This paper proposes a model where firms invest in secrecy to limit technological spillovers accruing to their competitors, in addition to investing in cost-reducing R&D. The main result of the paper is that increases in spillovers increase secrecy, suggesting that legal and strategic protection...

This paper investigates the relationship between intangible capabilities and further AMT adoption in 116 small manufacturing firms. Results indicate that skills of blue-collar workers, influences of customers and vendors, and motivations focussed on process improvement and customers are the...

This paper presents empirical evidence on the relationship between innovative efforts and performance on international markets for the specific case of small firms acting as specialized suppliers. In addition to tangible efforts such as R&D expenditures, intangible efforts are also considered....

CIRANO and its partners are proposing the creation of an Expert Network in Open Standards and Open Source Software (Research, Expertise and Synergy for Open and Libres Standards and Software-RESOLL), which would be a partnership between information technology research centres, government and...

The purpose of this paper is to highlight a version of the Balassa-Samuelson effect for emerging countries with a new dataset. More than the catching-up effect, we will measure the convergence for three emerging countries: Brazil/China/India. We will compare the convergence between these...

Two firms produce a good with a horizontal and a vertical characteristic called quality. The difference in the unobservable quality levels determines how the firms share the market. We consider two scenarios: In the first one, firms disclose quality; in the second one, they send costly signals...

New international standards for environmental auditing are now being actively promoted by public authorities and adopted by private firms. One important feature of these standards is their emphasis on managerial systems and incentives that support a wiser use of environmental resources. This...

We provide sufficient conditions for existence and uniqueness of a Cournot equilibrium. The contraction mapping approach is used. Equilibrium is characterized in terms of marginal costs. The result is useful for applications to two-stage games, where, in the first stage, firms incur costs to...

We use agency theory to shed light on a complex, multi-year outsourcing contract between an important public organization and three major information services outsourcers. The contractual arrangement shows that innovative contracts can be drawn that reduce the scope of supplier opportunism. Nous...

This paper analyzes a class of two-stage Cournot games where rival firms, in the first stage, incur real resource costs in jointly manipulating their marginal costs of production, so as to influence the outcome of game they want to play in the second stage. Marginal costs may be manipulated by...