One of the main purposes of American labor law has been to reduce conflict between employers and workers. This paper discusses the ways in which various doctrines might serve this purpose. Four theories are examined: bargaining with asymmetric information; conflict; herding; and trust. The...

Calls for benefit-cost analysis in rule-making, based on the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act, have revealed a paucity of work on allocative efficiency in financial markets. We propose three principles to help fill this gap. First, we highlight the need for quantifying the statistical cost of a...

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...

This article studies the judicial resolution of business deadlock. Asset valuation, a necessary component of business divorce procedures, can pose serious problems in case of closely-held businesses such as general partnerships and limited liability companies (LLCs). Courts face the challenge of...

Can incumbent sellers and buyers use contracts with stipulated damages to extract surplus from entrants? We experimentally study the strategic environments of Aghion and Bolton (1987)and Spier and Whinston (1995). As predicted, contract renegotiation weakens the commitment power of stipulated...

Shotguns clauses are commonly included in the business agreements of partnerships and limited liability companies (LLCs), but the role of o fferor typically remains unassigned. In a common-value, one-sided asymmetric information setting, unfair and ineffcient outcomes occur with an unassigned o...

Business divorce is an arduous affair. The process of resolving deadlocks is time consuming and expensive, typically requiring the services of lawyers, financial experts and judges. Prolonged resolution processes, cost-inefficient administration of those processes, and inequitable outcomes...

The operating agreements of many business ventures include clauses to facilitate the exit of joint owners. In so-called Texas Shootouts, one owner names a single buy-sell price and the other owner is compelled to either buy or sell shares at that named price. Despite their prevalence in...

This paper considers settlement negotiations between a single defendant and $N$ plaintiffs when there are fixed costs of litigation. When making simultaneous take-it-or-leave-it offers to the plaintiffs, the defendant adopts a divide and conquer strategy. Plaintiffs settle their claims for less...

This paper explores the power of threats in the absence of binding commitment. The threatener cannot commit to carrying out the threat if the victim refuses payment, and cannot commit to not carrying out the threat if payment is made. If exercising the threat is costly to the threatener, then...