Coase (1937) famously asked: if the price mechanism is efficient, why are there firms? His answer, following his identification of firms as “islands of conscious power,” was that using the price mechanism is costly and due to transaction costs it is efficient to integrate production...

Incorporating the extension of exclusive dealing into Cournot competition, we analyze the multiproduct downstream firms' choice of organizational form between U-form and M-form. With managerial delegation in downstream firms, we find that choosing U-form for the downstream firms is a dominant...

In this paper we investigate the ways in which new forms of organization enabled by digital technologies such as crowdsourcing and digital marketplaces are allowing firms to circumvent and defy traditional knowledge constraints. This is part of the broader question of when and why these forms of...

The scope of the activities performed by the platform sponsor vis-à-vis the complementors is one of the key decisions that platform sponsors must continually make. Yet, the implications of alternative scope decisions are not well understood. This article delves deeper into platform sponsors’...

Tech giants are commonly referred to as ‘platforms’ in our everyday language and academic circles. Some refer to ‘the platform economy’, or the ‘platformization of the Web’. But our legal language requires more nuance as putting all these companies in the same basket has significant...

This paper is about a set of interrelated labour law initiatives called quot;supply chain regulation.quot; This set of labour law initiatives signal the progressive transcendence of direct employment as a focus of labour law. Supply chain regulation originated as a response to the exploitation...

Common ownership exists when investors concurrently hold partial and significant shares in related firms. In this paper, I compile, document, and taxonomize 30 separate cases of intervention to demonstrate how common owners influence firm behavior. Although previous literature has identified a...

This paper evaluates the recent literature claiming that the US economy has generally become less competitive causing the US economy to perform poorly and that lax antitrust policy is one important reason for the decline in economic performance. Although there certainly are empirical facts...

This paper presents clinically-based studies of two acquisitions that received very different stock market reactions at announcements one positive and one negative. Despite the differing market reactions, we find that, ultimately, neither acquisition created value overall. In exploring the...