eBay provides an online auction venue for remote and anonymous members of its online community to realize gains from trade. As a venue it never sees the items sold, verifies the item listings, handles settlements, or represents the buyer or seller. Despite the associated market imperfections and incentive problems, over five million auctions are active on an average day. Trading is based on trust among members of the eBay community, and trust is supported by a multilateral reputation mechanism based on member feedback. eBay supplements the reputation mechanism with rules and policies that mitigate incentive problems, reduce transactions costs, and support trust among members and between members and the company. Reputations and the rules and policies provide a private ordering of eBay's community. This paper examines this private ordering in the context of the company's strategy and in the shadow of the public order.

MNCs are increasingly facing global environmental issues demanding coordinated market and non-market strategic responses. The home country institutional context and individual company histories can create divergent pressures on strategy for MNCs based in different countries; however, the location of MNCs in global industries and their participation in ‘global issues arenas’ create issue-level fields within which strategic convergence might also be expected. This paper analyzes the responses of oil MNCs to climate change and finds that local context influenced initial corporate reactions, but that convergent pressures predominate as the issue matures.

This article tests two hypotheses about post-communist business associations. The first predicts weak business associations which are presented with insurmountable collective action problems by the flattened civil society inherited from totalitarianism. According to this hypothesis, no business associations are inherited from the previous regime, and associations are confronted with difficult-to-organize latent groups of large numbers of new small enterprises. The second hypothesis, as proposed by Mancur Olson, predicts strong business associations benefiting from the collective action advantages of the communist economic structure which was composed of small numbers of large enterprises. The hypotheses are tested with case studies of Poland's five most influential business associations. The conclusion is that the flattened civil society hypothesis is best borne out by the evidence. This suggests that, in other countries, political factors, rather than the standard communist economic structure, are more likely to explain the persistence of industrial super lobbies.

The extent of business support for democracy in Latin America may determine whether the transitions from authoritarian rule since the 1980s lead to the consolidation of democratic regimes. While some analysts see business support for democracy as firm, others regard its as precarious, and still others believe it is contingent upon whether elected governments contest the economic interests or political dominance of the bourgeoisie. The difficulty of generalizing about the political orientations of business underscores the need for well-documented case studies. This study focuses on Peru, a country where democracy has been at grave risk, and it offers insight into the underlying forces and conditions that determine whether business supports or undermines democratic governance.