This paper argues that - in contrast to an often expressed view - the formation of larger and more powerful buyers need not reduce welfare by stifling suppliers' incentives. If contracts are determined in bilateral negotiations, the presence of larger buyers may both increase suppliers'...

We provide a formal analysis of the notion that conglomerates are more ‘entrenched’ as they have ‘deeper pockets’. Using the financial contracting model of Bolton and Scharfstein (1990), we can isolate two effects that confirm this conjecture: the pooling of cash flows, which allows to...

Hat die heutige Finanzmarktkrise instabile Marktmechanismen oder mangelnde Regulierung als Ursache? Christoph Kaserer, Technische Universität München, sieht in einer Kombination aus einem Regulierungsversagen und einem ungelösten Moral-Hazard-Konflikt bei Finanzinstitutionen den Grund für...

This paper analyzes the implications of the inherent conflict between two tasks performed by direct marketing agents: prospecting for customers and advising on the product's "suitability" for the specific needs of customers. When structuring salesforce compensation, firms trade off the expected...

We characterize a monopolist's optimal offer of service plans when only informed customers know already at the contracting stage whether their demand is high or low, while uninformed customers may learn their demand only after incurring some costs, if at all. While informed customers purchase...

We challenge the view that the presence of powerful buyers stiffles suppliers' incentives to innovate. Following Katz (1987), we model buyer power as buyers' ability to substitute away from a given supplier and isolate several effects that support the opposite view, namely that the presence of...

A seller owning a single, indivisible asset faces the random arrival of privately informed buyers, with whom he can bargain sequentially. Our key result is that despite the arrival of alternative buyers the Coase conjecture continues to hold under stationary strategies if the distribution of...

This paper shows that active investors, such as venture capitalists, can affect the speed at which new ventures grow. In the absence of product market competition, new ventures financed by active investors grow faster initially, though in the long run those financed by passive investors are able...