What is the relationship between product prices and vertical integration? While the literature has focused on how integration affects prices, this paper shows that prices can affect integration. Many theories in organizational economics and industrial organization posit that integration, while...

Transactions take place in the firm rather than in the market because the firm offers agents who make specific investments power. Past literature emphasizes the allocation of ownership as the primary mechanism by which the firm does this. Within the contractibility assumptions of this...

The Hollywood quot;studio systemquot; - with production, distribution, and exhibition vertically integrated - flourished from the late teens until 1948, when the U.S. Supreme Court issued its famous Paramount decision. The Paramount consent decrees required the divestiture of affiliated theater...

What is the relationship between product prices and vertical integration? While the literature has focused on how integration affects prices, this paper shows that prices can affect integration. Many theories in organizational economics and industrial organization posit that integration, while...

This book contains eight articles written (six with co-authors who are noted at the beginning of the relevant chapters) over the past 30 years addressing various aspects of the Theory of the Firm. These articles emanated from our desire to understand more thoroughly the forces pushing firms to...

This paper enriches the celebrated Grossman-Hart-Moore (GHM) property-rights model with employment relationships. By combining the GHM view of the firm as a bundle of asset ownership with the Alchian and Demsetz (1972) view of the firm as a nexus of contracts, the model yields, in some cases,...

Private sector corporations in the United States fall short of their potential to increase shareholders'1 wealth in a number of ways. One example is the failure to undertake profitable energy conservation investments. Explanations of this phenomenon include agency and moral hazard problems,...

This article explores the economic role of the firm in a market economy. The analysis begins with a discussion and critique of the property rights approach to the theory of the firm as exposited in the recent work by Hart and Moore ('Property Rights and the Nature of the Firm'). It is argued...

The paper explores the economic role of the firm in a market economy. The analysis begins with a discussion and critique of the property rights approach to the theory of the firm as exposited in the recent work by Hart and Moore ("Property Rights and the Nature of the Firm"). It is argued that...