This paper is the first chapter of the third edition of The Anatomy of Corporate Law: A Comparative and Functional Approach, by Reinier Kraakman, John Armour, Paul Davies, Luca Enriques, Henry Hansmann, Gerard Hertig, Klaus Hopt, Hideki Kanda Mariana Pargendler, Georg Ringe, and Edward Rock...

Within the context of expected utility and in a discrete loss setting, we provide a complete account of the demand for insurance by strictly-risk averse agents and risk-neutral firms when they enjoy limited liability. When exposed to a bankrupting, binary loss and under actuarially fair prices,...

We analyze a Cournot duopoly market with differentiated goods and the separation between ownership and control. We consider a delegation game, for which the owner of a firm hires a manager who acts as if the good has a lower degree of substitutability than it really has. This is so either...

An entrepreneur shares business risk with the investors providing capital for her firm. Risk sharing is per se beneficial, but also results in an agency problem from diminished incentives for the entrepreneur. This classical trade-off depends on the financial contracting between the entrepreneur...

Collusion sustainability depends on firms' ability to impose sufficiently severe punishments in the event of deviation from the collusive rule. We extend results from the literature on optimal collusion by investigating the role of a limited liability constraint. We examine all situations in...

A manufacturer contracting secretly with several downstream competitors faces an opportunism problem, preventing it from exerting its market power. In an infinitely repeated game, the opportunism problem can be relaxed. We show that the upstream firm's market power can be restored even further...