This paper documents the delayed adoption of a major technological innovation: the adoption of the diesel locomotive in the US railway industry. Contrary to other instances of major technological innovations, the delay in the adoption of the diesel locomotive was not associated with an initial...

We identify and investigate the basic `hold-up' problem which arises whenever each party to a contingent contract has to pay some ex-ante cost for the contract to become feasible. We then proceed to show that, under plausible circumstances, a `contractual solution' to this hold-up problem is not...

This paper suggests a reason, other than asymmetric information, why agency contracts are not explicitly contingent on the agent's performance or actions. Two ingredients are essential to this reason. The first is the written form that contracts are required to take to be enforceable. The second...

It has been argued that collusion among the members of an organization or a vertical structure creates efficiency losses, and hence should be prevented. This paper shows that whenever collusion takes the form of co-insurance agreements, here called `friendships', among the members of a vertical...

This paper suggests a framework to analyze the efficiency properties of bankruptcy procedures, distinguishing between ex-ante and ex-post efficiency. Ex-post efficiency consists in maximizing the ex-post value of the insolvent firm, whereas ex-ante efficiency consists in maximizing the proceeds...