In this paper I study how the make-or-buy decision of a firm depends on the organization of its peers. I consider a multi-firm framework in which firms choose whether to integrate into the supply of an intermediate input or to outsource its production, and choose the size of their supplier...

It has been argued that collusion among the members of an organization or a vertical structure creates efficiency losses and, hence, should be prevented. This paper shows that whenever collusion takes the form of co-insurance agreements, here called "friendships," among the members of a vertical...

It is well-known that a seller imposed non-discrimination clause can soften downstream price competition by constraining opportunistic pricing behavior on the part of an upstream monopolist seller. But what about about market settings in which there exists a pivotal buyer? We show that in the...

The traditional transaction cost perspective helps us understand how governance structures impact dyadic transaction costs by focusing on the possibility of ex-post holdup, but it usually neglects the impact of such decisions on other agents. This paper uses value capture theory to investigate...

This paper examines how the density and governance of vertically related populations affect the life chances of organizations. We integrate the literatures on organizational ecology and vertical integration to develop a theory of how 1) specialized upstream industries affect downstream survival...

The paper addresses the effect of technological progress on the boundaries of the firm, building on transaction cost theory and agency theory. The model incorporates four types of costs: production, coordination, management, and transaction costs. The market has lower production costs, but...

We develop a model in which the heterogeneous firms in an industry choose their modes of organization and the location of their subsidiaries or suppliers. We assume that the principals of a firm are constrained in the nature of the contracts they can write with suppliers or employees. Our main...

Existing studies, largely based in the transaction cost economics tradition, approach the issue of vertical scope from the point of view of the decision faced by the individual firm about whether to make or buy, given a set of existing markets and well-defined vertical segments. However, recent...

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...

We study the effect of organizational choice and institutions on the performance of Spanish car dealerships. Using outlet-level data from 1994, we find that verticallyintegrated dealerships showed substantially lower labor productivity, higher labor costs and lower profitability than franchised...