This article examines the railway concessions in France in the 19th century as examples of a principal-agent relationship between the State and a contractor. I show that one of the main assumptions of the agency theory, the asymmetric information at the benefit of the agent, is not verified. I...

<!--Début du contenu @xml:lang="en"-->?Recent research in industrial organization has emphasized the strategic value of incomplete contracts in vertical inter-firm relationships. This paper offers a screening rationale for contractual incompleteness in a class of producer-retailer economies when countervailing incentives arise. By...