This paper views authority as the right to undertake decisions that have external effects on other members of the organization. Because of contractual incompleteness, monetary incentives are insufficient to internalize these effects in the decision maker's objective. The optimal assignment of...

This paper views authority as the right to undertake decisions that impose externalities on other members of the organization. When only decision rights can be contractually assigned to one of the organization's stakeholders, the optimal assignment minimizes the resulting inefficiencies by...

Hybrid governance structures between markets and hierarchies in many industries, e.g., in energy and telecommunications, challenge antitrust and regulation policy. The paper focuses on the theoretical and methodological basis provided by the New Institutional Economics (NIE) for analyzing the...

The property-rights theory assumes that trade is non-contractible ex-ante and focusses exclusively on the allocation of property-rights. We derive foundations for this focus on property-rights by identifying scenarios where only one of the simple ownership structures is optimal even though trade...

In public procur ement a temporal separation between award and actual contract allows private entrepreneurs who did not get the award to sue to become contractor. Hence, not only the award-winning entrepreneur, but also the losers will engage in relationship-specific investments. Unfortunately,...

This paper develops and applies a test of the property rights theory of the firm in the context of global input sourcing. We use the model by Pol Antràs and Elhanan Helpman, "Global Sourcing," Journal of Political Economy, 112:3 (2004), 552-80, to derive a new prediction regarding how the...

I analyse firms organisational choices when they face uncertainty about institutional conditions in foreign locations with heterogeneous final good producers and incomplete contracts. As firms learn about the conditions abroad, the increasing offshoring activity increases competition in the...