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The purpose of this paper is to expose two mechanisms by which pirated firms that market cultural goods can strategically use piracy to increase their profits.

The authors interpret several world examples through the lens of behavioral economics to identify mechanisms that can make pirates’ initiatives profitable for the intellectual property rights holders. They also address two principal objections to “beneficial piracy”.

First, intrinsically motivated pirates can be in a better position to shape consumers’ preferences in a sense favorable to the firm profit. Second, pirates can generate strategic information that can help original producers to increase their profits.

Fighting piracy can be perfectly justified from a legal viewpoint while constituting simultaneously a bad decision for a business viewpoint. Moreover, some pirates follow ethical rules that can lead to a symbiotic relationship with pirated businesses. Nevertheless, the generalization of our analysis must be undertaken with caution given that our arguments have been developed out of observations of particular institutional settings.

Distinguishing “good pirates” from “bad ones” can lead managers to reconsider the systematic disapproval of copyright infringement in favor of more nuanced approaches.

Piracy can be useful under some circumstances for the pirated firm and even for the whole society, by increasing access to cultural goods.

The authors identify two mechanisms that can make piracy profitable for pirated firms. These insights can help managers to avoid a “one-size-fits-all” policy regarding piracy and to seek how to create conditions for a mutual and shared success.

This paper has a triple objective: first, to investigate the effect of the adoption of ethics codes on bank performance, second, to analyse the role played by the risk committee (RC) effectiveness in improving bank performance and finally, to assess the indirect role that the implementation of ethics codes exerts on the latter relationship.

The research questions are examined using an international sample of large banks worldwide from 2006 to 2017, applying the dynamic generalized method of moments (GMM) model for panel data.

The authors find that risk management committee size and independence have a positive and significant effect on bank performance. This highlights the importance of the risk governance function in enhancing bank performance. Most importantly results reveal that although larger RC tends to improve bank performance, this linkage is less strong when adopting ethical codes. They also find that the adoption of ethical codes by banks positively affects the relationship between the functioning of RC and performance.

Although it is well known that risk management, business ethics and performance are interrelated, there is no research that has dealt with this question.

This article investigates the influence of status quo bias (SQB) on venture capital investments.

The authors use the dynamic panel probit (respectively logit) model for 24 countries over nine years (from 2007–2015).

The authors’ regressions reveal that the SQB is meaningful in real decisions. Indeed, the authors find that the choice of investment sectors depends positively on the previous choice. Moreover, the study identifies other factors that were perceived to influence the choice of the investment industry such as added value by activity and the venture capital (VC) country attractiveness index.

By knowing the behavior of VC FIRMS, entrepreneurs would better frame their business plans and better target the VC to whom they should better contact.

No research has dealt with this question, yet status quo is consensually recognized as an omnipresent institutional factor.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how knowledge and information is shared by small information and communication technology firms in Tunisia.

The paper employs a comparative case study approach. This was intended to collect data that describe processes and also to elicit information about the reasons for these processes. The authors set the study in the context of a developing country.

It was found that information and knowledge is key to the operational success of these companies. Knowledge, and its application, is crucial to their competitive advantage. The companies have developed very useful internal systems for sharing information. They also have efficient methods for tapping into existing external knowledge. However, evidence was also found of immature national information sharing systems. The authors attribute this to the level of development in Tunisia and to the understandable attitudes of the firm owners.

Whilst unable to generalise empirically beyond these cases, the authors can conceptually generalise that these processes are likely to be common in similar national contexts. The implication is then that developing countries such as Tunisia may need to invest more in creating knowledge hubs.

The paper contributes by describing knowledge sharing in a less well‐researched area. Conceptually, it offers an appreciation of how knowledge sharing works in less‐developed regions.

The research aims to ask whether, in the absence of overarching innovative conditions, a small firm can have an innovative culture and what its scale and scope is.

The study employs four exploratory case studies. This methodological choice is justified in that a case study approach allows the use of the existing literature without inhibiting the detection of any unique characteristics in the Tunisian context. This context of a developing economy is likely to be different from established economies.

The study finds evidence of a learning environment within the firms and a good fit with the concepts of an innovative culture. Internal knowledge sharing is evident for all companies. However, this culture faces inwards, so that the paucity of linkages and weak socialisation combines with institutional thinness to isolate the firms. Local competitive advantages are not amplified but rather are dampened by the relative absence of interaction.

Most research about innovation in the ICT sector is conducted in the context of developed countries. This paper shows the specificities and uniqueness of innovation culture in the context of a developing country.

The findings imply that despite recent improvements, Tunisia lacks many of the regional “institutions” that produce the synergic benefits of an innovative milieu.

The context of a developing country is novel. The value of the findings may, however, be extended to other similar countries. This is important given the role of ICT in “catching up”.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to investigate empirically whether entrepreneurship causes growth or whether growth creates a prosper environment for entrepreneurship.

Design/methodology – We perform a co-integration analysis using an error correction model on data from 34 countries spanning 13 years to assess the causality issue between growth (proxied by GDP per capita) and entrepreneurship (proxied by self-employment). Our analysis also includes other variables deemed to influence growth.

Findings – The results from an error correction model show that self-employment Granger causes GDP per capita while the opposite direction is not statistically accepted. Moreover, these results suggest that increases in self-employment increase GDP per capita over the short-term but leads to a GDP per capita decrease at a long-term horizon.

Research limitations and implications – We use a linear model to estimate the relationship between self-employment and Growth. Consequently, a more complex model allowing for nonlinearities and additional variables might be more accurate. The empirical investigation is limited to self-employment, which is one facet of entrepreneurship, hence it will be interesting to introduce other measures of entrepreneurship. A direct implication of our study is that rather to be a sustainable economic driver, self-employment seems to resolve only a short-term problem.

Value – The chapter contributes by analyzing the relationship between self-employment and growth by using a co-integration analysis. Consequently it offers a more rigorous appreciation of the direction of causality as well as the long- vs. short-term relationships.