Alliances between competitors where an established firm provides access to its marketing and distribution channels are an important real-world phenomenon. We analyze a market where an established firm, firm A, produces a product of well-known quality, and a firm with an unknown brand, firm B,...

"Implicit Contracts, incentive compatibility, and involuntary unemployment" (MacLeod and Malcomson, 1989) remains our most highly cited work. We briefly review the development of this paper and of our subsequent related work, and conclude with reflections on the future of relational contract...

The increased attention to blockchain-related technologies has brought into focus ``smart" contacts, whose key feature is the automated algorithmic execution based on mapping states of the world to corresponding contractual actions. Smart contracts require digital inputs that determine when such...

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...

We investigate how asymmetric information on final demand affects strategic interaction between a downstream monopolist and a set of upstream monopolists, who independently produce complementary inputs. We study an intrinsic private common agency game in which each supplier i independently...

By applying factor analysis to unique data on loan screening for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Japan, we investigate the factors that banks actually evaluate when underwriting commercial loans. We find that banks emphasize three factors when they decide whether to grant loans: the...

One recurring theme that emerges from empirical studies on franchising is the coexistence of franchised and company-owned units within the same chain. This paper supports the idea that mixed chains or dual distributions are efficient organizations when both the behavior of managers and the...

Firms in decentralized markets often trade using quantity contracts, agreements that specify quantity in advance of trade. We show that firms use quantity contracts to reduce the costs of trading frictions. Specifically, quantity contracts are valuable for two reasons. First, they increase trade...

This paper investigates a contest in information revelation between firms that seek to persuade consumers by revealing positive own information and negative information about the rival. In the face of limited bandwidth, firms are forced to make a trade-off between disclosing their own positive...