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The Royal African Company, the Hudson’s Bay Company, and the East India Company used both owned and hired ships in their seventeenth and eighteenth century trading operations. Why such critical assets were sometimes owned and sometimes rented is explored. Contrary to economic reasoning, ship rentals occurred in shipping markets that were uncompetitive. The use of hired ships was correlated instead to market power in the companies’ selling or output markets. The pattern of ship ownership can be attributed to the close social proximity of shipowners to decision-makers in the companies. By modeling the input hiring decision while allowing for variation in the competitiveness of output markets, it is argued that rent-seeking behavior on the part of company insiders may explain the ownership patterns.

William Baumol is best-known as an academic. He was a prodigious researcher and publisher of texts on microeconomic theory, and a highly regarded educator with roles as head of the Department of Economics at Princeton University, director of the C.V. Starr Center for Applied Economics and director of the Berkley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at New York University. Less well-known were his engagements as a corporate consultant, notably for the telecommunications monopoly AT&T. Baumol’s work as an advisor, expert witness and theorist for AT&T spanned three decades from 1966. His relationship with AT&T arguably forms the context within which we can better understand his work on contestability theory, which he developed with a team of economists working for AT&T’s Bell Telephone Laboratories in the 1970s. Contestability theory was later deployed as a policy tool to justify industry deregulation and even advocate for monopolies and oligopolies on the ground that they were optimally efficient industry structures if potential competitors faced low barriers of entry. Baumol’s intellectual contribution to contestability theory was arguably influenced by the Chicago school and by AT&T’s drive toward the technological integration of telecommunications. Contestability was a rebellion against economic orthodoxies concerning competition and government regulation, and the status quo within AT&T which opposed market competition on the ground that it threatened the technological integration of the Bell system. The outcome was a revolution in industrial organization that would pave the way for the emergence of platform business models incorporating multi-sided and two-sided markets as exemplified by Amazon and Uber.

This chapter presents a new approach to teach process costing that uses worksheets to create the information necessary to account for costs. The approach employs a five-column, five-row worksheet that presents weighted-average and FIFO costs per equivalent unit simultaneously. Then, the goal of process costing, accounting for costs, is formally presented in a manner to emphasize its importance. As a result, students are better able to compare and contrast the two process-costing methods.

This chapter presents a personal reflection on the attention to community needs and inclusiveness in libraries.

Personal experiences and insights of the author serve as the framework for this discussion.

Tracing the course of the author’s four-decade career, the author identifies the growth in the focus on service to communities and their specific needs by libraries.