The costs of vertical integration are analyzed within a game-theoretic signaling model. It is shown that a company when being vertically integrated with a supplier may well decide to buy certain components from this supplier even at a lower quality than that offered by external sources. When the...

Input transactions in the petrochemical industry are often subject to temporal specificity. That is, non-performance in quantity, such as delaying delivery, is highly costly to producers and can be an effective holdup strategy. In the 1970s, two oil price shocks induced high price volatility in...