Since even before Copperweld Corp. v. Independence Tube Corp., 467 U.S. 752 (1984), it has been thought that antitrust needs some "theory of the firm" to inform its application of a "single-entity" defense in Sherman Act section 1 litigation. Not only is that sense mistaken, it is emblematic of...

Informal long-term relationships and mutual confidence play a crucial role in modern economies in at least two dimensions. First, the performance of firms is strongly affected by their capacity to solve organizational questions effectively and this capacity is apparently strongly related to...

While the literature on firm boundaries has been greatly influenced by transaction cost economics, strategy scholars often emphasize the importance of capabilities considerations in these decisions. This has led to a debate that, we suggest, has generated more heat than light. We argue that the...

Can formal contracts help resolving the holdup problem? We address this important question by studying the holdup problem in repeated transactions between a seller and a buyer in which the seller can make relation-specific investments in each period. In contrast to previous findings, we...

A central role of the entrepreneur-manager is assembling a strategic bundle of complementary assets and activities, either existing or foreseen, which when combined create value for the firm. This process of creating value however requires managers to assess which activities should be handled by...

Contract stipulations tend to be subject to commodity standards. Standards make it clearer what transactors have agreed upon. They also bring stipulations from different contracts under a common denominator. The lower the cost of measuring an attribute and the wider the range of its application,...

The aim of this paper is to analyze both internal and external aspects posing a risk in the operation for the multinational Johnson Controls in its subsidiaries in United States and Mexico from the point of view based on institutions; the main challenge to initiate the investigation is do have...

Contract today increasingly links entrepreneurial innovations to the efforts and finance necessary to transform ideas into value. In this Chapter, we describe the match between a form of contract that "braids" formal and informal contractual elements in novel ways and the process by which...

In this paper we criticize the so-called 'more economic approach' to European competition law for its disregard of the importance of a functional system of private law. The more economic approach presumes that vertical integration is an economically efficient governance-mechanism. This...