Export marketing literature supports the view that firm size is positively related to export intensity. Although the empirical findings have been mixed, a number of theoretical arguments are used to support this proposition, i.e., international marketing economies of scale, limited managerial and financial resources of small firms, decisionmaker's risk perception. Based on a large survey of the Italian manufacturing industry, the article falsifies the proposition and challenges some widely held assumptions in export marketing literature.The relationship between firn size and export behavior has been extensively analyzed in the export marketing literature. Firm size is thought to be a useful and manageable approximation of firm resources which are held to affect export behavior. Furthermore, firm size provides a simple criterion for segmenting firms into groups showing a similar export behavior and, possibly, similar problems that public support programmes should deal with in a focused way. Thus many researchers have included firm size as an independent variable in their empirical studies. The purpose of this article is to compare research findings on the relationship between firm size and export behavior with findings from selected Italian export studies. In Italy small firms are deeply involved in foreign trade; indeed in the most successful export sectors, such as consumer durables, small firms are at the leading edge. There is a growing interest in Italian small firms in the international literature [Piore and Sabel 1984; Goodman, Bamford and Saynor 1989] and some studies are available on their export behavior and performance [Lanzara 1987; Reid 1987;Varaldo 1987]. In the following section the fmdings of the international literature are summarized. Selected findings on Italian small exporters are then discussed and a

The paper discusses three key economic problems raised by the emergence and diffusion of Open source software: motivation, coordination, and diffusion under a dominant standard. First, the movement took off through the activity of a software development community that deliberately did not follow profit motivations. Second, a hierarchical coordination emerged without the support of an organization with proprietary rights. Third, Linux and other open source systems diffused in an environment dominated by established proprietary standards, which benefited from significant increasing returns. The paper shows that recent developments in the theory of critical mass in the diffusion of technologies with network externality may help to explain these phenomena.

The purpose of this paper is to build up a theoretical framework to study university‐industry interorganisational relations (U‐1 IOR) and formulate hypotheses which will be tested on empirical data in a future research phase. Then, a taxonomy for university‐industy relationships is proposed. Finally, the problem of evaluating relationships between universities and industries by defining the concept of ‘relationship performance’ is addressed.

The paper analyzes the strategies of software firms that have entered the open source (OS) field. The notion of the OS business model is discussed in the light of a substantial body of theoretical literature concerning strategic management and the economics of innovation, as well as specialized literature on OS. Empirical evidence based on a survey of 146 Italian software firms shows that firms have adapted to an environment dominated by incumbent standards by combining the offering of proprietary and OS software under different licensing schemes, thus choosing a hybrid business model. The paper examines the determinants of the degree of openness toward OS and discusses the stability of hybrid models in the evolution of the industry.open source, software industry, hybrid business models, switching costs, network externalities

The paper discusses three key economic problems raised by the emergence and diffusion of Open source software: motivation, coordination, and diffusion under a dominant standard. First, the movement took off through the activity of a software development community that deliberately did not follow profit motivations. Second, a hierarchical coordination emerged without the support of an organization with proprietary rights. Third, Linux and other open source systems diffused in an environment dominated by established proprietary standards, which benefited from significant increasing returns. The paper shows that recent developments in the theory of critical mass in the diffusion of technologies with network externality may help to explain these phenomena.

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This paper explores scale, scope and trade-off effects in scientific research and education. External conditions may dramatically affect the measurement of performance. We apply theDaraio&Simar's (2005) nonparametric methodology to robustlytake into account these factors and decompose the indicators of productivity accordingly. From a preliminary investigation on the Italian system of universities, we find that economies of scale and scope are not significant factors in explaining research and education productivity. We do not find any evidence of the trade-off research vs teaching. About the trade-off academic publications vs industry oriented research, it seems that, initially, collaboration with industry may improve productivity, but beyond a certain level the compliance with industry expectations may be too demanding and deteriorate the publication profile. Robust nonparametric methods in efficiency analysis are shown as useful tools for measuring and explaining the performance of a public research system of universities

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