This paper investigates some economic effects of recent amendments to the German Copyright Law on the German film industry. The changes assume the existence of a prevailing “structural superiority” of media companies over their contractual partners in labor markets which supposedly results...

In this paper, we prove that two firms can choose not to include a termination clause in their partnership contract, thus inducing a costly termination in case of failure of the joint project. This ex-post inefficiency induces partners to exert large non-contractible efforts (investments) to...

We characterize the outcomes of games when players may make binding offers of strategy contingent side payments before the game is played. This does not always lead to efficient outcomes, despite complete information and costless contracting. The characterizations are illustrated in a series of...

This paper studies the ability of an agent and a principal to achieve the first-best outcome when the agent invests in an asset that has greater value if owned by the principal than by the agent. When contracts can be renegotiated, a well-known danger is that the principal can holdup the agent,...

Many couples do not sign prenuptial agreements, even though this often leads to costly and inefficient litigation in case of divorce. In this paper we show that strategic reasons may prevent agents from signing a prenuptial agreement. Partners which have high productivity in marital activities...

We examine how social preferences affect behavior and surplus in relational contracts. Experimental subjects participate in a contracting environment similar to Brown, Falk, and Fehr [Brown, M., Falk, A. & Fehr, E., “Relational Contracts and the Nature of Market Interactions, Econometrica, 72...