In this chapter, we review the use of TCE in the study of interfirm relationships. An extensive literature in economics and business strategy delves into interfirm governance choices. In our review, we focus on accounting and non-accounting studies to assess how TCE has contributed and can...

Firms typically use a ‘one-size-fits-all' (OSFA) compensation contract that specifies a common formulaic relation between performance and compensation (i.e., a performance bonus) for nonexecutive managers in similar jobs. However, a contract that is appropriate on average, may be suboptimal...

Transaction cost economics predicts that investments in management control will enable risky interfirm transactions. Risk is rarely eliminated, because firms trade off costs of management control and expected costs of control loss (together, the “cost of control”). The resultant solution...

We examine the portfolio of management controls to mitigate alliance risks of three firms' in order to analyze the suitability of three management control frameworks as descriptors of controls used in interfirm alliances: Simons (1995), Merchant and Van der Stede (2007), and Jensen and Meckling...

Coase (1937) first explained the existence of firms and the boundaries between them as an emergent solution to minimizing the costs of accessing markets -- what Williamson (1975) later termed ‘transaction costs.' Over time, innovations in management control and changes to legal structures have...

Complementing proprietary archival data with an experiment, we examine employees' subjective valuations of their employee stock options and explore a stock option education program as a mechanism for influencing those valuations. We argue that the conflicting evidence on employee subjective...