This report summarises the findings of a study on the growth factors and growth prospects of the business services (BS)industry, applying an internationally comparative perspective. The report untangles factors behind the extraordinary growth of the BS industry during last decade,comparing it...

A number of private colleges and universities have chosen not to compete for students by offering merit-based financial aid. In addition, until 1990 many of these schools jointly calculated a student's financial need. I theoretically and empirically analyze the effects of different financial aid...

We analyze models of product differentiation with perfect price discrimination and free entry. Although perfect price discrimination ensures efficient output decisions given product characteristics, coordination failures may prevent efficiency in the choice of product characteristics. More...

Open source software development has organizational characteristics that are out of the ordinary (e.g., flatter hierarchy, self-organization, self-regulation, and no ownership structure). The study suggests that this organization of work can be explained by combining the recently developed...

This work attempts to shed light on the “information technology productivity paradox”. Employing a large data set of Italian manufacturing firms we compute ICT marginal productivity across different cluster of firms and the impact of information and communication technology (ICT) on output...

The discipline of ergonomics studies the interaction between man and the designed technical and organizational environment. In product ergonomics, this knowledge is used to develop user-friendly products and in production ergonomics to design human-friendly (production) processes. Beside social...