There has been a revival of interest in small industries and their linkages with a nation's institutional arrangements among both academicians and policy makers. Extending the definition of institutions to include formal and informal rules, this paper attempts to identify these linkages using...

In a complex and dynamic business environment, managers widely appeal to modern methods and techniques that would help them cope with the competition and offer their customers new, attractive, good quality products and services and at competitive prices. In this context, total quality management...

Acceptance sampling is often used to monitor the quality of raw materials and components when product testing is destructive, time-consuming, or expensive. In this paper we consider the effect of a buyer-imposed acceptance sampling policy on the optimal batch size and optimal quality level...

Firms often use acceptance sampling to monitor the quality of the raw materials and components delivered by suppliers. In this paper, we use numerical methods to examine how a risk averse supplier produces and delivers a quality level that maximizes the supplier's expected utility. We examine...

Do firms respond to cost shocks by reducing the quality of their products? Using microdata from a large Russian retailer that refreshes its product line twice-yearly, we document that higher quality products are more profitable than lower quality ones, but that the number of high quality...

Services are characterised by the integration of customers while the service is produced. This integration leads to interruptions in the processing of a customer order until the customer provides the missing input. Since customer behaviour can be planned to a certain extent only challenges in...

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 understanding...

Services are characterised by the integration of customers while the service is produced. This integration leads to interruptions in the processing of a customer order until the customer provides the missing input. Since customer behaviour can be planned to a certain extent only challenges in...

This paper presents findings from a census of more than 79,000 stock-keeping units (SKUs) in 37 consumer packaged goods categories totaling $55 billion in annual revenue. It shows that, in 86% of product categories, the relationship between market share and retail distribution is increasing and...

This paper analyzes whether workplace employee representation (ER) affects the design of firm hierarchies. We rationalize the role of ER within a knowledge-based model of hierarchies, where the firm's choice of hierarchical layers depends on the trade-off between communication and knowledge...