The property rights approach to the theory of the firm suggests that ownership structures are chosen in order to provide ex ante investment incentives, while bargaining is ex post efficient. In contrast, transaction cost economics emphasizes ex post inefficiencies. In the present paper, a party...

This paper reports data from a laboratory experiment on two-period moral hazard problems. The findings corroborate the contract-theoretic insight that even though the periods are technologically unrelated, due to incentive considerations principals may prefer to offer contracts with memory.

Majority rules are frequently used to decide whether or not a public good should be provided, but will typically fail to achieve an efficient provision. We provide a worst-case analysis of the majority rule with an optimally chosen majority threshold, assuming that voters have independent...

An upstream firm can license its innovation to downstream firms that have to exert further development effort. There are situations in which more licenses are sold if effort is a hidden action. Moral hazard may thus increase the probability that the product will be developed.

The experimental literature has documented that there is overbidding in second-price auctions, regardless of bidders' valuations. In contrast, in first-price auctions there tends to be overbidding for large valuations, but underbidding for small valuations. We show that the experimental evidence...

In a complete contracting model, a risk-neutral seller exerts effort while producing a good. Effort is a hidden action and stochastically influences the risk-neutral buyer's valuation. Then the buyer can gather private information about his valuation. The ex ante optimal contract may encourage...

Under symmetric information, a job protection law that says that a principal who has hired an agent today must also employ them tomorrow can only reduce the two parties’ total surplus. The law restricts the principal’s possibilities to maximize their profit, which equals the total surplus,...

Recent work in the field of mechanism design has led some researchers to propose institutional changes that would permit parties to enter into non-modifiable contracts, which is not possible under current contract law. This paper demonstrates that it may well be socially desirable not to enforce...

The fact that according to the celebrated Coase theorem rational parties always try to exploit all gains from trade is usually taken as an argument against the necessity of government intervention through Pigouvian taxation in order to correct externalities. We show that the hold-up problem,...

Negotiations frequently end in conflict after one party rejects a final offer. In a large-scale internet experiment we investigate whether a 24-hour cooling-off period leads to fewer rejections in ultimatum bargaining. We conduct a standard cash treatment and a lottery treatment, where subjects...