Principal-agent analysis is applied to contemporary evidence on venture capital investment. The investor (as principal) and investee (as agent) are analysed in terms of risk management, information handling and the trading of risk and information. Investors and investees were paired in 'dyads',...

This paper reports on the behaviour of young (less than three years old) micro-firms (less than ten employees) in Scotland, with an emphasis on life-cycle effects. Two main tests were carried out. The first took Gibrat's Law (that growth is independent of size) as the null hypothesis, and a...

This paper seeks a good measure of new business performance, and then explains this measure by various dimensions of business strategy. Three criteria are used to create a one dimensional ordinal ranking of high, medium and low performance for new business starts: employment growth; return on...

It is well known that both "Silicon Valley" and "Route 128 Boston" owe much of their success ot the proximity of Stanford University and MIT. Knowledge spillovers from large research universities contribute to increasing returns, resulting in divergent development between clusters. This...

Modern management accounting information systems trace cost to a greater level of detail than did their predecessors. Nonetheless, the basic ingredient of accounting information continues to be the measurable transaction, actual or budgeted, rather than the more subjective concepts of marginal...

Uncertainty about a customer's reservation price for a good may be due to uncertainty about whether the customer values a costly attrbiute of the product or not. Depending on parameters, the seller will perform experiments in price and quality, or pure price or quality experiments. The price...

Consumer legislation such as laws against fraud, uniform standards and mandatory disclosure are imposed on market participants in order to ensure fair trade. One argument behind this legislation is that consumers are boundedly rational. I check the validity of this argument for spatially...

This paper examines the relationship between firm size, competitive strategy and performance, for the long-lived small firm in Scotland. It uses structural modelling to test the hypothesis that small firms need to remain small if they are to be long-lived. In a three-equation simultaneous model,...

The work of the Oxford Economic Research Group under the chairmanship of George Richardson is taken as the starting point for a new analysis of the limits to small firm growth. Following Richardson's emphasis on costs of organisational change within the growing firm, caused by the need to train...

Three tests of contingency theory are presented. The central hypothesis is that information system development is determined by contingencies. Data relate to the period 1994-98 for a sample of new Scottish micro firms. Contingency theory is tested by correlation, cluster and regression analysis....