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 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...

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 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...

Outsourcing decisions, and contractual arrangements of the type required by an IT outsourcing deal, entail risks. This is not to say that outsourcing is bad in itself. It only means that, as in other risky business ventures such as new product development, capital investments, and IS projects,...

We show that the growth of the service sector facilitates outsourcing, or fragmentation of production. Services link production blocks, and allows the breaking up of integrated production. The cost of aggregate service decreases as the number of specialized services increases. A country with a...

While it can bring several benefits, IT outsourcing entails some risks. As it is the case in other types of investments or business ventures, the risk associated to an IT outsourcing project must be evaluated and managed. This paper proposes a framework for the management of IT outsourcing risk,...

In this paper, we make use of a unique world electronics production data set to assess China's upgrading trajectory in the global electronics industry. Contrary to existing studies, we find no evidence that China's electronics production activities are more sophisticated than one would expect...