"Implicit Contracts, incentive compatibility, and involuntary unemployment" (MacLeod and Malcomson, 1989) remains our most highly cited work. We briefly review the development of this paper and of our subsequent related work, and conclude with reflections on the future of relational contract...

This paper analyzes how capital structure and product market competition affect the firms' choice between outsourcing with long term contracts and outsourcing to the spot market. When outsourcing to the spot market firms are exposed to price uncertainty, whereas a long term contract allows them...

We examine decentralization -- that is, the use of more than one decision maker -- in small- to medium-sized organizations, with a particular focus on family firms. Our estimation results suggest that larger firms decentralize more often, as do firms with newer owners, organizations with a...

We investigate a team production problem where two parties sequentially invest to generate a joint surplus. In this framework, it is possible to implement the first best even if the investment return is highly uncertain. The optimal contract entails a basic dichotomy: it is a simple option...

Focus - specialization and specific technology - improves productivity but leads to more dependency and opens a door for power problems. We analyze how organizational design and the choice of technology interact with the allocation of ownership in minimizing the holdup problem. We find a novel...

A hierarchically structured rent-seeking contest may be associated with lower equilibrium expenditure than a corresponding flat contest. In this chapter we discuss how this fact may be used to explain the structure of organizations such as firms, including why firms commonly have outside owners.

Integrated ownership is often seen as a way to foster specific investments. However, even in integrated firms, managers invest to maximize their compensation, which is chiefly driven by divisional income. Thus it is not clear that integration has any effect on investments in a world of...

To date, much of the literature on institutional economics has relied on abstract metaphors based in exchange. Thus, Williamson introduced the fundamental insights surrounding his “transaction costs” model and discussed the governance of contracts in exchange relationships. Yet organizations...

In the paper the trade-offs among endogenous transaction costs caused by two-sided moral hazard, exogenous monitoring cost, and economies of specialization are specified in a Grossman, Hart, and Moore (GHM) model to absorb Maskin and Tirole's recent critique and Holmstrom and Milgrom's criticism...