This paper studies the role of contested ownership in a situation where two players have to make a transaction-specific investment and when contracts are incomplete. It compares contested ownership to the various ex ante ownership structures typically discussed in the literature (following the...

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.

Big companies and small innovation factories possess different advantages in a patent contest. While large firms typically have a better access to product markets, small firms often have a superior R&D efficiency. In this paper I model a patent contest with asymmetric firms. In a pre-contest...