This paper presents an industry equilibrium model of vertical integration under contractualimperfections with speci…c input suppliers and external investors. I assume that vertical inte-gration economizes on the needs for contracts with speci…c input suppliers at the cost of higher…xed costs....

This paper develops a relational contracting model to show how fiat - a principal's ability to dictate her agent's performance - emerges in equilibrium under vertical integration, even when integration does not allocate distinctive formal authority to the principal. In a vertical structure, an...

We study the effect of organizational choice and institutions on the performance of Spanish car dealerships. Using outlet-level data from 1994, we find that vertically-integrated dealerships showed substantially lower labor productivity, higher labor costs and lower profitability than franchised...

Transaction cost economics, neoclassical economics, and the firm capabilities literatures propose theories of the firm that typically depict firm boundaries determined by a dichotomous choice: the make or buy decision. However, none of these theories presents a satisfying explanation as to why...

This paper provides an empirical analysis that examines the effect of both, transaction characteristics and the institutional environment on the choice of governance. Using a dataset of 237 corporate-specific value chains in the global LNG industry, we introduce inter-organizational trust as a...

Theoretical and empirical research in the past decades has advanced our understanding of what determines the vertical boundary of a firm. An equally important but much less understood issue is the impacts of vertical integration on firm performance, mainly because the decision on vertical...

It has been argued that collusion among the members of an organization or a vertical structure creates efficiency losses and, hence, should be prevented. This paper shows that whenever collusion takes the form of co-insurance agreements, here called "friendships," among the members of a vertical...

It is well-known that a seller imposed non-discrimination clause can soften downstream price competition by constraining opportunistic pricing behavior on the part of an upstream monopolist seller. But what about about market settings in which there exists a pivotal buyer? We show that in the...

Local and regional policy makers are acquiring an increasingly active role in affecting firms' specialization decisions that in turn influence firms' vertical organization. We analyse the relation between vertical integration incentives and trade liberalization in the presence of glocal...

The traditional transaction cost perspective helps us understand how governance structures impact dyadic transaction costs by focusing on the possibility of ex-post holdup, but it usually neglects the impact of such decisions on other agents. This paper uses value capture theory to investigate...