It is a widely adopted practice for firms to announce new products well in advance of actual market availability, especially in the computer industry. In this article, a firm makes pre-announcements on its product, which are "cheap talk." We develop a reputation model of "vaporware" where the...

We study how firm-specific complementary assets and intellectual property rights affect the management of knowledge workers. The main results show when a firm will wish to sue workers that leave with innovative ideas, and the effects of complementary assets on wages and on worker initiative. We...

We study how firm-specific complementary assets and intellectual property rights affect the management of knowledge workers. The main results show when a firm will wish to sue workers who leave with innovative ideas and the effects of complementary assets on wages and on worker initiative. We...

Firms choose debt structure and competing banks choose monitoring intensity. Monitoring improves credit allocation, but creates informational lock-in effects in bank-borrower relationships. In a competitive credit market, banks dissipate anticipated profit from serving locked-in borrowers...

Licensing promotes technology transfer and innovation, but enforcement of licensing contracts is often imperfect. We explore the implications of weak enforcement of contractual commitments on the licensing conduct of firms and market performance. An upstream firm develops a technology that it...

We study how firm-specific complementary assets and intellectual property rights affect the management of knowledge workers. The main results show when a firm will wish to sue workers that leave with innovative ideas, and the effects of complementary assets on wages and on worker initiative. We...

We study how complementarities and intellectual property rights affect the management of knowledge workers. The main results relay when a firm will wish to sue workers that leave with innovative ideas, and the effects of complementary assets on wages and on worker initiative. We argue that firms...