The papers of this thesis all look at different aspects of organisational governance and strategy. In particular these papers look at organisations that seem to be behaving in counterintuitive ways. For instance all around the world governments often spend disproportionately large amounts of money in the few months at the end of the fiscal year and in the private sector firms often advertise against their rivals even though by doing so they may face greater competition from these rival firms. In these papers I look into whether these behaviours are as a result of a strategy or perhaps reflect some form of a problem in organisational governance. I try to analyse the effects on market efficiency and what steps a government or regulator might take to improve the outcome of the market. The approach is generally theoretical but in the case of the first paper on government spending I calibrate a theoretical model to Northern Ireland spending data. In the rest of this document see non-technical abstracts for my three papers. Note that in order to avoid maths I had to simplify papers considerably so these nontechnical abstracts should not be cited.

The present research identified transaction costs in the mining sector in South Africa and provided means for mitigation. A review, discussion and evaluation of theories related to transaction costs such as vertical integration, outsourcing, price, long and short terms contracts was undertaken under literature review. A qualitative study, with two research questions, on eight companies of which four precious metals and minerals, two metallic minerals and two non-metallic minerals, was performed and provided among other results: • Cost of doing business in South Africa is high. • Site specificity and physical-asset specificity are the most influential specialised investments in the mining sector. • Long term contracts are the most appropriate to mitigate transaction costs. • Costly bargaining is the most important implication for all specialised investments. • Exchange rates, Mining Charter, BEE, legislation, taxes, royalties, fuel and electricity increases are cited as reasons for high transaction costs. • The small sample is a big concern as it does not allow generalising the results to over all mining companies. The South Africa’s government, as a regulator and a major stakeholder should revisit the mining charter and therefore the B-BBEE act as this clearly appeared to be a barrier to the development of mining companies. / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted