Despite agreement on many points, including our shared insistence that ‘corporation’ and ‘firm’ are different concepts, Jean-Philippe Robé still maintains that they are mutually exclusive: no corporation is a firm, and no firm is a corporation. In contrast, we follow standard nomenclature when we point out that all (business) corporations are firms, but some firms are not corporations. We show here that this is a standard practice among lawyers writing in leading law journals and note that Robé seems to have abandoned the task of defining the firm.

The major contribution of Oliver Williamson, who was a 2009 Nobel Prize co-Laureate in economics, consists of proposing a heuristic analysis of governance structures, namely, the firm, the market, and what he will later call the ‘hybrid forms’. This cardinal issue in organizational economics has made it possible to propose rigorous arbitration tools for the famous ‘make or buy’ decisions in modern market economies based on asset specificity and quasi-rents. However, Williamson's work goes far beyond these contributions alone. His contribution is based on a multidisciplinary theoretical background in building the science of organization. This is the important but sometimes neglected aspect of Williamson's work that I wish to highlight in this paper in memory of Williamson in regard to three major pieces on atmosphere (and informal organization), private ordering, and industrial pluralism. In doing so, I also propose reconsidering the different stages of Williamson's evolving science of organization from recent neo-institutional works.

In his recent book on Property, Power and Politics, Jean-Philippe Robé makes a strong case for the need to understand the legal foundations of modern capitalism. He also insists that it is important to distinguish between firms and corporations. We agree. But Robé criticizes our definition of firms in terms of legally recognized capacities on the grounds that it does not take the distinction seriously enough. He argues that firms are not legally recognized as such, as the law only knows corporations. This argument, which is capable of different interpretations, leads to the bizarre result that corporations are not firms. Using etymological and other evidence, we show that firms are treated as legally constituted business entities in both common parlance and legal discourse. The way the law defines firms and corporations, while the product of a discourse which is in many ways distinct from everyday language, has such profound implications for the way firms operate in practice that no institutional theory of the firm worthy of the name can afford to ignore it.

This paper proposes a new conceptualization of business model (BM) that rigorously exploits the important insights this notion offers and links them to related views developed in economics and business studies. We develop the foundations of a BM concept consistent with the principles of generalized Darwinism (GD) and with contributions already developed within this framework. Thus, we demonstrate the relevance of GD as a unifying framework for developing the evolutionary theory of firm and industry. We suggest analysing BM as a generative replicator hosted by the firm, which structures interactions between the members of this organization and the social entities of its industrial environment. We argue that GD allows us to clarify the nature and boundaries of the BM concept and to specify its relationships to other key evolutionary concepts, such as organizational routines.

Digital platforms have the potential to create benefits for their suppliers or workers as well as their customers, yet there is a heated debate about the character of this work and whether the platforms should be more heavily regulated. Beyond the high-profile global platforms, the technology is contributing to changing patterns of work. Yet the existing framework of employment legislation and public policy more broadly – from minimum wages to benefits and pensions – is structured around the concept of ‘the firm’ as the agent of policy delivery. To reshape policies in order to protect the interests of people as workers as well as consumers, it is important to understand why digital innovators make the choices they do, and therefore how labour market policies can improve working conditions without constraining the productivity and consumer benefits enabled by digital business models.

This study investigated the cost structure of the floriculture industry in the United States. Economies of scale and input elasticities were estimated with a normalized quadratic cost function. Results suggest that economies of scale exist in the floriculture industry. As producers become large and more automated, they have a cost advantage relative to smaller producers who are producing the same output product mix. The existence of economies of scale suggests that average grower size can increase in the future as growers increase in size to take advantage of cost efficiencies.

Un article précédent étudiait la distinction sémantique de l'analytique et du synthétique et l'appliquait à la micro-économie; celui-ci confronte les propositions micro-économiques fondamentales à la distinction épistémologique de l'a priori et de l'a posteriori (ou de l'empirique), tout en s'efforçant de systématiser les quatre concepts. Après avoir repris la définition kantienne de l'a priori et le problème célèbre du synthétique a priori, on met en place deux grandes interprétations des propositions fondamentales, l'empirisme (illustré par l'école classique anglaise) et l'apriorisme (illustré par von Mises au sein de l'école néo-classique autrichienne). On récuse les deux interprétations - la seconde avec plus de détail que la première. On conclut que les propositions fondamentales sont synthétiques, mais ni a priori, ni a posteriori; cette catégorie échappe aux découpages ordinaires. On défend l'interprétation nouvelle en étudiant la loi des rendements décroissants et l'hypothèse de convexité des ensembles de production.

In standard microeconomic theory, short-run and long-run marginal costs are equal for production equipment with adjusted capacity. When the production of joint products from interdependent equipment is modeled with a linear program, this equality is no longer verified. The short-run marginal cost then takes on a left-hand value and a right-hand value which generally differ from the long-run marginal cost. In this article, we demonstrate and interpret the relationship existing between long-run marginal cost and shortrun marginal costs for a given finished product. That relationship is simply expressed as a function of marginal capacity adjustments (determined in the long run) and marginal values of capacities (determined in the short run).

We consider the measurement of performance in the public sector in general, focussing on local government and the provision of library services by English local authorities in particular. We will consider two methodologies that assess the performance of local authorities in terms of the efficiency with which they provide services and consider methods that allow us to account for exogenous influences on performance, such as the socio-economic profile of the population served by the authority. We find that although both methods' results appear similar, the implications for potential cost savings vary widely. Omitting to account for background factors leads to an overstatement of the level of inefficiency and hence the scope for reducing expenditure.

L'article étudie les origines de la relation entre prix et quantité produite. Les travaux de trois auteurs allemands (Hermann, Rau, et Mangoldt) montrent que cette idée résulte de la réinterprétation, à l'aide d'outils algébriques et géométriques, de thèses initialement formulées par les économistes classiques dans un cadre théorique différent. Malgré leurs limites, ces premières mathématisations ont contribué à l'évolution de la théorie économique, en favorisant la transition de la pensée classique à l'affirmation de l'école néoclassique. Alors que la théorie classique fait ressortir l'hétérogénéité des phénomènes sous-jacents à la forme des fonctions de coût, les instruments mathématiques utilisés en suggèrent plutôt une interprétation en termes de symétrie et d'unité. Ces contributions préfigurent ainsi l'idée marshallienne d'une loi unique, pouvant expliquer toute forme de la courbe d'offre.