cores of inventory centralization games abstract consider a set of n stores with single item and single period demands assume an option of centralized ordering and inventory with holding and penalty costs only in this case a cooperative inventory centralization game defines allocations of the cost we examine the conditions under which such an inventory centralization game has a nonempty core we prove the existence of nonempty core for demands with symmetric distributions and the existence of nonempty core for joint multivariate normal demand distribution we establish the equivalency of four different nonempty core conditions for the newsboy problem and demonstrate their efficacy for discrete independent and identically distributed iid demands journal of economic literature classification numbers c44 c62 c71

the futures and forward price differential in the nordic electricity market abstract this note investigates price differentials between electricity forwards and portfolios of short term futures with identical delivery periods at the nordic power exchange nord pool since both contracts are traded at the same exchange there is no influence of for example different market microstructure and default risk when examining the effect of the marking to market of futures on the price differential although the prices of the futures portfolios are on average below the corresponding forward prices these price differentials are on average not statistically significant and not economically significant when taking transaction costs into account given the characteristics of the electricity contracts under observation this is consistent with the predictions of the cox et al 1981 model and indicates efficient pricing in the nord pool forward market in contrast to previous results

timing problems in contract breach decisions in contracts susceptible to efficient breach each party has an american option to breach and pay damages rather than perform she will repudiate early if the expected decrease in damages liability resulting from her partner s mitigation exceeds the expected value of the terminated contract including the option to breach in the future we show that each party has the incentive to repudiate earlier than socially optimal because expectation damages compensate the nonrepudiating party only for the loss of the completed exchange and not the value of its lost breach option this inefficiency is particularly acute in long term fixed price contracts in which the cost of performance to the promisor and the value to the promisee are volatile and uncorrelated we explore various responses to this problem including vertical integration changes in contract remedies including specific performance flexible price provisions and the capital structure of each party

the newsvendor game has a nonempty core we settle an open conjecture regarding the newsvendor game we prove that its core is always non empty for all possible joint distributions of the random demands we give sufficient conditions under which the core is a singleton or it contains non negative elements

can transport infrastructure change regions economic fortunes some evidence from europe and china abstractcan transport infrastructure change regions economic fortunes some evidence from europe and china regional studies claims and counterclaims about the likely impact of new transport infrastructure on a region s economic performance have existed for centuries going back to the early days of canals and railways high speed rail hsr as a new type of infrastructure has just over 50 years of existence the persistent debate is questioning the power of hsr in reducing economic disparities between cities and effecting economic transformation the paper goes beyond macro modelling looking to more disaggregated approaches of the structural changes two regions one in europe and one in china are compared to gain insights for future research and practice

channel bargaining with risk averse retailer abstract we first consider a supply chain with one manufacturer and one retailer where there is only one product with stochastic demand the retailer is risk averse with conditional value at risk cvar as her risk measure and the manufacturer is a risk neutral agent we model the problem as a nash bargaining problem where the manufacturer and the retailer negotiate about the wholesale price and order quantity we show that there exists a nash bargaining equilibrium for the wholesale price and order quantity with equal and unequal bargaining power we also find that even for the equal bargaining power between the two agents the retailer s bargaining power for the supply chain profit increases as she becomes more risk averse we then extend the model to the case where demand is endogenous and can be manipulated by setting the retail price we show that there exists a nash bargaining equilibrium for the wholesale price retail price and the order quantity under equal bargaining power

a comparison of milestone based and buyout options contracts for coordinating r d partnerships we analyze optimal contractual arrangements in a bilateral research and development r d partnership between a risk averse provider that conducts early stage research followed by a regulatory verification stage and a risk neutral client that performs late stage development activities including production distribution and marketing the problem is formulated as a sequential investment game with the client as the principal where the investments are observable but not verifiable the model captures the inherent incentive alignment problems of double sided moral hazard risk aversion and holdup we compare the efficacy of milestone based options contracts and buyout options contracts from the client s perspective and identify conditions under which they attain the first best outcome for the client we find that milestone based options contracts always attain the first best outcome for the client when the provider has some bargaining power in renegotiation and identify their applicability to different r

renegotiation design with unverifiable information this paper considers a buyer seller relationship with observable but unverifiable investments and or random utility parameters in such situations it is known that contract renegotiation may prevent the implementation of first best outcomes in this paper we show however that efficient investments and optimal risk sharing can typically be achieved provided the initial contract is able to monitor the ex post renegotiation process specifically we focus on the following two features of renegotiation design first default options in case renegotiation breaks down second the allocation of all bargaining power to either contracting party moreover we show that these two features can be obtained in standard rubinstein bargaining games through contractual provisions such as specific performance clauses and penalties for delay or equivalently financial hostages refundable without interest

future capacity procurements under unknown demand and increasing costs in this paper we study a situation in which a broker must manage the procurement of a short life cycle product as the broker observes demand for the item she learns about the demand process however as is often the case in practice it becomes either more difficult or more expensive to procure the item as the selling season advances thus the broker must trade off higher procurement costs against the benefit of making ordering decisions with better information about demand problems of this type arise for example in the travel industry where a travel agent s cost of procuring airline and hotel reservations increases as the date of a vacation package approaches we develop a newsvendor like characterization of the optimal procurement policy in a numerical analysis we demonstrate how broker procurements tend to cluster just before price increases and how brokers can benefit from explicitly considering the effects of information about demand in their ordering policies

strategic information management under leakage in a supply chain the importance of material flow management for a profit maximizing firm has been well articulated in the supply chain literature we demonstrate in our analytical model that a firm must also actively manage information flows within the supply chain which translates to controlling what it knows as well as what its competitors and suppliers know in our model of horizontal competition between an informed and an uninformed firm with a common upstream supplier material and information flows intersect through leakage of demand order information to unintended recipients as a result the informed firm s drive to control information flows within the supply chain can trigger operational losses through material flow distortion these losses can be so severe that the firm may prefer not to acquire information even when it is costless to do so our results underscore the importance of strategic information management actively managing the supply chain s information flows and making trade offs with material flows where appropriate to maximize profits

what does reputation really assure the relationship of trademarks to expectations and legal remedies i introduction klein and leffler 1981 and shapiro 1982 1983 have shown that a firm that engages in repeat transactions has an incentive to use the market as distinct from formal legal processes to assure the quality of its product the firm charges a price above salvageable costs of production and invests the premium in reputation trademark capital that it forfeits wholly or in part if it allows quality to fall below the standards it represents to its customers 1 the quality assurance hypothesis seems to be supported by stock market event studies such as those by jarrell and peltzman 1985 and karpoff and lott 1993 which show that product recalls airline crashes deceptive advertising and fraud result in trademark losses the quality assurance hypothesis however does not explain the massive size of these losses which typically are many times the outlays incurred by the firm as a result of the event the law and economics literature on contracts offers an answer to this and related puzzles suggesting that trademark capital does more than assure quality it assures specific performance that is fulfillment of the precise terms of the contract 2 after developing the specific performance hypothesis section ii we show that it is supported by the evidence from event studies furthermore it explains other phenomena not covered by the quality assurance hypothesis including why competitors of firms whose products are recalled lose wealth why some damages such as those in airline crashes intentionally fail to provide full compensation and why firms who sell to other firms also invest in trademark capital section iii we conclude with a summary and a few remarks on the issue of market versus legal forces section iv ii the specific performance hypothesis the quality assurance hypothesis focuses on the problems that arise when the physical characteristics of a commodity are costly to determine even after purchase and sellers warranties and quality representations are costly to enforce because higher quality usually costs more to produce and can be sold at a higher price producers have an incentive to represent their goods as being of higher quality than they really are or having established a reputation to cut quality and costs when consumers observe that the quality of the goods they purchase is lower than they had been led to believe they shift to lower cost lower quality goods whose quality is easier to determine higher quality goods seemingly are driven off the market klein and leffler 1981 hypothesize that a firm that engages in repeat transactions can gain by producing higher quality goods charging a price above salvageable costs of production and investing the premium in firm specific trademark capital the value of this trademark also described as reputation or goodwill is the present value of the expected stream of price premiums misrepresentation causes a reduction in this income stream and a corresponding loss in trademark capital 3 thus trademarks assure quality without a third party to enforce the contract 4 a buyer however is concerned about other characteristics of a transaction besides the physical attributes of the product the expected harm if the seller breaches the contract for example by misrepresenting the product failing to deliver it on time or failing to provide future service and the ability of the legal system to assure full compensation also matter accordingly a seller who engages in repeat transactions has an incentive to provide a bond that assures specific performance rather than just product quality when a breach results in damages that are hard to measure and the legal system does not enforce contracts costlessly the next task therefore is to examine the limitations of the legal system in enforcing contracts and providing compensation in case of breach specific performance and penalty clauses the courts could require contracting parties to provide specific performance

infrastructure investment a review essay economists try not to be faddists but they often cannot help themselves while work on a topic should mirror the prospective importance of the topic that situation seems to occur with disappointing frequency instead the usual pattern is that some reasonably important topic will be totally ignored for the longest time then recognized and then the subject of a flurry of work all out of proportion to its likely long run importance nowhere has this speculative bubble of economic research been more clearly illustrated than with infrastructure investment macroeconomists havelong felt that the stock of public capital is an important factor input in the production of total output macroeconomists have known that u s productivity growth slowed dramatically in about 1973 and macroeconomists should have known that united states investment in public capital has been down since the late 1960s yet analysis of the u s productivity slowdown completely ignored infrastructure investment for the first fifteen years of this slowdown concentrating instead on energy prices social regulation the composition of the work force research and development different rates of obsolescence of the private capital stock and any number of other matters the public capital stock was hardly ever even mentioned as a potential factor in the productivity slowdown aschauer changed all that he wrote a series of papers 1989a 1989b 1989c that put these two movements together econometrically infrastructure investment turned down and aggregate productivity turned down slightly later both in the united states and in some other developed countries his work hit the magic button those who had worried about the productivity puzzle for fifteen years welcomed a new suspect those who were worried about low rates of u s national saving welcomed a new way to make their argument even more forcefully than with official figures on saving and investment which do not count infrastructure investment as investment political liberals and liberal politicians saw a way to rescue government spending and projects from the assaults of reaganism and even a way to avoid oth

a three stage model for a decentralized distribution system of retailers we present and study a three stage model of a decentralized distribution system consisting ofn retailers each of whom faces a stochastic demand for an identical product in the first stage before the demand is realized each retailer independently orders her initial inventory in the second stage after the demand is realized each retailer decides how much of her residual supply demand she wants to share with the other retailers in the third stage residual inventories are transshipped to meet residual demands and an additional profit is allocated our model is an extension of the two stage model of anupindi et al abz 2001 which implicitly assumes that all residuals enter the transshipment stage we show however that allocation rules in the third stage based on dual solutions which were used in the abz model may induce the retailers to hold back some of their residual supply demand in general we study the effect of implementing various allocations rules in the third stage on the values of the residual supply demand the retailers are willing to share with others in the second stage and the trade off involved in achieving an optimal solution for the corresponding centralized system

uncertainty about uncertainty and delay in bargaining we study a one sided offers bargaining game in which the buyer has private information about the value of the object and the seller has private information about his beliefs about the buyer s valuation we show that this uncertainty about uncertainties dramatically changes the set of outcomes in particular second order beliefs can lead to a delay in reaching agreement even when the seller makes frequent offers we show that not all types of second order beliefs lead to a delay when the buyer assigns positive probability to the seller knowing the buyer s value then delay not only can occur but it must occur for a class of equilibria however in all other cases delay will never occur

electricity futures prices indirect storability expectations and risk premiums the goal of this paper is to examine to what extent electricity futures prices contain expected risk premiums or have power to forecast spot prices and whether this might be dependent on the type of electricity supply we analyse futures prices from the dutch market a market in which power is produced with storable fossil fuels and futures prices from the nordpool market where electricity is mostly produced by hydropower we show that futures prices from markets in which electricity is predominantly produced by imperfectly storable fuels such as hydro wind and solar contain information about expected changes in the spot price of electricity whereas futures prices from markets in which electricity is predominantly produced with perfectly storable fuels contain information about both expected price changes and time varying risk premiums these findings provide insight in the applicability of forward price models one cannot apply the same model to all electricity markets forward models for markets with imperfect indirect storability should depend heavily on price expectations and models should include time varying risk premiums for markets with perfect indirect storability

coordinating investment production and subcontracting we value the option of subcontracting to improve financial performance and system coordination by analyzing a competitive stochastic investment game with recourse the manufacturer and subcontractor decide separately on their capacity investment levels then demand uncertainty is resolved and both parties have the option to subcontract when deciding on their production and sales we analyze and present outsourcing conditions for three contract types 1 price only contracts where an ex ante transfer price is set for each unit supplied by the subcontractor 2 incomplete contracts where both parties negotiate over the subcontracting transfer and 3 state dependent price only and incomplete contracts for which we show an equivalence result while subcontracting with these three contract types can coordinate production decisions in the supply system only state dependent contracts can eliminate all decentralization costs and coordinate capacity investment decisions the minimally sufficient price only contract that coordinates our supply chain specifies transfer prices for a small number 6 in our model of contingent scenarios our game theoretic model allows the analysis of the role of transfer prices and of the bargaining power of buyer and supplier we find that sometimes firms may be better off leaving some contract parameters unspecified ex ante and agreeing to negotiate ex post also a price focused strategy for managing subcontractors can backfire because a lower transfer price may decrease the manufacturer s profit finally as with financial options the option value of subcontracting increases as markets are more volatile or more negatively correlated

strategic investments trading and pricing under forecast updating this paper considers two independent firms that invest in resources such as capacity or inventory based on imperfect market forecasts as time progresses and new information becomes available the firms update their forecasts and have the option to trade their resources the trade contract is determined as the bargaining equilibrium or alternatively as the price equilibrium assuming a fairly general form of the profit functions we characterize the nash equilibrium investment levels which are first best under the price equilibrium trade contract but not under the bargaining equilibrium trade contract to gain additional insights we then focus on firms that face stochastic demand functions with constant price elasticity and have contingent pricing power assuming a general forecast evolution process we characterize the impact of the option to trade and the firms cooperation on equilibrium investments expected prices profits and consumer surplus finally to study the main driving forces of trading we employ a well established and empirically tested forecast updating model in which the forecast evolution process follows a two dimensional geometric brownian motion under this model we prove that the equilibrium investments expected prices profits and consumer surplus are nondecreasing in the quality and timing of forecast revisions in market variability and in foreign exchange volatility but are nonincreasing in market correlation

evaluating the effects of the m6 toll road on industrial land development and employment pugh g and fairburn j evaluating the effects of the m6 toll road on industrial land development and employment regional studies the paper reports the first evaluation of the wider economic effects of the m6 toll the uk s first toll motorway methodologically it contributes to the literature evaluating the economic effects of new transport infrastructure by exploiting a new source of data applying fresh econometric techniques and triangulating quantitative results with interview data it is concluded that the m6 toll has caused a positive development effect at the sub regional level in addition reasons are advanced why the development potential of new road infrastructure may be amplified rather than reduced by tolls pugh g et fairburn j evaluer les effets de la route a peage m6 sur le developpement des zones friches et l emploi regional studies cet article cherche a presenter les premiers resultats quant aux retombees economiques de plus grande envergure de la route a peage m6 la premiere r

holdups standard breach remedies and optimal investment in bilateral trading problems the parties may be hesitant to make relationship specific investments without adequate contractual protection we postulate that the parties can sign noncontingent contracts prior to investing and can freely renegotiate them after information about the desirability of trade is revealed we find that such contracts can induce one party to invest efficiently when courts impose either a breach remedy of specific performance or expectation damages moreover specific performance can induce both parties to invest efficiently if a separability condition holds expectation damages on the other hand is poorly suited to solve bilateral investment problems forthcoming the american economic review please contact the program in law and economics at boalt hall school of law uc berkeley berkeley ca 94720 for a copy of this paper

procurement and renegotiation parties bound by an incomplete contract have an incentive to renegotiate after acquiring new information the issue of the parties investment in the relationship before renegotiation is analyzed in a simple two period procurement model the firm invests in the first period it then learns its production cost and the sponsor learns its value for the project williamson s underinvestment presumption is shown to hold under very general assumptions about bargaining and about the ex post asymmetry of information as long as the firm s investment is not observable by the sponsor the introduction of a cancellation fee may well lead to even less investment contrary to what is sometimes argued the role of ex ante price fixing as an alternative way to reintroduce some form of commitment and the problem of cost overruns are discussed last it is shown that if investment is observable by the sponsor andthus may become a joint decision variable the two parties may choose to under or overinvest

adverse selection and renegotiation in procurement as was shown by dewatripont optimal long term contracts are generally not sequentially optimal the parties ex post renegotiate them to their mutual advantage this paper fully characterizes the equilibrium of a simple two period procurement situation and studies the extent to which renegotiation reduces ex ante welfare i a central result is that like in the non commitment case the second period allocation is optimal for the principal conditionally on his posterior beliefs about the agent ii the first period allocation exhibits an increasing amount of pooling when the discount factor grows iii with a continuum of types it is never optimal to induce full separation the paper also analyzes whether renegotiated long term contracts yield outcomes resembling those under either unnegotiated long term contracts or a sequence of short term contracts and it links the analysis with the multiple unit durable good monopoly problem

storage and the electricity forward premium we develop and test a model describing the influence of natural gas storage inventories on the electricity forward premium the model is constructed by linking the effect of gas storage constraints on the higher moments of the distribution of electricity prices to an established model of the effect of those moments on the forward premium the model predicts a sharply negative effect of gas storage inventories on the electricity forward premium when demand for electricity is high and space heating demand for gas is low empirical results based on pjm data strongly support the model

decentralizing cross functional decisions coordination through internal markets a firm faces many problems that are inherently cross functional to solve them successfully requires the coordinated actions of many functional representatives acting in a decentralized setting functional managers however respond to their own individual incentives and may consequently fail to maximize the overall profits of the firm we examine this issue in a setting in which the output of early actions limits the range of later actions and we propose an incentive scheme that allows the system to be successfully decentralized our mechanism is based on linear transfer prices for the intermediate output that are implemented through an internal market a market maker buys the output from one function and sells it to another she is not obliged to sell at the same price at which she bought and may set prices solely to provide incentives we illustrate the flexibility of the scheme by applying it to several models in the operations management literature

sell the plant the impact of contract manufacturing on innovation capacity and profitability in the electronics industry and others original equipment manufacturers oems are selling their production facilities to contract manufacturers cms the cms achieve high capacity utilization through pooling supplying many different oems meanwhile the oems focus on innovation research and development product design and marketing we examine how this change in industry structure affects investment in innovation and capacity and thus profitability in particular innovation is noncontractible so oems will invest less in innovation than is ideal for the industry as a whole hence although contract manufacturing improves capacity utilization it may reduce the profitability of the industry as a whole by weakening the incentives for innovation contract manufacturing is not the only means to achieve capacity pooling alternatively the oems can pool capacity with one another through supply contracts or a joint venture this may result in underinvestment or overinvestment in innovation and capacity but always increases profitability we find that the sale of production facilities to a cm improves profitability for the industry as a whole if and only if oems are subsequently in a strong bargaining position vis a vis the cm if the oems are indeed very strong the gain from pooling capacity via contract manufacturing is maximized in industries with moderate cost of capacity

cooperation between multiple news vendors with transshipments we study a situation with n retailers each of them facing a news vendor problem i e selling to customers over a finite period of time product with a short life cycle such as fashion groups of retailers might improve their expected joint profit by coordinating their orders followed by transshipments after demand realization is known we analyze these situations by defining a cooperative game called a general news vendor game for such a situation with n retailers we concentrate on whether it makes sense to cooperate by studying properties of general news vendor games our main result states that general news vendor games have non empty cores

efficient reliance and damage measures for breach of contract this article considers a situation where the buyer or the seller of a good must engage in expenditures on specific capital before the exchange either to prepare to use the product or to prepare to sell it it is assumed that postbreach bargaining is possible and carried out in a cooperative fashion and that buyers and sellers form expectations about the outcome of such bargaining in a specific way without enforceable contracts the potential appropriability of specific rents results in inefficiently low levels of investment three damage measures commonly used to enforce contracts are shown to produce inefficiently high levels of investment and to be pareto ranked from best to worst as follows specific performance expectation damages and reliance damages

market price of risk implied by asian style electricity options and futures in this paper we propose a jump diffusion type model which recovers the main characteristics of electricity spot price dynamics in the nordic market including seasonality mean reversion and spiky behavior we show how the calibration of the market price of risk to actively traded futures contracts allows for efficient valuation of nord pool s asian style options written on the spot electricity price furthermore we study the evolution of the market price of risk and the risk premium over a three year time period and compare the obtained results with those reported in the literature

on manufacturing marketing incentives stereotypically marketing is mainly concerned about satisfying customers and manufacturing is mainly interested in factory efficiency using the principal agent agency paradigm which assumes that the marketing and manufacturing managers of the firm will act in their self interest we seek incentive plans that will induce those managers to act so that the owner of the firm can attain as much as possible of the residual returns one optimal incentive plan can be interpreted as follows the owner subcontracts to pay the manufacturing manager a fixed rate for all capacity he delivers each marketing manager receives all of the returns from his product in turn all managers pay a fixed fee to the owner under this plan the marketing managers will often complain about the stock level decisions even though these levels are announced in advance under a revised plan the owner can eliminate such complaints by delegating the stocking decisions to the respective marketing managers without any loss this plan is interpreted as requiring the owner to make a futures market for manufacturing capacity paying the manufacturing manager the expected marginal value for each unit of capacity delivered receiving the realized marginal value from the marketing managers and losing money on average in the process

implications of breach remedy and renegotiation design for innovation and capacity amanufacturer writes supply contracts with n buyers then the buyers invest in innovation and the manufacturer builds capacity finally demand is realized and the firms renegotiate the supply contracts to achieve an efficient allocation of capacity among the buyers the court remedy for breach of contract specific performance versus expectation damages affects how the firms share the gain from renegotiation and hence how the firms make investments ex ante the firms may also engage in renegotiation design inserting simple clauses into the supply contract to shape the outcome of renegotiation for example when a buyer grants a financial hostage to the manufacturer or is charged a per diem penalty for delay in bargaining the manufacturer captures the gain from renegotiation tradable options which grant buyers the right to trade capacity without intervention from the manufacturer return the gain from renegotiation to the buyers this paper proves that under surprisingly general conditions the firms can coordinate their investments with the simplest of supply contracts fixed quantity contracts this may require renegotiation design and certainly requires that the firms understand the breach remedy and set their contract parameters accordingly

signaling new product reliability with after sales service contracts prior studies on performance based contracting pbc for after sales services have highlighted its advantages over traditional resource based contracting rbc when products are established and their reliability is known to all parties we develop a game theoretic model to investigate how these insights are affected when the vendor is privately informed about the reliability of a newly developed product a novel feature of our model is the interaction between reliability signaling private information and the vendor s discretionary investment in spares inventory private action which arises naturally in the setting we consider we find that this interaction leads to contrasting equilibrium outcomes under the two contracts rbc induces the vendor to focus on inventory savings leading to underinvestment in spares whereas pbc induces the vendor to focus on reliability signaling achieved through overinvestment in inventory as a result neither contract is efficient we investigate two means to mitigate this inefficiency but either approach has caveats a making inventory verifiable removes the trade off between reliability signaling and inventory investment but results in diverging contract preferences between the vendor and the buyer b pooling inventories across multiple buyers saves inventory costs but it also hinders reliability signaling potentially exacerbating inefficiency this paper was accepted by yossi aviv operations management

signalling and renegotiation in contractual relationships this paper examines how the possibility of renegotiation affects contractual outcomes in signaling games when an infinite number of rounds of renegotiations are allowed before contracts are executed the main results of the paper are 1 contracts may still contain distortions 2 the popular efficient separating equilibrium outcome is never an equilibrium outcome with renegotiation 3 incentive compatibility constraints can be generalized to incorporate renegotiation 4 equilibrium outcomes can be separating and nevertheless depend on the uninformed player s prior and 5 renegotiation in signaling games may lead to outcomes similar to equilibrium outcomes of screening games in which multiple contract purchases are allowed copyright 1993 by the econometric society

the impact of royalty contract revision in a multistage strategic r d alliance this paper investigates the impact of royalty revision on incentives and profits in a two stage research and development r d stage and marketing stage alliance with a marketer and an innovator the marketer offers royalty contracts to the innovator we find that the potential for royalty revision leads to more severe distortions in the optimal initial royalty contracts offered by the marketer we show that if the innovator plays a significant role in the marketing stage the marketer should offer a low royalty rate initially and then revise the royalty rate up later otherwise she should do the opposite we identify two major effects of royalty revision first royalty revision provides the marketer with a flexibility to dynamically adjust royalty rates across the two stages of the alliance to better align the innovator s incentives this incentive realigning effect improves the marketer s profit second royalty revision makes it harder for the marketer to obtain private information from the innovator because the innovator worries that the marketer will take advantage of the information to revise the initial contract to a more favorable one to herself later this information revealing effect hurts the marketer s profit we characterize in what kind of alliances marketers would benefit the most from royalty revision so that managers should clearly establish the expectation for royalty revision and in what kind of alliances markerters would not benefit from royalty revision so that managers should commit not to revise the initial royalty contract with royalty contracts that are contingent on the r d outcome of the r d stage we find that contingent contract structure could be either substitutable by fully capturing the incentive re aligning effect or complementary by weakening the information revealing effect to royalty revision depending on whether the innovator plays a significant role in the marketing stage managers may need to use a contingent contract if possible either to replace or with royalty revision accordingly to improve profits this paper was accepted by kamalini ramdas entrepreneurship and innovation

coordination of channel members efforts and utilities in contract farming operations abstract one important driving force behind parties entering into contract farming agreements is to improve farmers production efforts e g buying agricultural machinery or using new planting techniques in this study we examine two widely used channel structures in contract farming operations namely firm farmer ff and firm cooperative farmer fcf structures to assess how each contract type influences the coordination of efforts and utilities by channel members first we study wholesale price and cost sharing contracts under the ff structure and find that the latter can result in a win win outcome for both channel members when the firm s cost sharing proportion is lower than a threshold level we also find that cost sharing contract effectively enlarges the opportunity of a successful ff contract farming agreement interestingly we show that the purchasing price offered by the firm has a unimodal pattern in its cost sharing proportion second under the fcf structure we consider two bargaining models based on the cooperative s commission contracts with the farmer we find that the farmer s production effort can achieve the system optimal level and the cooperative s high bargaining power helps ensure a steady fcf contract farming agreement we also find that there exists a win win win outcome for all three channel members when the cooperative s commission ratio is higher than a threshold level