We analyze a model of duopolistic competition in a search market, where firms compete by choosing prices and the number of outlets, while consumers are ignorant about the individual locations. The degree of price transparency prevailing in the market is modeled by the fraction of consumers who...

The present paper analyzes the effect of competition for scarce corporate financial resources on managers' incentives to generate profitable investment opportunities. Competition is only unambiguously beneficial if projects are symmetric. If they are asymmetric, competition for corporate...

This paper considers a model of moral hazard with the additoinal feature that the principal has private information. For instance, in an organizational setting the firm may be better informed about the profitability of a sales area for which it seeks to employ a new sales representative. We show...

We analyze a bargaining model with one-sided uncertainty where the uninformed party makes all offers. In difference to the literature we allow contracts to include a variable in which the informed party's utility satisfies a standard sorting condition. For instance, a union on strike might offer...

Contract design under incomplete information is typically analyzed in a bilaterally monopolistic setting. This holds particularly for screening games with transferable utility and private values. If the informed party's reservation value does not depend on its private information (its type), it...

We consider bargaining between a seller and a buyer with private information about his valuation. We introduce the novel feature that with some probability a new buyer may visit the seller's shop each period, which grants the seller the option to switch to a new trading partner. We analyze the...

In an internal capital market, individual departments may compete for a share of the firm's budget by engaging in wasteful influence activities. We show that firms with more levels of hierarchy may experience lower influence costs than less hierarchical firms, even though the former provide more...

This paper presents a theory of integration based on the inability of parties to write comprehensive financial contracts. In our model, integration entails both benefits and costs. On the one hand, integration involves liquidity spillovers between projects ensuring that integrated firms can...

We consider a game of signaling where the informed sender proposes a contract, which can only be accepted or rejected by the receiver. While most of the literature considers a bilaterally monopolistic setting, we embed the game in a search market environment where a sender may switch to another...

We present a model where an incumbent firm raises its price in response to increasing competition. It may pay the incumbent to exploit a rather immobile fraction of consumers instead of capturing a larger but more contested segment of the market. In particular, we apply our results to deregulation.