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...

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...

This paper surveys recent contributions on the Internalisation issue, based on different theories of the firm, to show how the make-or-buy decision, at an international level, has been assessed through the opening up of the “black box” - traditionally explored by the theorists of the firm...

Over the past three years Italy has witnessed a rapid growth in the photovoltaic energy market, followed by an equally sudden decline when the government decided to reduce the incentives. This sharp change in the trend of the market calls into question the achievement of Grid Parity and the...

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...

The paper is concerned with instructions as a way of setting premises for subsequent decisions in models of teams à la Marschak-Radner, under information diversification. The paper suggests that instructions can bridge people’s differences in knowledge: they do not require mutual...

Persistent and significant privately-held stockpiles of crude oil have long been an important empirical regularity in the United States. Such stockpiles would not rationally be held in a traditional Hotelling-style model. How then can the existence of these inventories be explained? In the...

Governments contracting with private agents for the provision of an impure public good must contend with agents who would potentially supply the good absent any payments. This additionality problem is centrally important in the use of carbon offsets as part of climate change mitigation....

In many cases consumers cannot observe firms’ investment in quality or safety, but have only beliefs on the average quality of the industry. In addition, the outcome of the collective investment game of the firms may be stochastic since firms cannot control perfectly the technology or external...