Contracts often reward inefficient tasks and are not enforced ex post. We provide a new explanation based on the relationship between explicit contracts and implicit agreements, distinguishing the ex-ante decision to sign a contract from the ex-post decision whether to apply it. We show that it...

We study the tension between competitive screening and contract enforcement where a principal trades repeatedly with one among several agents, moral hazard and adverse selection coexist, and non-contractible dimensions are governed by relational contracting. We simultaneously characterize...

Using a tried and tested measure of management practices which has been shown to predict firm performance, we survey nearly 250 departments across 100+ UK universities. We find large differences in management scores across universities and that departments in older, research-intensive...

Globalization – improved access to integrated, anonymous markets – is claimed to crowd out cooperative relations: from reciprocal exchange to lifetime employment, from relational governance to corruption/collusion. We study how agents’ intertemporal preferences and their access to markets...

We model networks of relational (or implicit) contracts, exploring how sanctioning power and equilibrium conditions change under different network configurations and information transmission technologies. In our model relations are the links, and the value of the network lies in its ability to...

Collusive agreements and relational contracts are commonly modeled as equilibria of dynamic games with the strategic features of the repeated Prisoner's Dilemma. The pay-offs agents obtain when being ‘cheated upon’ by other agents play no role in these models. We propose a way to take these...