This chapter provides a critical review and survey of aspects of formal and informal contracting particularly relevant to the study of corporate governance. Two types of modeling, hidden-information agency and informal (relational) contracting that are perhaps under-utilized in governance...

A manager's current and potential future employers are continually assessing her or his ability. Such assessment is a crucial component of corporate governance and this chapter provides an overview of the research on that aspect of governance. In particular, we review how assessment generates...

This chapter surveys major issues arising in the economic analysis of contract law. It begins with an introductory discussion of scope and methodology, and then addresses four main topics that correspond to the major doctrinal divisions of the law of contracts. These divisions include freedom of...

This chapter deals with uncertainty and incomplete information in markets. It first considers situations in which the contract proposer is the ignorant party with the problem of designing a mechanism that induces the counter party, who is exogenously endowed with his information, to reveal that...

This paper explores leadership within organizations. Leadership is distinct from authority because following a leader is a voluntary rather than coerced activity of the followers. This paper considers how a leader induces rational followers to follow her in situations when the leader has...

Pricing of Internet access has been characterized by two properties: Parties are directly billed only by the Internet service provider (ISP) through which they connect to the Internet. Pricing, moreover, is not contingent on the type of content being transmitted. These properties define a regime...

This paper builds on the model of leadership set forth by Hermalin ("Toward an Economic Theory of Leadership: Leading by Example," American Economic Review, forthcoming). A criticism of that earlier work is that it considers leadership in a static setting only. Yet an important phenomenon of...

This paper studies the ability of an agent and a principal to achieve the first-best outcome when the agent invests in an asset that has greater value if owned by the principal than by the agent. When contracts can be renegotiated, a well-known danger is that the principal can holdup the agent,...

In public-policy discussions about corporate disclosure, more is typically judged to be better than less. In particular, better disclosure is seen as a way to reduce the agency problems that plague firms. We show that this view is incomplete. In particular, our theoretical analysis shows that...