Unternehmer koennen eine aktive Rolle in ihren eigenen Unternehmen spielen: Sie sind dann gleichzeitig Eigentuemer, Fuehrungskraft und stehen in der operativen Verantwortung. Fuer das UEberleben der Unternehmen sind Innovationen essentiell: Ohne Innovation entsteht kein Produkt. Wie sich...

An influential thesis [Kuran, 2011, The Long Divergence] locates the economic failure of the Middle East in Islamic legal arrangements that laid the basis for organizational deficiencies.  This article critically scrutinizes this thesis using the lens of political economy and argues that...

Im Zuge der Globalisierung und Beschleunigung des Wettbewerbs wird die schnelle und kostenguenstige Entwicklung von Produkten bis zur Marktreife zunehmend zu einem zentralen Wettbewerbsfaktor. Dies gilt im besonderen Masse fuer die pharmazeutische Industrie, in der die Ausgaben fuer Forschung &...

A turnaround in the way we convert and consume energy is the key to successful climate change mitigation. Taking a micro-economic perspective, in order to put the necessary changes into practice corporations in the energy sector need not only have a long-term vision of the developments necessary...

Traditionally, the scholarly journal market operates so that research institutions are charged high prices and the wider public is often excluded altogether, while authors can usually publish for free and commercial publishers enjoy high profits.  Two forms of open access regulation can...

In relativ kurzer Zeit haben Open Source-Projekte als selbst organisierte, informale (Arbeits-)Netzwerke freiwillig Arbeitender, die durch eine rechtlich spezifische Lizenz ein „oeffentliches Gut“ erstellen, neben kommerzieller Software eine hohe Bedeutung erlangt. In dieser Arbeit wird die...

We develop a framework in which: (i) a firm can have a new product tested publicly before launch; and (ii) tests vary in toughness, holding expertise fixed.  Price flexibility boosts the strong positive impact on consumer beliefs of passing a tough test and mitigates the strong negative impact...

We show that introducing an external capital market with information asymmetry into a product market model reduces opportunistic substitution of sub-standard goods and encourages producers to concentrate on long-run reputation building.  We test this result with a laboratory experiment.  We...

This paper evaluates alternative strategic models of competition and market structure in online retailing, and makes comparisons with traditional retailing. Online consumers are less concerned than traditional consumers about spatial characteristics and more concerned about hidden quality...

Herding arises when an agents private information is swamped by public information in what Jackson and Kalai (1997) call a recurring game. The agent will fail to reveal his own information and will follow the actions of his predecessor and, as a result, useful information is lost, which might...