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- January 12, 2023
- Article
Progressive Decentralization: A High-level Framework
By: Jad Esber and Scott Duke Kominers
We explain a high-level framework for designing for future decentralization up front, and offer some guidance about when and how to do so. The guidelines apply to both web3 projects and more traditional organizations.
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- September 10, 2022
- Article
NFT Sales: Clearing the Market, Avoiding Gas Wars
By: Scott Duke Kominers and Tim Roughgarden
Instead of letting the market decide the price for their primary sale offerings, many NFT projects choose to initially sell their NFTs at prices below the market-clearing level. But what happens when market designers trade off efficiency for equity; or when demand far...
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- March 2022
- Article
Contractual Restrictions and Debt Traps
By: Ernest Liu and Benjamin N. Roth
Microcredit and other forms of small-scale finance have failed to catalyze entrepreneurship in developing countries. In these credit markets, borrowers and lenders often bargain over not only the interest rate but also implicit restrictions on types of investment. We...
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- Article
Small States in an Age of Empires: The Duchy of Parma's Colonial Moment, 1750–1770
By: Arnaud Orain and Sophus A. Reinert
Often thought of as the "Athens of Italy" during the Enlightenment, and as a microcosm of the Italian peninsula and of the eighteenth century alike, the Duchy of Parma played a unique role in the culture and politics of the age. This essay focuses on its "colonial...
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- May 2021
- Case
The International Space Station, Principal-Agent Problems, and NASA's Quest to Keep Humans in Space
By: Matthew Weinzierl and Mehak Sarang
In building the International Space Station (ISS), NASA opened the door to the development of a robust in-space economy in low-Earth Orbit, and yet the decision to build the station, and continue to extend its lifetime, placed a huge burden on NASA’s Human Spaceflight...
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- November 2020
- Article
Disrupting the Disruptors or Enhancing Them? How Blockchain Re‐Shapes Two‐Sided Platforms
By: Daniel Trabucchi, Antonella Moretto, Tommaso Buganza and Alan MacCormack
The importance of platform‐based businesses in the modern economy is growing continuously and becoming increasingly relevant. Specifically, the deployment of digital technologies has enhanced the applicability of two‐sided business models, enabling companies to act not...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations: Chapter 4 The Mirroring Hypothesis: Linkages Inside and Across Transaction Free Zones
A technology is a specific way to achieve a material goal. It describes a feasible path—a recipe—by which a group of people can arrive at a goal that none could achieve individually. Technical recipes thus require linkages between and among the various contributors to...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Transaction Cost Economics in the Digital Economy: A Research Agenda
By: Frank Nagle, Robert Seamans and Steve Tadelis
Transaction Cost Economics (TCE) theory has played an important role in understanding when it is more efficient for a transaction between two parties to occur within the market or within an organization. However, as more transactions occur in a digitally-mediated...
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- 2020
- Chapter
Foreign Direct Investment, Finance and Economic Development
By: Laura Alfaro and Jasmina Chauvin
Research has sought to understand how foreign direct investment affects host economies. This paper reviews the empirical literature, specifically addressing the question: How does FDI affect economic development of host countries and what is the role of local financial...
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- 2018
- Book
A Crisis of Beliefs: Investor Psychology and Financial Fragility
By: Nicola Gennaioli and Andrei Shleifer
The collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 caught markets and regulators by surprise. Although the government rushed to rescue other financial institutions from a similar fate after Lehman, it could not prevent the deepest recession in postwar history. A...
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- 2018
- Chapter
Historical Political Economy
This book is a major contribution to the study of political economy. With chapters ranging from the origins of political economy to its most exciting research fields, this handbook provides a reassessment of political economy as it stands today, while boldly gesturing...
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- April 2017
- Article
The New Look of Deal Protection
By: Guhan Subramanian and Fernán Restrepo
Deal protection in mergers and acquisitions (M&A) evolves in response to Delaware case law and the business goals of acquirers and targets. We construct a new sample of M&A deals from 2003 to 2015 to identify four such areas of evolution in current transactional...
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- November 2016
- Article
Spatial Organization of Firms and Location Choices Through the Value Chain
By: Juan Alcacer and Mercedes Delgado
We explore the impact of geographically bounded, intra-firm linkages (internal agglomerations) and geographically bounded, inter-firm linkages (external agglomerations) on firms' location strategies. Using data from the Census Bureau's Longitudinal Business Database,...
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- Spring 2016
- Article
Performance Responses to Competition Across Skill-Levels in Rank Order Tournaments: Field Evidence and Implications for Tournament Design
By: Kevin J. Boudreau, Karim R. Lakhani and Michael E. Menietti
Tournaments are widely used in the economy to organize production and innovation. We study individual contestant-level data from 2,796 contestants in 774 software algorithm design contests with random assignment. Precisely conforming to theory predictions, the...
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- 2016
- Book
Revolutionizing Innovation: Users, Communities, and Open Innovation
By: Dietmar Harhoff and Karim R. Lakhani
The last two decades have witnessed an extraordinary growth of new models of managing and organizing the innovation process, which emphasize users over producers. Large parts of the knowledge economy now routinely rely on users, communities, and open innovation...
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- 2019
- Working Paper
Self-Interest: The Economist's Straitjacket
By: Robert Simons
This paper examines contemporary economic theories that focus on the design and management of business organizations. In the first part of the paper, a taxonomy is presented that describes the different types of economists interested in this subject—market economists,...
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Keywords:
Self-interest;
Economist;
Moral Philosophers;
Regulation;
Capture;
Organization Design;
Economy Theory;
Organization Theory;
Management Theory;
Commitment;
Controls;
Governance;
Customers;
Conflict of Interests;
Business or Company Management;
Competition;
Organizational Design;
Business Education;
Agency Theory;
Economics;
Theory;
Boundaries
- October 2015
- Article
The Multinational Firm and Geopolitics: Europe, Russian Energy, and Power
By: Rawi Abdelal
Multinational firms unavoidably exert influence over politics through power that is generated by both structure and process. While both political economy and management scholars address international firms, neither field has an adequate understanding of the reciprocal...
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- August 2015 (Revised January 2017)
- Background Note
Evolving Trends in Global Trade
By: Dante Roscini and Annelena Lobb
The note, while not intended to be historically comprehensive, explores the regulation of international trade from the period after World War II to developments in 2010, focusing on shifts in trade theory and policy as well as economic benefits and disadvantages...
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- October 2014
- Article
Sovereigns, Upstream Capital Flows and Global Imbalances
By: Laura Alfaro, Sebnem Kalemli-Ozcan and Vadym Volosovych
We construct measures of net private and public capital flows for a large cross-section of developing countries considering both creditor and debtor side of the international debt transactions. Using these measures, we demonstrate that sovereign-to-sovereign...
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- Article
Analyzing Scrip Systems
By: Kris Johnson, David Simchi-Levi and Peng Sun
Scrip systems provide a nonmonetary trade economy for exchange of resources. We model a scrip system as a stochastic game and study system design issues on selection rules to match potential trade partners over time. We show the optimality of one particular rule in...
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