The prerequisite for this collaboration is openness of the Web2.0 service system. Although the Web2.0...

This paper analyzes royalty rates in franchise contracts, focusing on the two leading hypotheses. We consider whether royalty payments are simply the means for franchisors to acquire revenue from franchisees (revenue hypothesis), or are to preserve incentives for the franchisors to exert...