Regulators are commonly accused of using 20-20 hindsight to punish a firm for bad outcomes rather than bad decisions; it is often thought that such penalties lead to underinvestment by the firm. I find that this expectation is not borne out when retrospective review is based on the firm's...

We examine contractual design in a principal-agent model under two forms of limited liability: nonnegative constraints on the transfer payments to, and the profits of, the agent. We show that when limited liability is a binding constraint, the principal cannot implement the first-best solution...

A model is developed in which corporate spinoffs are a feature of incentive contracts for product managers in diversified firms. I argue that the possibility of a future spinoff can improve current incentives for divisional managers, even if a spinoff rarely actually occurs. Spinoff incentive...

The analysis of strategic behavior frequently revolves around the problem of identifying commitment "technologies" that credibly expand strategic opportunities. This article revisits the question of spatial preemption to investigate the potential for organizational form to serve as a commitment...

Most earlier experimental tests of the contestable market hypothesis assume a zero opportunity cost of entry. This design feature makes interpretation of results in terms of entry behavior problematic. The experimental study that I report tests contestability with the addition of an alternative...

Several articles show that differences in firm characteristics such as size or diversification may affect plant-closing decisions during an industry's decline such that higher-cost plants survive lower-cost plants. Examination of the plant-closing decisions of integrated steel firms indicates...

This article examines the use of share repurchase as a takeover deterrent. The main result is that in the presence of an upward-sloping supply curve for shares, the takeover cost to the acquirer can be greater if the target firm distributes cash through share repurchase than if it chooses either...

Forming a common agency in oligopoly may introduce both advantageous and disadvantageous implications on the profits of the firms, if agents have access to private information about their costs. In addition to facilitating better coordination of production and pricing decisions, a common agency...

We develop a symmetric-information auction model of multiproject contracting with costly bidding and increasing marginal performance costs. When there are many potential contractors or only one job, there is a zero-expected-profit symmetric equilibrium in mixed strategies. The winning bid at...