infonet-economy

The Viable System Model by Stafford Beer embodies a theory about the preconditions of organizational viability. This theory has been discussed extensively by the academics and professionals of organizational cybernetics. The theoretical claim of the Viable System Model (VSM) is bold. It asserts to specify the necessary and sufficient preconditions for the viability of any…

A ground-breaking report by New Direction, the Foundation for European Reform, highlights the poor track record of the European Commission in holding trading partners to account.
The report's author, Professor Simon Evenett of the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, found that the Commission only attempt to tackle 20 percent of complaints reported by European industry…

The rise of the programmable web offers new opportunities for the empirically driven social sciences. The access, compilation and preparation of data from the programmable web for statistical analysis can, however, involve substantial up-front costs for the practical researcher. The R-package RWebData provides a high-level framework that allows data to be easily collected from the…

According to F. A. Hayek, Keynes' General Theory neglects an analysis of the production structure. As a contribution to this research gap, we look at companies' decisions to finance investments and at their agility to adjust their capital structure. We thus study the relationship between capital structure to finance corporate production and shifts in aggregate demand.…

We posit that family firms often face a dilemma in their strategic decision making: whether to maintain current socioemotional wealth (SEW) or pursue prospective financial wealth. Applying such a mixed gamble perspective to acquisitions, family owners assess potential acquisitions with regard to their impact on both wealth dimensions. In line with this reasoning, we find that family…

Family firms often evolve into ownership constellations with multiple family owners. Building on agency theory, we argue that the growing complexity within a group of family blockholders gives rise to what we label family blockholder conflicts, defined as conflicts within a group of family owners. To curb family blockholder conflicts, families often separate the family from its…