If you’ve been following the previous posts in my economics of outsourcing series, I hope you see that thanks to Coase, Solow and their colleagues, outsourcing is now a major part of the business and economic landscape. However, it has been popularized, debated and indeed lionized in the mainstream press by Thomas Friedman. His major [...]

Next in my mini-series on the seminal economic thinkers who prepared the way for outsourcing  I’d like to look at the more current and less theoretical side of the economics of outsourcing and there’s no better place to start than with Freakonomics and the followup mega-bestseller, SuperFreakonomics. Steven D. Levitt and his sidekick and co-writer [...]

Most – OK many – of us can remember when there was no Internet, when email was a clunky toy for a few that could never revolutionize communication, when computers were huge, slow and really annoying, when wireless was just another word for radio, when a phone sat on a table, hung on a wall [...]

Next in my mini-series about the great economic thought leaders who were seminal in the development and success of modern outsourcing is one of my favorites, the mathematician John F. Nash, who took economists a step or two beyond Adam Smith with his ideas on Game Theory and Behavioral Economics. His conclusions are right in [...]

Lately I’ve been thinking and writing about the economic theorists and thought leaders who set the stage for modern outsourcing to really take off. For me, the obvious choice to begin this mini-series of posts is with Ronald Coase, who was a pioneer in the area of transaction costs and the nature of the firm. Coase’s [...]