The main contribution of Coase1 is having proven that no institution is a free lunch (among others, Pagano, 2012). It means that every institution (e.g. the market and the firm) has non-null costs of functioning, i.e. transaction costs. In a world with positive transaction costs, the...

Comparing the literature on hold-up and strategic entry deterrence leads to a puzzling role for sunk or specific investments in affecting investor’s incentive. In one case, non-redeployable investments decrease investor’s ex-post bargaining power. In the other they increase it. When the...

With data from 2001 to 2010 of the First Instance Courts of the Canton of Ticino, Switzerland, this paper examines the impact of Legge sull’istituzione della Pretura penale e della funzione di sostituto Procuratore pubblico (2002), which meant to improve Cantonal court performance by...

One of the main contributions of Ronald H. Coase was to demonstrate how mainstream economics was based on a contradictory amalgam of costly physical inputs and free institutional resources, and to gave origin the economics of institutions: each institution is a mode of allocation and...

With data from 2001 to 2010 of the First Instance Courts of the Canton of Ticino, Switzerland, this paper examines the impact of Legge sull’istituzione della Pretura penale e della funzione di sostituto Procuratore pubblico (2002), which meant to improve Cantonal court performance by...

Positional good shares with public good the non-private characteristic of consumption: for a positional good, given the consumption choice of one party, the other(s) must consume a corresponding negative amount of what the first party chooses to consume. Therefore, we treat positional good in a...

When renegotiation under incomplete contracts follows the outside option principle, hold-up may occur as the ex-post degree of competition increases on investor’s side. However, under this framework, asset specificity may play the counterintuitive role of an entry deterrence device, thus...

In accordance with the concept of transaction as introduced by John R. Commons we willinvestigate the contractual and market remedies which labour law may implement to make ‘order’ in theemployer-employee relationship.In this view, one of the most important contractual remedies is the...

This paper documents Hohfeld's influence on interwar American institutionalism. We will mainly focus on three leading figures of the movement: John Rogers Commons, Robert Lee Hale, and John Maurice Clark. They regarded Hohfeld's contribution on jural relations as a preliminary step toward the...

An Independent Regulatory Authority is a publicly identified official bureau having the regulatory responsibility of a market and being independent from i) the agents operating in that market, ii) other interested parties such as industrial pressure groups and iii) political actors like...