One might easily gain the impression that the academic work of Professor Erich Guten-berg, whose centenary provides the occasion for this lecture, is outdated and has lost touch with contemporary economic theories of the firm. However, this impression would be wrong, as this paper demonstrates...

The paper discusses the role of various constituencies in the corporate governance of a corporation from the perspective of incomplete contracts. A strict shareholder value orientation in the sense of a rule that at any time firm decisions should be made strictly in the interest of the present...