It is common practice for firms to pool their expertise by forming parterships such as joint ventures and strategic alliances. A Central organizational problem in such parterships is that managers may behave noncooperatively in order to advance the interests of their parent firms. We ask whether...

Financial constraints are an important impediment to the growth of small businesses. We study theoretically and empirically how the financial constraints of agents affect their decisions to exert effort, and, hence the organizational decisions and growth of principals, in the context of...

The literature on public procurement pays great attention to the rules underlying tendering procedures as well as on the specification of the type of contract to be awarded. Less attention has been paid to the incompleteness of the contract; this issue is relevant in the public work sector...

November 2, 1999 <p> Inspired by facts from the private sector construction industry, we develop a model that explains many of the stylized facts about procurement contracts. The buyer in our model incurs a cost of providing a comprehensive design, and is faced with a trade-off between providing...</p>