A transaction cost approach is used to investigate a manufacturer's policy towards exclusive territory dealers who bootleg (sell across their assigned territories). We show that optimal enforcement policies will generally tolerate some level of bootlegging. This tolerance is a natural...

quot;Pluralquot; distribution systems are often found in industrial markets. Although transaction cost analysis has been successfully applied to understanding decisions about distribution systems, these plural forms have been virtually ignored in extant empirical work. Critics suggest that...

Extant empirical work in TCA relies almost exclusively on cross-sectional survey data on firm behavior to test predictions about vertical integration, long-run contracts, alliances and the like. Such designs shed useful light on the causal mechanisms supposedly responsible for the effects, but...

Using weekly retail transaction scanner price data from a large US supermarket chain, significantly higher retail price rigidity is found for private label products than for nationally branded products during the Christmas and Thanksgiving holiday periods relative to the rest of the year. The...

We use store-level data to document the exact process of changing prices and to directly measure menu costs at five multi-store supermarket chains. We show that changing prices in these establishments is a complex process, requiring dozens of steps and a nontrivial amount of resources. The menu...