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AbstractWe show that duopolistic innovation competition between identical firms may lead to an equilibrium with asymmetric corporate governance modes with one firm being shareholder oriented and its rival stakeholder oriented. This happens if the benefit associated with innovation success faced by the stakeholders falls short of an endogenously determined threshold. Above this threshold, the corporate governance equilibrium is symmetric with both firms oriented toward maximization of shareholder value.

The core industries of the new information economy are characterized by imperfect competition, asymmetric information or external effects. Thus, well-designed microeconomic policies, in the form of competition policies, technology policies or combinations of these, have strong potential of generating welfare improvements and promoting social efficiency. This paper emphasizes innovation-intensive competition, strong technological scale economies, network effects and complementarity between system components as characteristic features of the core industries in the information economy. With reference to these features the study explores the implications for microeconomic policies from the point of view of competition analysis. The combination of strong technological scale economies on the supply side and network effects on the demand side makes market structures with high concentration and dominant firms both likely and efficient. On the other hand, a firm possessing a dominant market position and operating in a network industry has access to a more efficient set of instruments in order to abuse its dominant market position relative to a firm operating in a traditional industry. This study argues that the recognition of these two counteracting aspects forms a necessary condition for the design of successful microeconomic policies in contemporary high-tech markets. It is also emphasized that efficient competition policy in these markets has to face an inherent structural trade-off between the exploitation of strong scale economies and the promotion of entry and small enterprises.

We study the role of labour and credit market imperfections for the determination of equilibrium unemployment. In the credit market loan contracts are negotiated between financiers and firms, both possessing bargaining power, while the firms and organized labour bargain over the base wage. The sequential labour and credit market negotiations are assumed to take place conditional on the firm having committed itself to use performance-related profit sharing in addition to the negotiated base wage. It is shown that in the presence of profit sharing intensified credit market competition will raise equilibrium unemployment, because it induces wage-enhancing effects causing an increase in the outside option available to union members. Equilibrium unemployment is also an increasing function of firms' bunkruptcy risks. It is, however, independent of the degree credit market imperfections if the compensation system is unrelated to firms' profits or if there is a monopoly union in the labour market.

Abstract
We analytically characterize the effects of ownership and competition in the healthcare industry on quality provision, market coverage and optimal reimbursement policy. A for-profit monopoly selects a lower quality than a nonprofit supplier, and the socially optimal reimbursement rate with a nonprofit monopoly exceeds that with a for-profit monopoly. We establish that the optimal repayment policy is invariant to the introduction of competition by a for-profit high-quality supplier. Thus, market coverage is invariant to the introduction of competition, whereas consumers with a higher willingness to pay for quality are better off with competition.