• Permeable Boundaries

    Updated: 2012-11-30 14:59:30
    | Dick Langlois | The new table-of-contents alert from Industrial and Corporate Change carries an interesting new paper by Carliss Baldwin and her coauthors called “The Architecture of Transaction Networks: A Comparative Analysis of Hierarchy in Two Sectors.” Here’s the abstract: Many products are manufactured in networks of firms linked by transactions, but comparatively little [...]

  • Business and Poetry

    Updated: 2012-11-30 00:03:18
    | Peter Klein | Wallace Stevens was one of America’s greatest poets. The author of “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” and “The Idea of Order at Key West” was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1955 and offered a prestigious faculty position at Harvard University. Stevens turned it down. He didn’t want to give up [...]

  • Call for Proposals: Austrian Economics Research Conference

    Updated: 2012-11-29 18:59:51
    | Peter Klein | Below and here are the details about the 2013 Austrian Economics Research Conference. Submissions are due December 31, 2012. For an example of the high-quality keynotes speeches, see this one from 2012! Austrian Economics Research Conference March 21–23, 2013 Ludwig von Mises Institute Auburn, Alabama The Austrian Economics Research Conference (formerly [...]

  • Dilbert on Multitasking

    Updated: 2012-11-29 04:58:21
    | Peter Klein | Speaking of agency theory, today’s Dilbert deals with multitasking and, as usual, gets the problem exactly right: Filed under: - Klein -, Management Theory, Strategic Management

  • Behavioral Agency Theory

    Updated: 2012-11-28 14:12:31
    | Nicolai Foss | Kathleen Eisenhardt’s 1989 Academy of Management Review paper is likely still the first, but hopefully not the last, exposure many management scholars have to agency theory. The paper is somewhat imprecise, and it shows its age, but as an introduction to the theory, one can do worse. However, much has in fact happened in [...]

  • Miscellaneous

    Updated: 2012-11-27 20:03:33
    | Nicolai Foss | A few interesting links, Tyler-style: Too ephemeral, even for the Pomo Periscope, but fun nonetheless: Le Blog de Jean-Paul Sarte. Yes, blogging and tweeting (and FB’ing?) research is worth it. Vitorino Ramos’ blog.  Interesting thoughts on self-organization, complexity, bounded rationality … Very interesting 1997 study on what matters most when it [...]

  • Book Seminar: Institutional Foundations of Impersonal Exchange: The Theory and Policy of Contractual Registries

    Updated: 2012-11-27 08:23:28
    | Lasse Lien | Very shortly O&M will host a Virtual Seminar on former guest blogger Benito Arruñada’s important new book, Institutional Foundations of Impersonal Exchange: The Theory and Policy of Contractual Registries (University of Chicago Press, 2012). The blurb: Governments and development agencies spend considerable resources building property and company registries to protect property rights. [...]

  • Pomo Periscope XXIV: Sartre on Ownership

    Updated: 2012-11-26 07:37:57
    | Nicolai Foss | Proto-pomo Jean-Paul Sartre was a certified commie. I was therefore baffled to read about Sarte’s views on ownership (here). In Being and Nothingness Sarte argues that “to have” is one of the three fundamental categories of human existence (along with “to do” and “to be”), and notes that the “totality of [...]

  • A Naturalistic Foundation for the Hierarchy?

    Updated: 2012-11-25 09:50:52
    | Nicolai Foss | In economics, the hierarchical firm arises for reasons related to economizing with transaction costs, managerial attention allocation, information synthesis and what not. Many organizational economists would argue that absent transaction costs, there would be no hierarchies as there would be no firms. But, what if the existence of hierarchy has a partly genetic [...]

  • More on Performance Pay and Motivation Crowding Out

    Updated: 2012-11-24 11:00:47
    | Nicolai Foss | Observing  how economists relate to psychology is interesting. On the one hand, there is considerable fascination:  Social psychology research often produces interesting findings about human interaction, and motivational and cognitive psychology yields insight in human behavior and decision-making which is more fine grained than most econ research. On the other hand, there is [...]

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