Bedingte Aktiengeschäfte sind solche, die nur bei Eintritt einer Bedingung wirksam werden, z. B. bei einer Übernahme oder der Wahl eines bestimmten Vorstandsvorsitzenden. Damit lassen sich Alternativen bewerten und Entscheidungen besser treffen.

Measurement quality is a fundamental factor in determining the cost of transactions within organizations and markets. A huge gulf separates the meaningfulness and precision of business metrics as currently achieved from the quality that has been routinely obtained for decades in research and in...

Economic theory has generally akcnowledged the role that institutions have in shaping economic space. The distinction however between physical and institutional descriptions of economic activity has not received adequate attention within the mainstream paradigm. In this paper I show how a proper...

The relative price of locally-produced milk and cheese in rural Paraguay is puzzling, apparently leaving opportunities for arbitrage. Despite requiring additional labor and inputs, the price of cheese per liter of milk is lower than the price of a liter of fluid milk. We propose a framework of...

In "The Tragedy of the Commons," Garrett Hardin argues that those who can use a resource for free consume more of it than they would if they had to pay for it. Public resources eventually collapse because people overuse them. Hardin’s widely accepted argument seems correct as far as it goes,...

Mechanism design provides a general paradigm for deriving legal rules and institutions that implement social objectives as equilibrium outcomes of interactions among strategic individuals with private information and endogenous transaction costs. This paper designs mechanisms that generalize...

This Article challenges the dogma of U.S. patent law that direct infringement is a strict liability tort. Impermissibly practicing a patented invention does create liability even if the infringer did not intend to infringe or know about the patent. The consensus is that this is a form of strict...

The Coase Theorem predicts that, if there are no transaction costs, parties will always contract their way to an efficient outcome. Thus, no matter which legal rules society chooses, "Coasean bargains" will lead to efficient results. There are always some transaction costs. However, transaction...

In this article we apply and extend the model elaborated by Acemoglu and Verdier in their seminal paper (2000), to examine how the economy represented in their theoretical framework responds to an exogenous change in the agent's incentive. In particular, we focus on the consequences of a famous...

This entry for the forthcoming The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics (Second Edition) surveys the economic analysis of five primary fields of law: property law; liability for accidents; contract law; litigation; and public enforcement and criminal law. It also briefly considers some...