Broadband communications have become the most important focus in the current evolution of the Internet. But there is a significant difference in the broadband performance of different countries, raising critical issues about the United States, Japan and Korea, and the European Union. The United...

The purpose of this paper is threefold. First, the paper provides a synthesis of the potentialities and limits of the dominant economic literature on vertical contractual relations which essentially focuses on the impact of vertical specialization and vertical integration on competition and...

This paper focuses on recent developments of the new business history on a specific theme: the boundaries of firms and industries. Connexions with industrial organisation, and especially with neo-institutionalism, have increasingly appeared in the literature on this theme. These connexions are...

This papers intends to relate more closely corporate governance, industry dynamics and firms performance. In this perspective, it focuses on the impact of applying the normative, best pratice, shareholder value model of corporate governance on industry dynamics and related performance measured...

The paper analyses whether the economics of the firm is, or can be, historically relevant. In order to answer this question, we re-examine the famous historical case of vertical integration Fisher Body-General Motors. The archive related to this famous case being now accessible, we consider that...

The theme of industry life cycle (ILC) is today one of the central fields of research in industrial dynamics. ILC shows that industries behave like biological organisms, and proceed through different phases of development, from emergence to decline. Although this approach constitutes one of the...