In an auction with a buy price, the seller provides bidders with an option to end the auction early by accepting a transaction at a posted price. The "Buy-It-Now" option on eBay is a leading example of an auction with a buy price. This paper develops a model of an auction with a buy price in...

In an auction with a buy price, a seller offers bidders the opportunity to forgo competing in an auction by transacting immediately at a pre-specified fixed price. If a seller has aspirations in the form of a reference price that depends upon the auction's reserve price and buy price, she does...

Courts require royalty rate calculations based on rigorous economic foundations. The licensing literature provides limited guidance for royalty rate determination, leaving appraisal report readers wanting a more tangible and objective lens through which to understand and judge the credibility of...

The doctrine of fair use allows limited copying of creative works based on the rationale that copyright holders would consent to such uses if bargaining were possible. This paper develops a formal model of fair use in an effort to derive the efficient legal standard for applying the doctrine....

This paper's title is an echo of Alfred Chandler's (2001) chronicle of the electronics industry, Inventing the Electronic Century. The paper attempts (A) a general reinterpretation of the pattern of technological advance in (American) electronics over the twentieth century and (B) a somewhat...

Business groups in all of their manifestations are informational mechanisms for coordinating complementary activities -- for "gap filling." This is well known in the literature on business groups outside the Anglo-American sphere. Especially in developing economies, where markets are thin and...

Intangibles exhibit zero marginal licensing cost, including cross-border intra-firm licensing of intangibles within a MNC. A MNC may not realize the full profit potential of licensing intangibles intra-firm, however, under suboptimal negotiated transfer pricing schemes. Our negotiated transfer...

The holdup and holdout problems arise in different contexts, but they share certain fundamental similarities that have not generally been recognized. In particular, both involve activities requiring an up-front, non-salvageable investment, and both require the investor to purchase an input, the...

This paper examines markets, firms, and the law as alternative institutional arrangements for organizing transactions that involve transaction-specific investments and uncertain performance. The analysis is the logical extension of Coase’s seminal analysis of the market-firm boundary on one...

The first professional base ball clubs came in two varieties: stock clubs, which paid their players fixed wages, and player cooperatives, in which players shared the proceeds after expenses. We argue that stock clubs were formed with players of known ability, while co-ops were formed with...