American Honda was founded in 1959 as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Honda Motor Company to facilitate sales and distribution in the United States. The details of American Honda's early history have long served as evidence in debates among scholars and practitioners about the managerial...

We study individuals' behavior in an environment that is deterministic, but too complex to permit tractable deterministic representation. Under mild conditions, behavior is represented by a unique probabilistic model in which the agent's inability to think through all contingencies of the...

We study individuals' behavior in an environment that is deterministic, but too complex to permit tractable deterministic representation. Under mild conditions, behavior is represented by a unique probabilistic model in which the agent's inability to think through all contingencies of the...

General Motors' (GM) acquisition of Fisher Body is the classic example of market failure in the literature on contracts and the theory of the firm. According to the standard account, GM merged vertically with Fisher Body in 1926, a maker of auto bodies, because of concerns over...

We study competitive interaction between two alternative models of digital content distribution over the Internet: peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing and centralized client-server distribution. We present microfoundations for a stylized model of p2p file sharing where all peers are endowed with...

Existing models of the principal-agent relationship assume the agent works only under extrinsic incentives. However, many observed agency contracts take the form of a fixed payment. For such contracts to work, the principal must trust the agent to work in the absence of incentives. I show that...

To shed light on individuals' willingness to pay for green goods (i.e., goods that are supposed to have lower adverse environmental impacts either in production or in use), we study data from the introduction by Patagonia, Inc., of organic cotton sportswear in the mid 1990s. Patagonia, a maker...

type="main" <p>We present a theory for why it might be rational for a platform to limit the number of applications available on it. Our model is based on the observation that even if users prefer application variety, applications often also exhibit direct network effects. When there are direct...</p>

We present a theory for why it might be rational for a platform to limit the number of applications available on it. Our model is based on the observation that even if users prefer application variety, applications often also exhibit direct network effects. When there are direct network effects,...