Economics and Information Theory

Economic Freedom of the World: 2002 Annual Report

It is generally assumed that the performance of a firm improves with greater multinationality. Yet recent empirical studies have shown both a U-shaped relationship (which suggests an initially negative effect of international expansion on performance, before the positive returns of international expansion are realized) and an inverted-U-shaped relationship (which suggests that international expansion beyond an optimal level is again detrimental to performance, and results in a negative slope). This paper proposes a new unified three-stage theory of international expansion that incorporates both concepts in a sigmoid hypothesis. It then tests this on data from 11 service industries, highlighting the difference between knowledge-based and capital-intensive service sectors.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/palgrave_jibs_8400003.pdf?abstractid=1809435&mirid=1

A three-stage theory of international expansion: the link between multinationality and performance in the service sector

This paper analyzes the recent progress in the understanding of a class of organizations known as hybrid forms. The growing literature on these forms, standing between markets and hierarchies, raises important questions about their nature and role in a market economy. Adopting a transaction-cost perspective, the paper first confronts the conceptual problem posed by this apparently heterogeneous set of arrangements. It then proceeds to explore the attributes characterizing their mode of coordination. The last section examines the complex forms of "government" adopted by these arrangements and proposes a model for encapsulating these properties. The conclusion emphasizes several remaining issues.

/pdf/the-economics-of-hybrid-organizations-37dxhuaq07.pdf

The Economics of Hybrid Organizations

Human security is the latest in a long line of neologisms—including common security, global security, cooperative security, and comprehensive security—that encourage policymakers and scholars to think about international security as something more than the military defense of state interests and territory. Although deanitions of human security vary, most formulations emphasize the welfare of ordinary people. Among the most vocal promoters of human security are the governments of Canada and Norway, which have taken the lead in establishing a “human security network” of states and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that endorse the concept.1 The term has also begun to appear in academic works,2 and is the subject of new research projects at several major universities.3 Human Security Roland Paris

Human Security: Paradigm Shift or Hot Air?

HE cooperative form of business organization has deep historical roots in the economy. The cooperative dairy association movement began in New York in the mid-1800s as a response to the monopsony power of privately held milk-processing plants.1 It was perceived that a producer cooperative had the ability to produce processed cheese from its members' raw milk at a lower per-unit cost than would have been possible by contracting with a geographically isolated, private, for-profit firm. Modern refrigerated transportation has diminished monopsony power. In modern times, the cooperative form of business has been consciously nurtured as a matter of public policy. The tax laws of the United States exempt cooperatives that meet certain requirements from payment of income taxes.2 Certain other pecuniary advantages are available to agricultural cooperatives. Loans are available to cooperatives at a belowmarket rate of interest. The collective knowledge of the Department of

Economic Efficiency in Cooperatives

This study investigates the role that economicfreedom plays in economic growth and in the distribution in marketincome, the role of government policy in advancingeconomic progress and in promoting income equality, and the effectthat the rate of economic progress has on thedistribution of market income. Structural and reduced formmodels are estimated that reveal that economic freedompromotes both economic growth and equity, and that there is apositive but relatively small trade-off between growth andincome inequality.

Economic Freedom, Government Policy and the Trade-Off Between Equity and Economic Growth

In economic analysis the role of the entrepreneur is paramount to the production process. The entrepreneur is engaged in a Darwinian game of efficiently transforming scarce resource inputs into outputs. In the modern business organization this role is delegated to managers. Despite the conceptual importance of the role of management in the production function, very little is known about the actual effect on output of variations in managerial skill. In part this is due to the lack of proprietory data. In part it is due to difficulties in measuring the outputs and inputs of complex production processes in a meaningful way. A number of investigators have employed the concept of the frontier production function, as developed by Forsund and Hjalmarsson [1] and Timmer [6] and more recently by Schmidt and Lovell [3], to measure the effect on technical and price efficiency of various property rights structures or institutional constraints. To our knowledge estimates of managerial efficiency have not been obtained with firm specific data, except for some regulated industries. In this study we estimate managerial efficiency by manager and by firm, managerial marginal revenue product, the rate of change in managerial efficiency over years of experience and relative factor price efficiency. We use major league baseball teams over the period 1961-1980 as our data source. What is particularly appealing about the choice of major league baseball teams as the industry for analysis is that outputs (win percent) and inputs (player skills) are unambiguously measured, and the production function is simply specified, as shown by Scully, [5]. Our results indicate that managerial skill in baseball contributes very substantially to the production process. The paper will evolve as follows. First, the concept of the frontier production function is briefly outlined. Then, estimates of managerial efficiency by manager and by team are provided and discussed, a managerial efficiency learning curve is estimated, an estimate of managerial marginal revenue product provided, and the managerial efficiency

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/1058656

Measuring Managerial Efficiency: The Case of Baseball

We have constructed a number of summary indexes of economic liberty based on principal component and hedonic weighting techniques. While overall these indexes are related to each other in a statistical sense, there are sufficient differences among them to impact the rankings of the individual countries. Because the liberty indicators currently available for use are fairly coarse, the differences that these weighting techniques yield in the summary liberty indexes are understated. As research on liberty yields finer measures of the liberty indicators, the choice of the weighting technique will become more crucial in defining an overall measure of economic liberty. As Table 3 indicates, the simple overall ranking index we created summarizes the information content of all the other indexes (based on hedonic, data variance, etc. rationale) and appears to be very robust with respect to all of them. In addition, all the rankings indicate that economic growth and RGDP are positively correlated with the level of economic liberty within a nation.

Ranking economic liberty across countries

Students of organizational sociology tend to believe that managerial efficiency has less to do with individual talent than with the environment in which firms operate. Economists and fans know that this is not true in sports. Measures of managerial efficiency are constructed for baseball, basketball and football coaches. Survival analysis is utilized to measure coaching tenure probabilities in these sports and coaching tenure is shown to be related to managerial efficiency.

Gerald W. Scully

Papers

Economic Efficiency in Cooperatives

Economic Freedom, Government Policy and the Trade-Off Between Equity and Economic Growth

Measuring Managerial Efficiency: The Case of Baseball

Ranking economic liberty across countries

Managerial efficiency and survivability in professional team sports