This Paper develops an account of the role and significance of managerial power and rent extraction in executive compensation. Under the optimal contracting approach to executive compensation, which has dominated academic research on the subject, pay arrangements are set by a board of directors...

A government agency wants a facility to be built and managed to provide a public service. Two different modes of provision are considered. In a public-private partnership, the tasks of building and managing are bundled, while under traditional procurement, these tasks are delegated to separate...

A government agency wants an infrastructure-based public service to be provided. Our experimental study compares two different modes of provision. In a public-private partnership, the two tasks of building the infrastructure and operating it are delegated to one private contractor (a...

There has been a dramatic change in the division of responsibility between the state and the private sector for the delivery of public goods and services in recent years with an increasing trend towards contracting out to the private sector and ‘public-private partnerships’. This Paper...

This Paper analyses the effect of a possible takeover on information flows and on the terms of trade in business relationships. We consider a long-term relationship between a firm and a privately-informed stakeholder, a buyer for example. In our model, takeovers both increase the surplus from...

I develop a model of rent seeking with informational foundations and an arbitrary number of rent seekers, and I compare the results with Tullock's (1980) classic model where the influence activities are "black-boxed." Given the microfoundations, the welfare consequences of rent seeking can be...

We develop a model in which two firms that have proposed to merge are privately informed about merger-specific efficiencies. This enables the firms to influence the merger control procedure by strategically revealing their information to an antitrust authority. Although the information improves...