Many managers face the problem of employee assessment. Face to face meetings are the only source of basic information concerning employee activity and productivity. This unavoidable situation creates an opening for dishonest and misleading behavior whereby employees invest in 'manager relations'...

The article explores joint consumption equilibrium environments. It illustrates network formation through one-to-one directional synapses. Family (couple) arrangements, spontaneously generated under a decentralized general equilibrium price system are suggested - involving link and...

We show that if agents are risk neutral, prizes outperform wages if and only if there is sufficient pride and envy relative to the noisiness of performance. If agents are risk averse, prizes are a necessary supplement to wages (as bonuses).

The fishery and aquaculture sector constitutes a negligible part on income formation of the primary sector and, more generally, on value added. The importance of the sector, however, is far superior to that of its economic contribution, as it forms the basis of employment and income of a...

This (revised) study seeks to examine the rise, expansion, and ultimate decline of the Italian wool-based textile industries over a period of six centuries (from ca. 1100 to ca. 1730). An international trade model combining transaction costs and comparative advantage is employed to explain the...

This chapter reviews the literature on the theory of relational incentive contracts.  It motivates the discussion by the classic applications of relational contracts to the GM-Fisher Body relationship and the relationships between Japanese automobile manufacturers and their subcontractors.  It...

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...

There has been a fundamental development in theory and understanding of market, private, collective and public organizations in recent years. This paper incorporates achievements of the interdisciplinary New Institutional and Transaction Costs Economics (combining Economics, Organization, Law,...

This article characterizes the conditions under which holdout (i.e. bargaining inefficiency) may, or may not be significant in a two-sided, one-buyer-many-seller model with complementarity. Our central result is that the severity of holdout (i.e. inefficiency) is critically dependent on three...

We are well familiar with the economic analysis of a patent system in terms of a temporary monopoly on products, benefitting from marginal process inventions, formulated under conditions of certain future demands. This article develops an experimental and dynamic microeconomic model useful for...