We analyze empirically the allocation of rights and monetary incentives in automobile franchise contracts. All of these contracts substantially restrict the decision rights of dealers and grant manufacturers extensive rights to specify and enforce dealers' duties. The allocation of decision...

This paper develops a relational contracting model to show how fiat - a principal's ability to dictate her agent's performance - emerges in equilibrium under vertical integration, even when integration does not allocate distinctive formal authority to the principal. In a vertical structure, an...

We analyze in an incomplete contracts model whether a supplier should be integrated if in addition to his investment level he chooses the degree of relationship specificity. A basic trade-off arises: While non-integration leads to higher investment incentives, potential synergies are foregone....

Existing studies, largely based in the transaction cost economics tradition, approach the issue of vertical scope from the point of view of the decision faced by the individual firm about whether to make or buy, given a set of existing markets and well-defined vertical segments. However, recent...

In this paper we analyze the problem of the enforcement of incomplete contracts with endogenous outside options. Some of the equilibria we outline may reverse one of the main results presented in the standard literature. We then revisit the literature on the highly debated Fisher Body/General...

This article studies how franchise contracts adapt to temporal and local conditions in the shadow of the law. I theoretically show that when the law protects franchisees from unequal treatment, the subsequent changes to the franchisees' standards tend to be too rigid, both across stores and over...

We explore the nature of Business Groups, that is network-like forms of hierarchical organization between legally autonomous firms spanning both within and across national borders. Exploiting a unique dataset of 270,474 headquarters controlling more than 1,500,000 (domestic and foreign)...

We explore the nature of Business Groups, that is network-like forms of hierarchical organization between legally autonomous firms spanning both within and across national borders. Exploiting a unique dataset of 270,474 headquarters controlling more than 1,500,000 (domestic and foreign)...

We explore the nature of Business Groups, that is network-like forms of hierarchical organization between legally autonomous firms spanning both within and across national borders. Exploiting a unique dataset of 270,474 headquarters controlling more than 1,500,000 (domestic and foreign)...