This article surveys the literature on principal-agent problems with moral hazard that gained popularity following the seminal works of Mirrlees (1976), Holmström (1979), and others. This literature is concerned with designing incentives to motivate one or more workers—typically by paying for...

This paper studies transaction costs changes arising from the introduction of the Internet in transactions between firms. We divide transaction costs into coordination costs and motivation costs. We classify coordination efficiencies into three categories: process improvements, marketplace...

A characteristic of many bargaining situations is that the negotiators represents the interests of a set of parties (trade unions, political parties, etc.) with composite interests, whose bargaining behaviour is regulated by some collective decision mechanism. In this paper we provide a natural...

Increasing water scarcity has attracted more businesses and their high-powered market tools to a sector that has been dominated historically by organizations operating under low-powered incentives. This paper compares business and bureaucratic institutions through three interfaces. The first...

Deindustrialization is on the spot, again. The anachronism between the real economy and the way SNA accounts manufacturing and services has led economic research to render a new world with old premises. This paper aims to review statistical data upon its factual structure and to answer the...

[Note: the substantially revised published version of this article is available at www.ssrn.com/absract=489762] This article questions whether copyright law's prohibition against unauthorized copying and sales is either necessary or beneficial to the production and dissemination of creative...

Various approaches used in Agent-based Computational Economics (ACE) to model endogenously determined interactions between agents are discussed. This concerns models in which agents not only (learn how to) play some (market or other) game, but also (learn to) decide with whom to do that (or not).

To exploit the economies of scale and scope in multi-product technologies, enterprises in advanced capitalist countries grew in the last 150 years in three directions. By substituting in the place of traditional entrepreneurs professional managers, they developed organisational capabilities to...

[Note: the substantially revised published version was posted here on Aug. 4, 2004] This Article explores how copyright law's prohibition against unauthorized copying and sales may, counter to the law's purported goal, have an overall negative impact on the production and dissemination of...

The United States represents the world’s largest market for pharmaceutical drugs. It is also the only advanced economy in the world that does not regulate drug prices. There is no upper threshold for the prices of medicines in the United States. List prices are instead set by manufacturers in...