Agency and wholesale models are widely adopted vertical contractual agreements. This paper compares the private incentives and social welfare of these two business models by highlighting the differences in move order and price structure. With a monopoly platform, the agency model dominates the...

This paper assesses the emerging regulatory framework for special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs). According to this framework, mergers of SPACs, known as de-SPACs, must be “fair” to public (or unaffiliated) SPAC shareholders, and transaction participants face heightened liability risk...

In 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court decided PennEast Pipeline Co. v. New Jersey. The case is often associated with a theory of private delegation--that is, that Congress can delegate its federal eminent domain authority to private companies to build natural gas pipeline projects on state land. But...

Theories of political accountability typically focus on voter-politician relationships. However, overall government performance depends on both elected politicians and unelected bureaucrats. Politicians are agents of voters while serving as principals to bureaucrats. We develop a model of...

Long and specific Contracts in the US and short and ambiguous contracts in Japan are a stereotypical comparison of the contracting practices in both countries. Such characteristics of written contracts are understood as sticky. Based on a semi-structured interview of Japanese auto and...

We study a contract design problem between a principal and a team of two productively heterogenous agents who can mutually monitor each other’s actions over an infinite horizon. The principal designs the explicit contract to set the stage for the agents to use implicit contracts to motivate...

In most electoral agency models, the principal observes an increasing signal of the agent's effort. But in enforcement contexts, the signal may be nonmonotonic. This is the case if the principal observes enforcement actions rather than underlying violation incidents (e.g., crime or infections)....

A risk-neutral principal considers hiring one agent to improve a valuable, observable outcome. Who to hire? How to motivate? In this paper, the principal designs an incentive contract that pays according to the realized outcome and sells the contract to an agent through an auction. The paper...

This paper analyzes the transfer pricing decision of the multinational firm (MNF). There are differences in profit tax rates between home-country and host-country. The MNF determines the transfer price to its overseas affiliate and delegates the responsibility of deciding on the final sales...

In this paper, we assume that a small- and micro-sized enterprise (SME) funds the expansion investment cost through bank-tax-guarantee (BTG, henceforth) which embeds two credit enhancement mechanisms by taxation and guarantee. We develop a capital structure model to exhibit a trade-off between...