infonet-economy

Corporatism is often seen as the way Swiss stakeholders in business and politics handle industrial challenges in a reasonable and flexible way. The following publication argues, however, that the emergence of corporatist structures in the Swiss watch industry has often encouraged rent-seeking and collusion at the expense of the creation of new markets through innovation. This legacy…

The paper reviews the latest technological tools that arguably can contribute to reducing the excessively high costs of remittance transactions in Africa. Indeed, despite huge remittance inflows to and within the continent, Africa is the most expensive destination to send money to. As remittances have become more important than Overseas Development Assistance and Foreign Direct…

Over the past 2 decades, internet use has become increasingly more a part of our every-day lives. We communicate with our friends and colleagues using the internet, we work using the internet, we also shop using the internet. We learn and increase our knowledge from information available on the internet. While on the one hand, we advance from the instant access to online contexts…

When deciding between product alternatives, consumers have to compare the observed prices to their internal reference price to determine whether the offer is a good deal or not. For product innovations, for which no reference price has been established, it is unclear against which standard the observed price is compared. Despite extensive research on the use of reference prices,…

Biotechnology is a platform technology that may significantly contribute to climate change mitigation and adaptation. Yet biotechnology is hardly ever referred to as a ‘clean technology’. This paper investigates why biotechnology tends to be ignored in this context. A global stakeholder survey on biotechnology and climate change was conducted with 55 representatives of 44…

We provide a critique of the development in organisation studies of the idea of ‘unlearning’ as allegedly imported from the psychology literature by Hedberg and understood to mean the manageable discard of knowledge precedent to and aiding later learning. We re-review the psychology literature and in contrast to Hedberg, find that this definition of unlearning is not empirically…

This paper explores, based on the varieties-of-capitalism approach, configurations of key human resource management practices that explain radical innovation in subsidiaries. A fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis is conducted with data for 69 subsidiaries of US-based MNEs in Germany, Switzerland, and the UK. Contrary to the implications of the varieties-of-capitalism…

One of the major potential consequences of climate change is damage to earth’s ecosystems, damage which could manifest itself in the form of tipping risks. We establish an economic growth model of ecosystem tipping risks, set in the context of possible forest dieback. We consider different specifications of impacts arising from the forest dieback tipping point, specifications such as…