"Attempts to economize on bargaining costs imply that two parties may write a contract which is incomplete in the sense that each party tacitly cedes some decision rights to the other. If decision makers can be disciplined by the threat of ex post renegotiation of decisions initially delegated...

The paper is a study of barriers to communication in terms of agents' incentives to search for and communicate complementary information. In particular, I look at the value of commitment by comparing game forms in which a contract is negotiated prior to, versus after, search and communication. I...

If utility (net of price) varies by consumption occasion, the consideration set of a rational consumer will represent trade-offs between decision costs and the incremental benefits of choosing from a larger set of brands. If evaluating a brand decreases bias and uncertainty in perceived utility,...

The Resource-Based View of the firm (RBV) posits as a necessary condition for diversification that a firm's resources can be leveraged beyond its original business. To achieve sufficiency we need to know whether the resource is best leveraged inside the firm or through a market contract. We...

We look at a principal-agent model in which the agent has to perform an action, the difficulty of which is better known ex interim than ex ante. We compare two contracting regimes; one with commitment to an ex ante negotiated contract, and one with an ex interim negotiated contract. The ex ante...

The article proposes a research program to compare game forms in terms of their ability to govern ex post adjustments to ex ante contracts. The comparisons can be based on direct implementation-costs or the extent to which desirable adjustments are not implemented. In several examples of the...

The paper is concerned with communication within a team of players trying to coordinate in response to information dispersed among them. The problem is non-trivial because they cannot communicate all information instantaneously, but have to send longer or shorter sequences of messages, using...