Governance concerns the organisation of transactions. Four research themes regarding the governance of chains and networks are identified: decision rights, income rights, alignment, and cognition.

This article analyses the impact of ownership structure on investments in a three-party supply chain from an incomplete contracting perspective. Circumstances are determined in which a marketing cooperative is the unique first-best ownership structure.

We determine the circumstances when the absence of public listing, often believed to be a disadvantage, makes a cooperative the unique efficient governance structure. This is established in a multi-task principal-agent model, capturing that cooperatives are not publicly listed and their CEOs...