Collective Action in Plant Breeding

Olson (1965) formulated a "Logic of Collective Action". We investigate whether a logic of collective action in plant breeding - and research and development generally - can be constructed. Using a case study on the Latin American Fund for Irrigated Rice (FLAR) as well as other real-world institutions of collective action in R&D, we construct an expanded logic of collective action, which revolves around two core features: Impure public goods and the tragedy of the anticommons. Provisions of FLAR and other institutions are related to game theory and contract theory, and theoretical, methodological and policy implications are outlined.Institutional and Behavioral Economics,

Law Firm Selection and the Value of Transactional Lawyering

Following the contraction in demand for law firms’ services during the Great Recession, “Big Law” was widely diagnosed as suffering from several maladies that would spell its ultimate demise, including excessive fees, excessive size, increased competition from in-house counsel, the commoditization of legal work, and the decline in demand for “relationship firms.” While each of these market pressures is only too real for certain segments of the law-firm population, their threat to the most elite U.S. law firms has been largely misunderstood. Even as many firms reduce their fees and contract in size, we should expect certain firms to continue to charge more and grow bigger. The current prescriptions for fixing Big Law fail to recognize that the top-tier firms within the group serve a unique market function. Focusing on a particular type of legal work – major corporate transactions – this Article proposes a novel theory of the value created by elite law firms: their private information about “market” deal terms, acquired through repeated exposure to the same types of transactions, provides clients with a significant bargaining advantage in deal negotiations. By aggregating expertise in the ever-changing and ever-increasing set of deal terms for certain transactions, law firms help their clients price such terms more accurately and thereby maximize their surplus from the deal. This pricing function – traditionally thought to be limited to investment banks – is one that cannot be replicated or subsumed by in-house counsel, other service providers, or commoditized contracts

Aha? Is Creativity Possible in Legal Problem Solving and Teachable in Legal Education?

This article continues and expands on my earlier project of seeking to describe how legal negotiation should be understood conceptually and undertaken behaviorally to produce better solutions to legal problems. As structured problem solving requires interests, needs and objectives identification, so too must creative solution seeking have its structure and elements in order to be effectively taught. Because research and teaching about creativity and how we think has expanded greatly since modern legal negotiation theory has been developed, it is now especially appropriate to examine how we might harness this new learning to how we might examine and teach legal creativity in the context of legal negotiation and problem solving. This article explores both the cognitive and behavioral dimensions of legal creativity and offers suggestions for how it can be taught more effectively in legal education, both within the more narrow curricula of negotiation courses and more generally throughout legal education

From the Theory of the Firm to FDI and Internalisation: A Survey

This paper surveys recent contributions on the Internalisation issue, based on different theories of the firm, to show how the make-or-buy decision, at an international level, has been assessed through the opening up of the “black box” - traditionally explored by the theorists of the firm – and the simultaneous endogenization of the market environment – as in the International Economics tradition. In particular, we consider three Archetypes – Grossman-Hart-Moore treatment of hold-up and contractual incompleteness, Holmstrom-Milgrom view of the firm as an incentive system, Aghion-Tirole conceptualisation of formal and real authority in organisations – and show how they have been embedded in industry and general equilibrium models of FDI to explain the boundaries of global firms.FDI, Internalisation, International Economics, Incomplete contracts

Collective Bargaining and Technological Investment: The Case of Nurses’ Unions and the Transition from Paper-Based to Electronic Health Records

Does the presence of a unionized nursing workforce retard U.S. hospitals’ transition from paper-based to electronic health records (EHRs)? After tying archival data on hospitals’ structural features and health information technology (IT) investment patterns to self-gathered data on unionism, I find that hospitals that bargain collectively with their registered nurses (RNs) appear to delay or forego the transition away from paper, consistent with existing theory and research in industrial relations and institutional economics. However, this relationship is fully mediated by a hospital’s payer mix: those serving a larger share of less lucrative, elderly, disabled, and indigent patients are more likely to adopt EHRs if they are unionized than if they are not, a result that holds even at the median payer mix. Indeed, this accords with research on the interplay of labour and technology as the aforementioned dynamics are driven entirely by RN-exclusive bargaining units for whom the new IT serves as a complement rather than as a substitute in production. Given the outsized role that unions play in the U.S. healthcare sector, the overall sluggish performance of the sector, and the expectations that policymakers have for EHRs, evidence that these unions are welfare-enhancing should be welcome news

Globalization

[Excerpt] While the chapters in the previous section examined employment relations in different national contexts, in this chapter we focus on employment relations in the international or global context. We begin by outlining different perspectives on globalization and examine how globalization has evolved over time. Based on this discussion, we provide a definition of globalization which best accounts for contemporary patterns of global interdependence. We then provide a brief overview of the arguments for and against globalization and discuss the implications that economic globalization presents for employment relations

Enacting global competition in local supply chain environments: German “Chemieparks” and the micro-politics of employment relations in a CME

Drawing upon the debate on institutional mediation of macro processes, we examine how multinational enterprises (MNEs) engage with global competition through restructuring their operations situated in local supply chain environments and how employment relations (ER) of coordinated market economies are reconfigured in the course of this restructuring process. Our empirical setting is the German chemical industry which is both an exemplar of coordinated labour-management-collaboration and highly exposed to global competition. Using a comparative case study design, we observe how MNEs re-structure two local production sites into ‘Chemieparks’. Our empirical data suggest that local agency diverges in the extent to which the social partnership type of ER is maintained or disrupted. Furthermore, we highlight the importance of micro-political practices for understanding the restructuring outcome as well as the local enactment and change of macro institutions within production networks as meso-level arenas for institutional mediation

The politics of policy resistance: reconstructing higher education in Kosovo

This article considers attempts to incorporate lessons and transfer policies from Britain in the reconstruction of Higher Education in Kosovo after 1999. In doing so, it employs aspects of the lesson-drawing framework developed by Rose (1991 and 2001) and the related concepts of policy transfer and policy diffusion. Drawing on contributions from anthropology and democratization studies, we suggest development of the public policy frameworks for lesson drawing and policy transfer in circumstances characterised by asymmetric interdependence, in which the tactics and strategies of policy resistance by ‘subordinate’ recipient actors can be crucial. This article details the nature of policy resistance and sets out hypotheses for future research

The management of inter-state rivers as demands grow and supplies tighten: India, China, Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh

International cooperation over the major rivers in South Asia took a new turn with the signing in 1996 and 1997 of five innovative water, power and economic cooperation agreements. The innovations include four elements: (i) the transfer of some previously diplomatic questions into the sphere of the private economy, (ii) bringing third parties, other than governments, into the design and negotiation of cooperative projects, (iii) the principle of sharing costs and benefits, and (iv) taking steps toward multilateral discussion. However, political and implementation challenges have remained, and have been exacerbated by looming water shortages as economies grow and climate change occurs. This paper examines how recent innovations in diplomacy may be extended to address these challenges.international rivers, South Asia, multi-track diplomacy, cooperation

Incentive-Based Approaches for Mitigating Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Issues and Prospects for India

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