The advantage of multiple sourcing to protect against supplier failures arising from undependable products due to latent defects is examined using a model with non-linear external failure costs. Prior research has focused only on supplier failures arising from unreliable supply, such as...

We show that parties in bilateral trade can rely on the default common law breach remedy of `expectation damages' to induce simultaneously first-best relationship-specific investments of both the selfish and the cooperative kind. This can be achieved by writing a contract that specifies a...

This paper describes how entrepreneurial firms can use superior architectural knowledge to open up a technical system to gain strategic advantage. The strategy involves, first, identifying "bottlenecks" in the existing system, and then creating a new open architecture that isolates the...

Commoditization refers to the phenomenon where prices are declining so rapidly that market competitors are unable to earn a reasonable profit even though the market is expanding and there is strong demand. This sort of commoditization can be observed in many digital device industries, but in...

It was the title chosen in January 2004 for the 12 pages of the "Agreste" restitution of the primary results obtained through this second investigation, to the partners and interviewed firms, which was intended to question the evolutions of the regional agro-food sphere over 5 years (1998-2003)....

L'externalisation croissante des activités stratégiques des entreprises pose le problème de la gouvernance des relations client-fournisseur. L'article présente les résultats d'une recherche sur le sujet à partir de six études de cas d'entreprises industrielles. Quatre configurations de...

Les multinationales laissent apparaître un phénomène dominant: le transfert courant des connaissances et des diverses pratiques managériales de la maison mère vers ses filiales. Néanmoins, un aspect moins connu des flux intra organisationnels représente une valeur ajoutée que pourrait...

We analyze two and three-dimensional variants of Hostelling's model of differentiated products. In our setup, consumers can place different importance on each product attribute; this is measured by a weight in the disutility of distance in each dimension.

The paper analyzes voluntary Free Software/Open Source Software (FS/OSS) organization of work. The empirical setting considered is the Debian GNU/Linux operating system. The paper finds that the production process is hierarchical notwithstanding the modular (nearly decomposable) architecture of...

The paper provides a summary of the existing typologies of corporate parenting styles and discovers the missing elements in the theoretical constructs. New theoretical constructs fill the gaps. The paper presents a new typology of corporate parenting style by combining “adding value to...