The current financial crisis is a crisis of theory as well. The dominant theory of financial markets, the efficient market hypothesis (EMH), states that in an efficient market the price of a financial asset reflects publicly available information about that asset. Competing theories, such as...

Between the Civil War and World War II, every state and the federal government shifted toward codified versions of their statutes. Academia has so far ignored the systemic effects of this dramatic change. For example, the consensus view in the academic literature about rules and standards has...

The marginal cost of a good is not usually a relevant factor when crafting intellectual property policy. Marginal costs estimates are based on models of static efficiency, not dynamic efficiency, which is more relevant to policymakers.Profit margins on goods must be high enough to both support...

When we talk about the “governance” of business organizations, we usually refer to responsibility and regulatory compliance, and answering the question: “how should an organization be directed, monitored, and held more accountable?” In this paper, we take recent developments in the car...

Behavioral operations management (BOM) is a rapidly growing field. It relaxes the assumption that "human being is rational" in the decision-making process, considers behavioral and cognitive aspects rooted in psychology to develop models for operations, and processes in production and...

We rely on transaction cost economics and the contingency stream of organization theory to answer two related questions. First, when contracting for complex services, do governments design contracts for flexibility? Second, is the contingency perspective relevant to understanding contract...

Although the pure economic loss rule has been remarkably durable in the common law, it suffers from a theoretical deficit. The rule has not been properly framed within the broader context of Anglo-American political economy. Any theory must recognize that the rule fundamentally deals with...

A cybernetic perspective is used to evaluate firms with or without stakeholder participation in their information and control architecture. This approach also provides a basis for evaluating firms with more than one board or control center as found in Japan, Europe, and labor-managed firms....

The allocation of control rights is a key issue in incomplete contracts. In this paper, we add an exit option, the right of early termination, to the standard agency model for employment contracts. We address two questions: (1) Who should have this right? (2) What is the effect of its inclusion...