This paper considers the role of equity transfer to strategic alliance partners in mitigating the moral-hazard problem that occurs if a participating firm faces some possibility of reallocating a part of the resources devoted to the joint project of the strategic alliance or retreating from the...

The decision to cooperate within R&D joint ventures is often based on expert advice. Such advice typically originates in a due-diligence process, which assesses the R&D joint venture's profitability, for example, by appraising the achievability of synergies. We show that if the experts who...

In a unified framework, we survey the recent literature on partnership dissolution with interdependent values. Contrary to the private-values case, where the main obstacle hindering the construction of efficient trading mechanisms is the asymmetry in initial endowments, we find that...

This paper shows that giving a player an outside option can worsen his payoff in a bargaining game with strategic delay. If the seller has the option to terminate bargaining and sell the good on the spot market, this can limit the ability of a low-valuation buyer to use delayed responses to...

Recent empirical research has established what many assumed - few people read form contracts. This research employs an online experimental design to fill gaps in the literature by asking two important questions: (1) To what extent does information about the exchange beyond the contract...

This paper reports further experimental results on exclusive dealing contracts. We extend Landeo and Spier's (2009) work by studying Naked Exclusion in a strategic environment that involves a four-player, two-stage game. In addition to the roles of seller and buyers, our experimental environment...

Many economic writers on contract theory have assumed that legal institutions are simply unable to do the job of enforcement, and have thus attempted to devise arrangements that motivate the parties to keep their commitments even though a government tribunal would be unable to tell whether they...

Authority is modeled as the right to undertake a noncontractible decision in a joint project. The decision-maker is assumed to exert an externality on the other parties; overall surplus is shared according to generalized Nash bargaining. Under limited liability, the agent whose marginal costs...

This article considers the consequence of incomplete contracts that arise due to difficulties in precisely describing potentially relevant contingencies. Unlike much of the literature, this article concludes that the resulting incompleteness could often be immaterial with respect to economic...

This paper analyses how a firm chooses between direct ownership and licensing or franchising contracts in supplying distant markets. When contracts are incomplete we show that this choice must balance the moral hazard associated with appointing external agents against that associated with...