INNOVATIONS AND INFORMAL INSTITUTIONS:AN INSTITUTIONALIST APPROACH TO THE ROLE OF SOCIAL CAPITAL FOR INNOVATION

This article seeks to add to the debate on the role of informal institutions on innovations within firms. It argues that social capital arising from informal institutions can either help innovation or inhibit it within small enterprises. The paper attempts to provide a conceptual framework of how social capital fosters innovation within small firms. Like physical and human capital, social capital is also considered an explanatory factor in theories of innovation. Social networks become an essential element in the economic activity of the small businesses as they are more likely to rely on them to obtain information and learn about new techniques of productions due to their smaller resource base.Social capital, innovation, informal institutions, Pakistan

Replacing Contracts with Handshakes: A Study of Social Networks of Entrepreneurs in the Weaving Sector

Informal institutions like kinship based networks play a crucial role in business activity. The flow of information in such networks, based on trust and reciprocity helps in creating an environment where opportunism is curtailed and relational based governance mechanism prevails. This paper studies, whether such factors play a role as an alternative governance mechanism for contracts as opposed to the formal institutions or not. The effectiveness of such network factors hinges on the network structure, and therefore network density and network size are taken as independent variables. Though network density was positively and significantly related to the use of social networks for management of breach of contracts, network size was negatively related to management of breach of contracts. Network size and network density were positively related to ex-post transaction costs of dispute resolutions however, they were not statistically significant. JEL Classification: D850, O17, L14 Keywords: Social Capital, SMEs, Transaction Costs, Entrepreneurship, Network

Advances in electrochemical immunosensors

Immunosensors are compact tools on which antibody and antigen interactions are formed. The specific interaction between antibody and antigen is detected by using a transducer and an electrical signal is measured. This specific interaction between these molecules makes immunosensor very attractive for several applications in different fields. Electrochemical immunosensors are successful devices in selective and sensitive detection of several analytes. Electrochemical transducing methods such as voltammetric, potentiometric, conductometric or impedimetric have been utilized in different applications due to their excellent properties such as being low-cost, sensitivity and simplicity. In this chapter, the fundamentals of electrochemical immunosensors are summarized and different applications in food, environmental and clinical analyses are investigated and discussed