Agency Costs and Scarce Resources: Influences on Brazilian Franchising

Agency and institutional influences on franchising decisions

Article history: Received 3 March 2008 Received in revised form 12 May 2009 Accepted 12 May 2009 While the franchising literature has typically relied on agency theory, efficiency considerations may not fully explain decisions to expand through franchising or company ownership. In this study, I re-examine franchising decisions using insights from institutional theory. The key tenet of instituti...

Translating with Scarce Resources

Current corpus-based machine translation techniques do not work very well when given scarce linguistic resources. To examine the gap between human and machine translators, we created an experiment in which human beings were asked to translate an unknown language into English on the sole basis of a very small bilingual text. Participants performed quite well, and debriefings revealed a number of...

Competition for Scarce Resources

We show that the efficient allocation of production capacity can turn a competitive industry and downstream market into an imperfectly competitive one. Even though downstream firms have symmetric production technologies, the downstream industry structure will be symmetric only if capacity is sufficiently scarce. Otherwise it will be asymmetric, with one large “fat” capacityhoarding firm and a f...

Competition for Scarce Resources∗

We show that the efficient allocation of production capacity can turn a competitive industry and downstream market into an imperfectly competitive one. Even though downstream firms have symmetric production technologies, the downstream industry structure will be symmetric only if capacity is sufficiently scarce. Otherwise it will be asymmetric, with one large “fat” capacity-hoarding firm and a ...

Managing Scarce Water Resources – China