Hybrid Modes of Organization. Alliances, Joint Ventures, Networks, and Other 'Strange' Animals

The central message conveyed in this chapter is that there is a whole class of economic organizations that contribute substantially to what Coase (1992) called "the institutional structure of production". These arrangements fall neither under pure market relationships nor within 'firm boundaries'. They have multiplied because they are viewed as efficient in dealing with knowledge-based activities, solving hold-up problems, and reducing contractual hazards. They have properties of their own that deserve theoretical attention and empirical investigation.Hybrids, Alliances, Joint Ventures, organization theory, transaction costs, incomplete contracts

Hybrid Organizations

This paper focuses on forms that involve multiple partners pooling some strategic decision rights and even some property rights while keeping distinct ownership over key assets, so that they require specific governance to monitor and discipline their interactions. I identify these arrangements as 'hybrid organisations', in line with the terminology proposed by Oliver Williamson (1996). In the second section I go farther in identifying and delineating these arrangements. The third section discusses the forces at work that may explain why parties accept to share strategic rights. The fourth section exhibits different mechanisms of coordination that may play distinctly or in combination. The fifth section suggests a typology of hybrid organisations based on the prevalence of each different mechanism. The final section concludes by emphasising problems raised by the very existence of hybrids, particularly with respect to competition policies.Hybrid organizations; hierarchies; coordination; rent sharing

Percolation by cumulative merging and phase transition for the contact process on random graphs

Given a weighted graph, we introduce a partition of its vertex set such that the distance between any two clusters is bounded from below by a power of the minimum weight of both clusters. This partition is obtained by recursively merging smaller clusters and cumulating their weights. For several classical random weighted graphs, we show that there exists a phase transition regarding the existence of an infinite cluster. The motivation for introducing this partition arises from a connection with the contact process as it roughly describes the geometry of the sets where the process survives for a long time. We give a sufficient condition on a graph to ensure that the contact process has a non trivial phase transition in terms of the existence of an infinite cluster. As an application, we prove that the contact process admits a sub-critical phase on d-dimensional random geometric graphs and on random Delaunay triangulations. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first examples of graphs with unbounded degrees where the critical parameter is shown to be strictly positive.Comment: 50 pages, many figure

A New Institutional Perspective on Environmental Issues

This paper focuses on how to deal with environmental problems, through the lenses of the New Institutional Economics. The emphasis is on the intertwined role of organizational solutions and their institutional settings. This is not to say that technological solutions to environmental problems should be dismissed. However, it is argued that 'environmental innovation' is often of organizational nature, deeply embedded in institutions that adapt very slowly, making 'societal transitions' particularly challenging. The New Institutional Economics provides some key concepts to explore these dimensions and their interactions, thus shedding light on alternative solutions and the conditions of their implementation. Most examples come from the water sector.Organizations, Institutions, Property Rights, Contracts, Regulation, Transaction Costs, Water

Asymptotic expansion of the expected spectral measure of Wigner matrices

We compute an asymptotic expansion with precision 1/n of the moments of the expected empirical spectral measure of Wigner matrices of size n with independent centered entries. We interpret this expansion as the moments of the addition of the semicircle law and 1/n times an explicit signed measured with null total mass. This signed measure depends only on the second and fourth moments of the entries

The skeleton of the UIPT, seen from infinity

We prove that geodesic rays in the Uniform Infinite Planar Triangulation (UIPT) coalesce in a strong sense using the skeleton decomposition of random triangulations discovered by Krikun. This implies the existence of a unique horofunction measuring distances from infinity in the UIPT. We then use this horofunction to define the skeleton "seen from infinity" of the UIPT and relate it to a simple Galton--Watson tree conditioned to survive, giving a new and particularly simple construction of the UIPT. Scaling limits of perimeters and volumes of horohulls within this new decomposition are also derived, as well as a new proof of the $2$-point function formula for random triangulations in the scaling limit due to Ambj{\o}rn and Watabiki.Comment: 34 pages, 14 figure