Exclusive Contracts, Loss to Delay and Incentives to Invest

We take the view that alternative trading opportunities may influence the loss to delay in a bargaining situation, and show that contractual exclusivity may then be relevant even for ‘internal’ investments, contradicting a recent finding by Segal and Whinston (2000). When a buyer is an ongoing concern, exclusivity in supply increases his cost of haggling/bargaining with the supplier by preventing him to buy substitute inputs, produce and cover running costs during renegotiations. This may imply a larger bargaining share for the seller and increase his investment incentives. We model this effect using Rubinstein’s (1982) bargaining model with constant but endogenous time cost