We analyze the incentives of a controlling shareholder of a firm to acquire, directly or indirectly through his firm, shares in a competitor. We charaterize the conditions under which these partial acquisitions as well as the equilibrium toehold and its nature: controlling or silent. We find...

We provide sufficient conditions for the first-order approach in the principal-agent problem when the agent’s utility has the nonseparable form u(y−c(a)) where y is the contractual payoff and c(a) is the money cost of effort. We first consider a decision-maker facing prospects which cost...

We analyze the incentives of a controlling shareholder of a firm to acquire, directly or indirectly through his firm, shares in a competitor. We charaterize the conditions under which these partial acquisitions as well as the equilibrium toehold and its nature: controlling or silent. We find...