The paper shows that an increase in competition has two effects on managerial incentives: It increases the probability of liquidation, which has a positive effect on managerial effort, but it also reduces the firm’s profits, which may make it less attractive to induce high effort. Thus, the...

Economic experiments interact with economic theories in various ways. First of all they are used to test economic theories. However, they can neither confirm nor falsify them in a strict sense. They rather inform us about the range of applicability, the robustness and the predictive power of a...

This paper analyzes a finitely repeated bargaining game with asymmetric information. It gives a tight characterization of the equilibrium path and the equilibrium payoffs of all sequential equilibria satisfying a weak Markov property. The method used allows for arbitrarily many different types...

The paper analyzes reputation effects in perturbed repeated games with discounting. If there is some positive prior probability that one of the players is committed to play the same (pure) action in every period, then this provides a lower bound for her equilibrium playoff in all Nash...

Many high technology goods are based on standards that require several essential patents owned by different IP holders. This gives rise to a complements and a double mark-up problem. We compare the welfare effects of two different business strategies dealing with these problems. Vertical...

We analyze explicit and implicit contracts in a repeated principal-agent model with observable but only partially contractable actions of the agent. It is shown that the set of implementable actions may increase or decrease if additional actions become contractable.

We report on several experiments on the optimal allocation of ownership rights. The experiments confirm the property rights approach by showing that the ownership structure affects relationship-specific investments and that subjects attain the most efficient ownership allocation despite starting...

This paper offers a new explanation for the prevalent use of convertible securities in venture capital finance. Convertible securities can be used to endogenously allocate cash-flow rights as a function of the state of the world and the entrepreneur’s effort. This property can be used to...

Several recent papers argue that contracts provide reference points that affect ex post behavior. We test this hypothesis in a canonical buyer-seller relationship with renegotiation. Our paper provides causal experimental evidence that an initial contract has a highly significant and...

In discussions on the rate of profit and its tendency to fall and its role in Marxist theory, a number of phrases are often employed without clarifying what these might really mean. Primary among these are such phrases as ‘the rate of profit must ultimately fall’ and ‘the counter-acting...