Double Auctions, Ex-Post Participation Constraints, and the Hold-Up Problem

This paper makes two contributions in the context of seller-buyer relationships with bilateral relationship-specific investment. Firstly, we demonstrate how ex-post negotiations via double auctions can be used to alleviate and often resolve the hold-up problem. Secondly, we show that ex-post participation constraints make the hold-up problem unavoidable in environments where (i) production costs are relatively high compared to valuations and (ii) the trade price is independent of the investment levels.