learning and wage dynamics we develop a dynamic model of learning about worker ability in a competitive labor market the model produces three testable implications regarding wage dynamics 1 although the role of schooling in the labor market s inference process declines as performance observations accumulate the estimated effect of schooling on the level of wages is independent of labor market experience 2 timeinvariant variables correlated with ability but unobserved by employers such as certain test scores are increasingly correlated with wages as experience increases and 3 wage residuals are a martingale we present evidence from the nlsy that is broadly consistent with the model s predictions

financial contracting theory meets the real world an empirical analysis of venture capital contracts we compare the characteristics of real world financial contracts to their counterparts in financial contracting theory we do so by studying the actual contracts between venture capitalists vcs and entrepreneurs the distinguishing characteristic of vc financings is that they allow vcs to separately allocate cash flow rights board rights voting rights liquidation rights and other control rights we describe and measure these rights we then interpret our results in relation to existing financial contracting theories we also describe the interrelation and the evolution across financing rounds of the different rights query 1 query 2

the control of technology alliances an empirical analysis of the biotechnology industry we examine the determinants of control rights in biotechnology alliances through three case studies and a quantitative analysis aghion and tirole 1994 argue that control rights will be assigned so as to maximize the value of the final output as long as the r d firm has sufficient financial resources consistent with this framework the allocation of control rights to the r d firm increases with the firm s financial resources the empirical evidence regarding the relationship between control rights and the stage of the project at the time the alliance is signed is more ambiguous

the acquisition of fisher body by general motors abstract it is commonly said that in 1926 general motors was led to acquire its supplier of automobile bodies fisher body because fisher body held up general motors it is claimed that fisher body did this by locating its body plants far away from the general motors assembly plants and by adapting inefficient methods of production thus increasing both the cost of producing bidies and the profits of fisher body under its cost plus contract this tale is factually incorrect what general motors acquired in 1926 was the 40 percent of the shares of fisher body that it did not already own furthermore fisher body did not locate its plants far away from the general motors assembly plants it is also most implausible for many reasons that the fisher brothers would have used inefficient methods of production there is no evidence that a holdup occurred

the new institutional economics this outstanding book presents new original contributions from some of the world s leading economists including ronald coase douglass c north masahiko aoki oliver e williamson and harold demsetz it demonstrates the extent and depth of the new institutional economics research programme which is having a worldwide impact on the economics profession

pragmatic collaborations advancing knowledge while controlling opportunism this paper starts from the observation that firms are increasingly engaging in collaborations with their suppliers even as they are reducing the extent to which they are vertically integrated with those suppliers this fact seems incompatible with traditional theories of the firm which argue that integration is necessary to avoid the potential for hold ups created when non contractible investments are made our view is that pragmatist mechanisms such as benchmarking simultaneous engineering and root cause error detection and correction make possible learning by monitoring a relationship in which firms and their collaborators continuously improve their joint products and processes without the need for a clear division of property rights we argue that pragmatic collaborations based on learning by monitoring both advance knowledge and control opportunism and thus align interests between the collaborators copyright 2000 by oxford university press

two remarks on the property rights literature we first point out that the recent property rights literature is based on three assumptions 1 that contracts are always subject to renegotiation 2 that the exercise of a property right confers a private benefit and 3 that parties are risk neutral building on hart moore 1999 we provide conditions under which an optimal contract consists of nothing more than an assignment of property rights we also examine the robustness of some of the literature s standard predictions about asset ownership to the introduction of mechanisms for eliciting parties ex post willingness to pay for the assets such as options or financial markets to illustrate the issue we revisit the hart moore 1990 proposition that joint ownership is suboptimal and argue that ownership by a single party is dominated by joint ownership with put options

the role of market forces in assuring contractual performance the conditions under which transactors can use the market repeat purchase mechanism of contract enforcement are examined increased price is shown to be a means of assuring contractual performance a necessary and sufficient condition for performance is the existence of price sufficiently above salvageable production costs so that the nonperforming firm loses a discounted steam of rents on future sales which is greater than the wealth increase from nonperformance this will generally imply a market price greater than the perfectly competitive price and rationalize investments in firm specific assets advertising investments thereby become a positive indicator of likely performance

real time decentralized information processing as a model of organizations with boundedly rational agents this paper studies the properties of real time decentralized information processing as a model of human information processing in organizations real time decentralized processingwhich models the computation of decision rules in a temporal decision problem by members of an organization captures both the cost of computation in terms of the members time and the constraints imposed by computational delay on the use of recent information unlike a batch processing model it has no single measure of delay because decisions are computed from data of heterogeneous lags furthermore decentralization does not unambiguously reduce delay because processing a message precludes processing current data 1 real time decentralized information processing

efficient adaptation in long term contracts take or pay provisions for natural gas to mitigate the inflexibility of long term contracting for natural gas parties will look for terms that minimize the need for costly adjudication while maintaining incentives for appropriate adaptation the authors examine the incident of take or pay provisions in contracts between natural gas producers and pipelines from this perspective they argue that take obligations can be viewed as a mechanism for effecting appropriate incentives for contractual performance and show that efficient breach considerations define an optimal take percentage as a function of characteristics of the transaction these incentives are distorted by regulated price ceilings which cause the adoption of take obligations in excess of optimal levels the findings refute the common perception that take or pay provisions are just an artifact of wellhead price regulation and serve no useful purpose in the absence of regulation 20 references 1 figure 1 table

asset specificity and economic organization abstract this paper examines the optimization problem of firm and market organization in which both production cost and transaction cost differences are expressed as a function of asset specificity in general markets enjoy advantages by aggregating the demands of many buyers thereby realizing economies of scale or scope such production cost savings need to be assessed in relation to the transaction cost advantages that internal organization sometimes enjoys over markets in adapting to changed circumstances as it turns out both production cost economies and the transaction cost differences between firm and market organization vary systematically with the characteristics of the investments this paper employs a unified framework to assess the choice of organization form the condition of asset specificity is featured

team theory garbage cans and real organizations some history and prospects of economic research on decision making in organizations this essay attempts to articulate and advance a long term agenda for organizational economics the essay begins with a general discussion of four specific items on this agenda and then moves to a more specific discussion of decision making in organizations beginning with two polar opposite conceptions team theory and garbage cans and then describing several recent economic models part of the rationale for writing this essay is that this agenda has both substantive and methodological commonalities with the work of james march copyright 2003 oxford university press

the reference point approach to the theory of the firm an introduction there is a small but growing literature on the reference point approach to incomplete contracts as formulated by hart and moore the reference point approach has begun to be applied to the theory of the firm in 3 recent papers this introduction reviews the main theoretical aspects of each of these papers it then discusses the relationship between the reference point approach to the firm the transaction cost approach and the property rights approach here it is argued that the reference point approach is a step back towards ex post inefficiencies away from reliance on ex ante inefficiencies

subjective performance measures in optimal incentive contracts objective measures of performance are seldom perfect in response incentive contracts often include important subjective components that mitigate incentive distortions caused by imperfect objective measures this paper explores the combined use of subjective and objective performance measures in respectively implicit and explicit incentive contracts naturally objective and subjective measures often are substitutes sometimes strikingly so we show that if objective measures are sufficiently close to perfect then no implicit contracts are feasible because the firm s fallback position after reneging on an implicit contract is too attractive we also show however that objective and subjective measures can reinforce each other if objective measures become more accurate then in some circumstances the optimal contract puts more weight on subjective measures because the improved objective measures increase the value of the ongoing relationship and so reduce the firm s incentive to renege we also analyze the use of subjective weights on objective performance measures and provide case study evidence consistent with our analyses

relational contracts and the theory of the firm relational contracts informal agreements sustained by the value of future relationships are prevalent within and between firms we develop repeated game models showing why and how relational contracts within firms vertical integration differ from those between nonintegration we show that integration affects the parties temptations to renege on a given relational contract and hence affects the best relational contract the parties can sustain in this sense the integration decision can be an instrument in the service of the parties relationship our approach also has implications for joint ventures alliances and networks and for the role of management within and between firms

an economic approach to influence activities in organizations members of organizations spend considerable time effort and ingenuity attempting to influence decision makers such influence activities may bring benefits to the organization but they also involve real costs this essay offers an economic rationale for such influence activity as representing rational self interested behavior in the presence of informational asymmetries and an analysis of how the design of the organization s structure and policies should respond to the incentives for attempting influence it is posited that information valuable for the organization s decision making is directly available only to members of the organization who have some personal stake in the decisions these individuals may then have an incentive to try to manipulate the information they develop and provide in order to influence the resulting decisions to their benefits this can be costly both in degrading the quality of decision making and in diverting the attention and effort of the organization s members from more productive activities the organization has three different methods it can employ to discourage excessive influence activities and to encourage more directly productive uses of time and effort it can limit access to decision makers and participation in decision making it can alter its decision making criteria to favor those performing well in productive activities and it can provide direct financial incentives to encourage the desired allocation of effort it is shown that an efficiently designed organization will use such financial incentives only as a last resort instead it will always first alter its decision participation policies and decisionmaking criteria

contract duration and relationship specific investments empirical evidence from coal markets this paper examines the importance of specific relationship investments in determining the duration of coal contracts negotiated between coal suppliers and electric utilities data for 277 coal contracts are used to perform the analysis the results provide strong support for the view that buyers and sellers make longer commitments to the terms of future trade at the contract execution stage and rely less on repeated bargaining when relationship specific investments are more important

agency theory and franchising some empirical results this article provides an empirical assessment of various agency theoretic explanations for franchising including risk sharing one sided moral hazard and two sided moral hazard the empirical models use proxies for factors such as risk moral hazard and franchisors need for capital to explain both franchisors decisions about the terms of their contracts royalty rates and up front franchise fees and the extent to which they use franchising in this article i exploit several new sources of data on franchising to construct a cross section of 548 franchisors involved in various business activities in the united states in 1986 the data are most consistent with a model based on two sided moral hazard the empirical models are also more successful at explaining the extent to which franchisors choose to franchise stores than at explaining the terms of franchise contracts finally contrary to the predictions of several theoretical models i find that royalty rates and franchise fees are not negatively related

the existence of self enforcing implicit contracts implicit contracts are nontrivial nash equilibria to the post hiring trading game between a worker and the employer these are supported by intrafirm rather than labor market reputations the existence of an implicit contract that supports efficient trade is proved in a simple model

managerial incentive problems a dynamic perspective the paper studies how a person s concern for a future career may influence his or her incentives to put in effort or make decisions on the job in the model the person s productive abilities are revealed over time through observations of performance there are no explicit output contingent contracts but since the wage in each period is based on expected output and expected output depends on assessed ability an implicit contract links today s performance to future wages an incentive problem arises from the person s ability and desire to influence the learning process and therefore the wage process by taking unobserved actions that affect today s performance the fundamental incongruity in preferences is between the individual s concern for human capital returns and the firm s concern for financial returns the two need be only weakly related it is shown that career motives can be beneficial as well as detrimental depending on how well the two kinds of capital returns are aligned it is well understood by now that informational externalities may place special demands on the organization of economic exchange simple price mediated markets will frequently fail in the presence of asymmetric information in that case more elaborate contractual arrangements have to be used as substitutes for the price system lately considerable effort has been devoted to the analysis of contracting under incomplete information with the objective to understand the range of economic institutions that emerge in response to the failure of the price system the analysis of moral hazard has played a prominent role in this development moral hazard problems arise when for some reason or another transacting parties cannot contract contingent on the delivery of the good for instance in buying labour services it may be that the amount of labour supplied is not directly observable precluding a simple exchange of wage for labour as a partial remedy to this problem an imperfect mutually observed signal about the supply of labour can be used as a proxy in the contract frequently output is taken as such a proxy the drawback is that output is often influenced by other factors than labour input which induce undesirable risk into the contract one is therefore faced with a tradeoff between allocating risk associated with incomplete observability and providing incentives for a proper supply of labour gaining insight into this tradeoff is important not only for understanding contracting in the small e g managerial incentive schemes but also because it is closely related to the fundamental tension between equity and efficiency in the society as a whole while our understanding of moral hazard has advanced a lot in past years it is clear that much work remains an important question that has received little attention until

relational incentive contracts standard incentive theory models provide a rich framework for studying informational problems but assume that contracts can be perfectly enforced this paper studies the design of self enforced relational contracts i show that optimal contracts often can take a simple stationary form but that self enforcement restricts promised compensation and affects incentive provision with hidden information it may be optimal for an agent to supply the same inefficient effort regardless of cost conditions with moral hazard optimal contracts involve just two levels of compensation this is true even if performance measures are subjective in which case optimal contracts terminate following poor performance jel c73 d82 l14

power in a theory of the firm transactions take place in the firm rather than in the market because the firm offers power to agents who make specific investments past literature emphasizes the allocation of ownership as the primary mechanism by which the firm does this within the contractibility assumptions of this literature we identify a potentially superior mechanism the regulation of access to critical resources access can be better than ownership because i the power agents get from access is more contingent on their making the right investment and ii ownership has adverse effects on the incentive to specialize the theory explains the importance of internal organization and third party ownership

integration of the sales force an empirical examination this article develops and tests a model of integration of a marketing function personal selling the model derived from transaction cost analysis as developed principally by williamson is formulated as a logistic function which is estimated with data from the electronic components industry as expected integration is associated with increasing levels of asset specificity difficulty of performance evaluation and the combination of these two factors contrary to the transaction cost model neither frequency of transactions nor interaction of specificity and environmental uncertainty is significantly related to integration the transaction cost model improves significantly upon the fit of a simple model relating integration to company size alone these results suggest that for studying transactions of this kind it is fruitful to view the firm as a governance structure

incentives between firms and within this paper reviews the significant progress in agency theory i e the economic theory of incentives during the 1990s with an eye toward applications to supply transactions i emphasize six recent models in three pairs 1 new foundations for the theory of incentive contracts 2 new directions in incentive theory and 3 new applications to supply transactions by reviewing these six models i hope to establish three things first the theory of incentive contracts needed and received new foundations second new directions in incentive theory teach us that incentive contracts are not the only source of incentives finally and especially relevant to supply transactions the integration decision is an instrument in the incentive problem

the impact of competition on make or buy decisions evidence from the spanish local tv industry this paper empirically investigates whether changes in product market competition affect firm boundaries exploiting regulation induced shocks to entry barriers and differences in regulation enforcement across cities to obtain exogenous variation in competition we establish a negative causal effect of competition through reduced entry barriers and a larger number of rival firms on vertical integration in the setting of the spanish local television industry between 1995 and 2002 data and the online appendix are available at https doi org 10 1287 mnsc 2016 2633 this paper was accepted by bruno cassiman business strategy

double sided moral hazard and the nature of share contracts contractual arrangements involving revenue profit sharing are often based on fairly simple often linear rules in addition in many contexts these contracts are not finely adjusted to the particular circumstances of individual agents or markets nor do they vary over time to the extent current theories based on optimal contracting suggest they should we develop a simple model of such revenue or profit sharing arrangements based on double sided moral hazard and show that this model can account for many of these stylized facts more specifically the model shows that linear contracts can be optimal and that benefits from customizing terms can in some cases be quite limited if not zero

retail contracting theory and practice we summarize a number of regularities that arise in the empirical literature on contractual relationships between manufacturers and their exclusive resellers we do this using studies of traditional and business format franchise relationships as well as studies of salesforce integration decisions some of the patterns that we uncover are consistent with a standard incentive cum insurance theory of organization while others are not we brie y review some theoretical extensions that seem promising in terms of reconciling seeming con icts between theory and practice i introduction manufacturers of retail products must decide whether to sell their products to consumers themselves vertical integration or to sell via independent retailers vertical separation when manufacturers do not perform the sales function internally but want exclusive retailers they usually choose some form of franchising 1 many theories attempt to explain the choice of retail organizational form moreover a considerable body of empirical evidence concerning this choice is accumulating we attempt to evaluate this econometric evidence and relate it to the theories to accomplish this task we assess studies of franchising arrangements as well as studies of sales force organization in industrial settings the paper is organized as follows in the next section we highlight a number of regularities that arise in the empirical literature on retail contracting in particular we nd that i risk is positively related to the use of high powered incentives vertical separation ii the importance of the agent s eiort in production is positively related to the use of high powered incentives

hybrid cooperation agreements in networks the case of the airline industry abstract this paper develops a unified framework to analyze a continuum of hybrid cooperation agreements along two dimensions their degree of revenue sharing scope of alliances and their degree of cost sharing scope of joint ventures the analysis focuses on the air transportation industry distinguishing between interline and interhub markets as economies of traffic density become stronger we find that the socially optimal cooperation agreement moves from full alliance to joint venture in interline markets whereas it moves from joint ventureto merger in interhub markets these results are driven by the tradeoff between a procompetitive effect of alliances in interline markets and an anticompetitive effect in interhub markets along with the efficiency gains associated with joint ventures in interhub markets we also develop an empirical application for intercontinental routes for the period 2010 2016 that identifies a positive impact of deeper degrees of airline cooperation revenue and cost sharing on traffic both in interline and interhub markets therefore the potential anticompetitive effect of deeper alliances in interhub markets is not observed in our sample

a general analysis of rent seeking games in this paper we reconsider the basic model of efficient rent seeking we stress the importance of the shape of the players reaction curve in order to understand the impact of the technology of rent seeking on the structure of the outcome of the game we give a complete characterization of the pure strategy equilibria moreover the possibility of preemption by a stakelberg leader is discussed according to the nature of the technology of rent seeking available to the agents

four formal izable theories of the firm in this essay i define and compare elemental versions of four theories of the firm these elemental theories are distilled from important contributions by hart holmstrom klein williamson and others although these contributions have been widely cited and much discussed i have found it difficult to understand the commonalities distinctions and potential combinations of these seemingly familiar contributions in this essay therefore i attempt to clarify these issues in three steps i begin with informal summaries of the theories then turn to simple but formal statements of each elemental theory and finally nest the four elemental theories in an integrative framework

the fable of fisher body abstract general motors s gm s acquisition of fisher body is the classic example of market failure in the literature on contracts and the theory of the firm according to the standard account in 1926 gm merged vertically with fisher body a maker of auto bodies because of concerns over transaction specific investment and contractual holdup that account exhibits errors of historical fact and interpretation general motors acquired a 60 percent interest in fisher body in 1919 moreover the contractual arrangements and working relationship prior to the 1926 merger exhibited trust rather than opportunism fisher body s production technology did not exhibit asset specificity the merger reflected economic considerations specific to that time not some immutable market failure we demonstrate that vertical integration was directed at improving coordination of production and inventories assuring gm of adequate supplies of auto bodies and providing gm with access to the executive talents of the fisher bro

capturing knowledge within and across firm boundaries evidence from clinical development how do firm boundaries influence employees acquisition of information using detailed project level data and qualitative evidence i document that pharmaceutical firms are more likely to outsource the coordination of data intensive clinical trials while they are more likely to assign knowledge intensive trials to internal teams managers do not choose between market and hierarchy but between the hierarchy of the firm in which subjective performance evaluations are combined with flat explicit incentives and the hierarchy of its subcontractor whose virtue stems precisely from the ability to provide high powered incentives on a narrow set

the boundaries of the firm revisited why do firms exist what is their function and what determines their scope these remain the central questions in the economics of organization they are also central questions for business executives and corporate strategists the worldwide volume of corporate mergers and acquisitions exceeded 1 6 trillion in 1997 it is hard to imagine that so much time effort and investment bankers fees would be spent on adjusting firm boundaries unless there was some underlying economic gain indeed the exceptional levels of merger and acquisition activity over the past two decades are a strong indication that economically significant forces do determine organizational boundaries the study of firm boundaries originated with the famous essay by coase 1937 who raised the question of why we observe so much economic activity inside formal organizations if as economists commonly argue markets are such powerful and effective mechanisms for allocating scarce resources coase s answer was in terms of the costs of transacting in a world of imperfect information when the transaction costs of market exchange are high it may be less costly to coordinate production through a formal organization than through a market in large part thanks to the work of williamson 1975 1985 recent decades have seen a resurgence of interest in coase s fundamental insight that firm boundaries can be explained by efficiency considerations our understanding of firm boundaries has been sharpened by identifying more precisely the nature and sources of transaction costs in different circumstances in the process the focus of

ownership and control rights in internet portal alliances 1995 1999 we examine the structure of more than 100 alliances by internet portals and other firms between 1995 to 1999 from a contract theory perspective models of incomplete contracts frequently invoke unforeseen contingencies the cost of writing contracts and the cost of enforcing contracts in justifying the assumption of incompleteness the setting in which internet portals formed alliances was rife with these sorts of transaction costs we argue that these alliances can be viewed as incomplete contracts and find that the division of ownership and the allocation of control rights are consistent with the incomplete contracting literature copyright 2003 by the rand corporation

the theory of the firm as governance structure from choice to contract the propositions that organization matters and that it is susceptible to analysis were long greeted by skepticism by economists one reason why this message took a long time to register is that it is much easier to say that organization matters than it is to show how and why the prevalence of the science of choice approach to economics has also been an obstacle as developed herein the lessons of organization theory for economics are both different and more consequential when examined through the lens of contract this paper examines economic organization from a science of contract perspective with special emphasis on the theory of the firm

a signal jamming theory of predation we propose a new theory ofpredation based on signal jamming in our model the predator s characteristics are common knowledge while the entrant is uncertain of his own future profitability the entrant uses his current profit to decide whether to remain in the market and the predator preys to jam or interfere with this inference problem thus our model differs from those based on reputation effects in which the predator preys to signal information about himself

do national level policies to promote low carbon technology deployment pay off for the investor countries abstract national level policies to promote deployment of low carbon technologies have been suggested and used as a means to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the context of international climate change mitigation the long term benefits of such policies in the context of international climate change mitigation depend on their effects on near term emissions abatement and resultant long term technological change that will reduce abatement costs of achieving global mitigation goals there is also an argument that these policies might foster early mover advantages in international low carbon technology markets we first review the factors that could influence such benefits and use a global integrated assessment model to present an illustrative example to understand the potential magnitude of these benefits we find that reductions in long term abatement costs might not provide sufficient incentives to justify policies to promote the deployment of low carbon technologies in particular the emerging higher risk and currently expensive alternatives we also find that early mover advantages can potentially provide substantial benefits but only if these advantages are both strong and persistent our results suggest a role for international cooperation in low carbon technology deployment to address the existence of free riding opportunities in the context of global climate change mitigation

creating holdup through vertical integration fisher body revisited abstract general motors s gm s 1926 acquisition of fisher body has long served as a cornerstone of hold up arguments for vertical integration this paper utilizes primary historical evidence to make three related claims first it shows that gm s initial investment in fisher body occurred primarily to gain access to the fisher brothers specialized human assets second it shows that holdup was not the cause of gm s purchase of fisher body instead the primary factors leading to vertical integration were gm management s fears over the fisher brothers impending departure coupled with problems of financing new body plants finally i show that while holdup was not an issue prior to integration the fisher brothers successfully held up gm after they became employees far from reducing opportunistic behavior vertical integration increased gm s vulnerability to rent seeking behavior based in human asset specificity

the contractual nature of the firm for their helpful comments i am grateful to armen a alchian yoram barzel keith leffler john s mcgee and dean worcester 1 ronald h coase the nature of the firm 4 economica 386 1937 the paper however was written several years earlier see note 3 infra 2 the social sciences citation index provides the following information breaking down the period of 1966 80 into three five year periods the total citations of coase s firm paper for each subperiod are 1966 70 17 citations 1971 75 47 citations and 1976 80 105 citations

aggregation and linearity in the provision of intertemporal incentives we consider the problem of providing incentives over time for an agent with constant absolute risk aversion the optimal compensation scheme is found to be a linear function of a vector of n accounts which count the number of times that each of the n kinds of observable events occurs the number n is independent of the number of time periods so the accounts may entail substantial aggregation in a continuous time version of the problem the agent controls the drift rate of a vector of accounts that is subject to frequent small random fluctuations the solution is as if the problem were the static one in which the agent controls only the mean of a multivariate normal distribution and the principal is constrained to use a linear compensation rule if the principal can observe only coarser linear aggregates such as revenues costs or profits the optimal compensation scheme is then a linear function of those aggregates the combination of exponential utility normal distributions and linear compensation schemes makes computations and comparative statics easy to do as we illustrate we interpret our linearity results as deriving in part from the richness of the agent s strategy space which makes it possible for the agent to undermine and exploit complicated nonlinear functions of the accounting aggregates

propagation through endogenous investment specific technological change abstract many real business cycle models lack a significant propagation mechanism consequently most of the serial correlation in output is inherited from the serial correlation in the exogenous shocks a simple model is presented to show there need not be any relationship between the serial correlation of the exogenous shocks and that of output this is accomplished by incorporating the well documented fact that research spending has generated changes in the real price of capital

transaction cost economics in real time this paper attempts to place the theq of the boundaries of thejirm within the context of the passage of time more precisely it resurrects and places in a modem frame some of the insights of the chsical and marshallian theories of organization the modem reinterpretation of those theories centers around the capabilities view of the jirm taken together with governance costs the capabilities ofjirm and market determine the boundaries of the jirm in the short run ovw time capabilities change as firms and markets learn which implies a kind of information or knowledge cost the cost of trandewing the firm s capability to the market w vice versa these dynamic governance costs are the costs of persuading negotiating and coordinating with and teaching others they arise in the face of change notably txchnological and organizational innovation in fit they are the costs of not having the capabilities you need when you need them dynamic transaction costs provide an explanation for vertical integration that is arguably more general than those dominant in the literature in the face of uncertainty and divwgent views ofthe future common ownership of multiple stages of production is a supwior institutional arrangement for coordinating systemic change asset specrfity is neither necessary nor suffient for this to be true dynamic governance costs may also affit internal organization it may sometimes be costly in 3 terms of persuasion negotiation and teaching to create within the firm capabilities readily available on the market indeed in cases in which systemic coordination is not 4 the issue the market may turn out to be the superior institution of coordination in e 2 genwal the capabilities view of the jirm suggests that we look atfim2 and market as alternative and sometimes overlapping institutions of learning 1 transaction costs in the long rzln and the short 9 x classical and neoclassical perspectives

different missions and commitment power in r d organizations theory and evidence on industry university alliances this paper proposes a theory for why firms conduct some research activities in house but outsource other projects to independent partners and for why firms retain different degrees of control over collaborative research projects the focus is on the determinants of a company s choice to outsource research projects to academic organizations because of the different institutional missions of academic organizations outsourcing a project to a university allows a firm to commit not to terminate or alter a scientifically valuable project before it is complete this commitment is potentially valuable for the firm in an environment where scientific value and economic value may not coincide and scientific workers are responsive to the incentives defined by their community of peers an economic model that formalizes these arguments is developed empirical hypotheses are then formulated about the kind of research activities firms will outsource to universities and activities on which they will exert stronger control evidence from a sample of industry university research agreements as well as from other large sample and case studies shows patterns consistent with the predictions of the model

markets and hierarchies and mathematical economic theory over the past decade transaction cost economics has been partially translated in the more mathematical language of game theory and understanding of the costs of transactions has been deepened refined and extended but the translation is incomplete a great deal of human behaviour is missed and doing game theory with more life like models of individuals will bring theory closer to phenomena transaction cost economics particularly the economics of relational contracts provides a major arena for these developments since the important issues of bounded rationality and individual behavior are central to the topic copyright 1996 by oxford university press

bringing the market inside the firm academics consultants and practitioners have long advocated bringing the market inside the firm for example in the 1950 s and 1960 s economists proposed that the transferpricing problem should be solved by charging market prices for internal transactions similarly in the 1980 s financial economists suggested that the capital allocation problem should be solved by charging the external cost of capital for internal investments and wave after wave of organizational restructuring has advocated radical decentralization empowerment intrapreneurship and the like in short making employees feel like owners proponents of making transactions within firms more market like often seem to ignore the factors that brought these transactions inside firms in the first place but bengt holmstrom and paul milgrom 1991 1994 holmstrom and jean tirole 1991 and holmstrom 1999 hereafter referred to collectively as hmt remind us that in some cases integration is efficient precisely because it eliminates market incentives in such cases bringing the market inside the firm would clearly be undesirable in this paper we show that bringing the market inside the firm is often not feasible even if it would be desirable more precisely if some aspects of the market transaction are noncontractible as we define below then it is impossible to replicate spot market payoffs inside a firm this result would be trivial if the firm s only instruments were court enforceable contracts it is impossible by definition for such contracts to replicate payoffs that were noncontractible in a spot market our contribution is to show that this result also applies to relational contracts i e self enforcing agreements in repeated games to establish this result we follow sanford grossman and oliver hart 1986 hart and john moore 1990 and hart 1995 hereafter referred to collectively as ghm in using asset ownership to determine whether a particular transaction is inside a firm and hmt in adding court enforceable contracts to asset ownership models we also draw on our own work baker et al 2001 to model relational contracts the resulting model is the first we know of that simultaneously analyzes asset ownership courtenforceable contracts and relational contracts

implicit contracts incentive compatibility and involuntary unemployment this paper considers the enforceability of employment contracts when employees performance cannot be verified in court so that piece rate contracts are not legally enforceable part i shows that there exists a variety of self enforcing implicit contracts modelled as perfect equilibria in a repeated game and characterizes all the wage and performance outcomes that can be implemented implementation requires a strictly positive surplus from employment the form of the contract depending on how this surplus is divided between firm and employee piece rate contracts and contracts with an informally agreed bonus can be made self enforcing but the use of severance pay and bonding does not extend the set of implementable allocations the resulting contracts resemble actual labor contracts more than do the contracts in standard principal agent models part ii analyses market equilibrium with these contracts also modelled as perfect equilibria in a repeated game and shows that many such equilibria exist unfilled vacancies and unemployed workers can co exist despite the existence of contracts that are potentially mutually beneficial for those jobs that are filled any division of the potential surplus is possible so that the market can have at the same time involuntary unemployment and vacancies that are unfilled despite filled jobs earning positive profits as a criterion for selecting equilibria a notion of renegotiation proofness is applied then either all workers are employed or all jobs filled but any division of the potential surplus is still possible the paper explores what further restrictions on beliefs give rise to a walrasian outcome in which all the potential surplus goes to the short side of the market and to an efficiency wage type outcome in which the potential surplus goes to the long side

the tyranny of inequality abstract when parties are very unequally endowed agreement may be very difficult to reach even if the specific transaction is easy to contract on and fungible resources can be transferred to compensate the losing party the very fungibility of the resource transferred makes it hard to restrict its use changing the amount the parties involved spend in trying to grab future rents this spill over effect can inhibit otherwise valuable transactions as well as enable otherwise inefficient transactions agreement typically breaks down when the required transfer is large and the proposed recipient of the transfer is relatively unproductive or poorly endowed we examine the implications of this model for a theory of the optimal allocation of property rights

why hold ups occur the self enforcing range of contractual relationships one of my most enjoyable intellectual experiences was working with armen alchian on the klein crawford and alchian 1978 hold up paper in this paper i extend the basic framework presented in that paper pointing out what i now consider to be its shortcomings and providing insights into the nature of hold ups and the form of contracts chosen by transactors to avoid hold ups the major analytical extension entails combining hold up analysis with my work on private enforcement because private enforcement capital is limited and written contract terms are necessarily imperfect transactors must optimally combine court enforced written terms together with privately enforced unwritten terms to define what i call the self enforcing range of their contractual relationship hold ups occur when unanticipated events place the contractual relationship outside the self enforcing range this probabilistic framework where transactors enter contractual relationships knowing that a hold up may take place but believing that the expected gains from trade outweigh the expected rent dissipating costs associated with the hold up risk is shown to have important implications for understanding the structure of contracts adopted by transactors in the marketplace i why do hold ups occur i begin with a simple example that illustrates the basic economic forces involved in a hold up assume that a builder constructs a house on a piece of land the builder does not own but rather only leases short term after the initial land lease expires the landowner could hold up the builder by raising the land rent to reflect the costs of moving the house to another lot this example illustrates all the hold up factors emphasized in klein crawford and alchian a the builder has made an investment that is highly specific to a particular piece of land and b the landowner has taken advantage of the incompleteness of the contract that governs the relationship in particular the fact that the lease does not cover future years to c expropriate the quasi rents on the builder s specific investment the obvious question is why anything like this would ever occur that is why would someone be so naive as to build a house on land for which they had only a short term lease our primary goal in klein crawford and alchian was not to explain the existence of hold ups but rather the institutions adopted by transactors to avoid hold ups for example we would expect that builders anticipating a potential hold up problem would decide to purchase the land or at least to sign a long term ground lease before starting construction however we do present some examples in the paper of hold ups that actually occurred the implicit reason we give for the occurrence of these hold ups is transactor ignorance apparently transactors are not always smart enough to choose the contractual arrangement that would eliminate the hold up problem oliver williamson provides a similar but much more explicit answer to the question of why hold ups occur when defining opportunism he states by opportunism i mean self interest seeking with guile this includes but is scarcely limited to more blatant forms such as lying stealing and cheating opportunism more often involves subtle forms of deceit more generally opportunism refers to the incomplete or distorted disclosure of information especially to calculated efforts to mislead distort obfuscate or otherwise confuse 1 for example the hold up may have occurred in our illustrative house construction example because the landowner deceived the builder with a low up front land rental price and vague promises about the future relying on the ability of one transactor to take advantage of the naivete or ignorance of another transactor is a highly unsatisfactory way to explain the incidence of hold ups simple examples of deception such as a builder constructing a house on land that is only rented short term rarely if ever occur