This article analyzes the reasons for the adoption of contracts in which factors receive a share of output as payment. Previous theories are unsatisfactory in that their assumptions and predictions are inconsistent with basic features of activities in which such contracts are used. A new...

This article compares alternative liability rules for allocating losses from defective products when consumers underestimate these losses and producers may have some market power. If producers do not have any market power, the rule of strict liability is first-best. If market power is...

When research and development take place before the associated output is produced, imperfectly competitive firms may use R&D for strategic purposes rather than simply to minimize costs. Using a simple symmetric two-stage Nash duopoly model, we show that such strategic use of R&D will increase...

This article examines the premise that television broadcasters are able to exercise substantial market power deriving from governmental restrictions on entry. Using a new sample of actual transactions prices, we estimate a hedonic equation identifying product quality components of advertising...

Two steps are required for firms collusively to restrict output in stochastic markets. Firms must homogenize their market estimates by pooling information and they must cooperatively allocate production levels. In this article I examine the incentives for firms to share private information about...

This article presents a model of bilaterial monopoly in which one of the agents possesses private information about actual production costs. The strategic disclosure of this information is used as a bargaining tactic in an attempt to appropriate the quasi rents resulting from production. We...

Recently, the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Justice have imposed detailed regulatory schemes governing the contractual relationship between the commercial television networks and program suppliers. This article provides empirical evidence on the determinants of program...

This article analyzes contracting in a market for idiosyncratic products in which customers and suppliers are asymmetrically informed about randomly fluctuating demand conditions. The contracting problem is to induce agents to reveal truthfully their private information about demand, while also...

Bertrand's model of oligopoly, which gives perfectly competitive outcomes assumes that: (1) there is competition over prices and (2) production follows the realization of demand. We show that both of these assumptions are required. More precisely, consider a two-stage oligopoly game where,...

This article presents a simple probability model of R&D which suggests that competitive firms may overinvest resources in research, even in the face of uncertainty, inappropriability and increasing costs of research. In the presence of uncertainty, some duplication of R&D efforts may be...