We develop a tractable framework for the analysis of the relationship between contractual incompleteness, technological complementarities, and technology adoption. In our model a firm chooses its technology and investment levels in contractible activities by suppliers of intermediate inputs....

For many years, the ideas of Knight and Keynes have been widely understood to overlap greatly and they are presumed to have developed notions of uncertainty that deeply intersect, both describing a state where outcomes have non-probabilistic likelihoods. Further, even their political...

A "folk theorem" originating, among others, in the work of Stiglitz maintains that competitive equilibria area always or "generically" inefficient (unless contracts directly specify consumption levels as in Prescott and Townsend, thus bypassing trading in anonymous markets). This paper...

We develop a tractable framework for the analysis of the relationship between contractual incompleteness, technological complementarities, and technology adoption. In our model a firm chooses its technology and investment levels in contractible activities by suppliers of intermediate inputs....

It has become commonplace in management research to refer to “transaction cost theory,” a joint Coase-Williamson approach to economic organizing. This off-the-cuff usage overlooks their differences by treating Coase as a pre-Williamsonian. I argue that their theoretical frameworks are...

We present a tractable framework for the analysis of the relationship between contract incompleteness, technological complementarities and the division of labor. In the model economy, a firm decides the division of labor and contracts with its worker-suppliers on a subset of activities they have...

This paper reviews Austrian approaches to the firm and drafts a theory that emphasizes the firm as a market phenomenon. Here the firm is a vehicle for imaginative entrepreneurs to create artificially high factor density, thereby increasing its internal “extent of the market” to support...