This is a dictionary entry forthcoming in Peter Newman, ed. The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics and the Law, London: Macmillan, 1998.

We suggest an operational definition of transaction cost as the expected value of strategy information in games played by individuals randomly matched from a large population. We relate the concept of a transaction cost minimum to those of Nash equilibrium, efficiency, and evolutionary...

If contracting within the firm is incomplete, managers will expend resources on trying to appropriate a share of the surplus that is generated. We show that outside ownership may alleviate the deadweight losses associated with such costly distributional conflict, even if all it does is add...

We review and evaluate some recent contributions on the modeling of entrepreneurship within a neoclassical framework, analyzing how and to what extent the fundamental ingredients suggested in the social science literature were captured. We show how these approaches are important in stressing the...

A hierarchically structured rent-seeking contest may be associated with lower equilibrium expenditure than a corresponding flat contest. In this chapter we discuss how this fact may be used to explain the structure of organizations such as firms, including why firms commonly have outside owners.

A purchaser/provider split together with output- based reimbursement were recently introduced by several Swedish county councils. These changes have been motivated by arguments of efficiency and consumer choice. This paper tests the null hypothesis that hospital services are provided as...

The paper analyses how cooperation in a repeated social game may help to sustain cooperation in a "linked" repeated production game. We show that this may happen a)because of available "social capital", defined as the slack of punishment power present in the social repeated game, b) because,...

A separation of provider and purchaser roles - together with performance-based reimbursement - were recently introduced in several county councils, which are the local governments that provide and fund almost all health care in Sweden. These changes have been motivated by efficiency and consumer...

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...

This paper deals with the interplay between economic incentives and social norms in firms. We outline a simple model of team production and provide preliminary results on linear incentive schemes in the presence of a social norm that may cause multiple equilibria. The effect of the social norm...