In this paper, a principal's decision between delegating two tasks or handling one of the two tasks herself is analyzed. We assume that the principal uses both, formal contracts and informal agreements sustained by the value of future relationships (relational contracts) as incentive device. It...

Existing theories of a firm's optimal capital structure seem to fail in explaining why many healthy and profitable firms rely heavily on equity financing, even though benefits associated with debt (like tax shields) appear to be high and the bankruptcy risk low. This holds in particular for...

This paper analyzes a dynamic relational contract for employees with reciprocal preferences. I develop a tractable model to investigate how "direct" performance-pay (promising a bonus in exchange for effort) and generous upfront wages (which activate the norm of reciprocity) interact over the...

This paper provides a theoretical rationale for non-binding retail price recommendations (RPRs) in vertical supply relations. Analyzing a bilateral manufacturer-retailer relationship with repeated trade, we show that linear relational contracts can implement the surplusmaximizing outcome. If the...

The corporate finance literature documents that managers tend to overinvest into physical assets. A number of theoretical contributions have aimed to explain this stylized fact, most of them focussing on a fundamental agency problem between shareholders and managers. The present paper shows that...

Headquarters and their specialized component suppliers have a vital interest in establishing long-term collaborations. When formal contracts are not enforceable, such efficiency-enhancing cooperations can be established via informal agreements, but relational contracts have been largely ignored...

In this paper, a formal rent-seeking theory of the firm is developed. The main idea is that integration (compared to non-integration) facilitates rent-seeking for the integrating party, but makes it harder for the integrated one. In a one-period model, this implies that the rent-seeking contest...

In this paper, we consider a dynamic search-and-matching problem of a firm with its intermediate input supplier. In our model, a headquarter currently matched with a supplier, has an interest to find and collaborate with a more efficient partner. However, supplier switching through search and...