Future wage payments drive a wedge between total firm output and the output share received by the firm’s owners, thus potentially distorting strategic decisions by the firm’s owners such as, e.g., whether to continue the firm, sell it, or shut it down. Using an optimal contracting approach,...

This Paper presents a model of takeover incentives in an oligopolistic industry, which, in contrast to previous approaches, takes both insiders' and outsiders' gains from an increase in industry concentration into account. Our main application is to compare takeover incentives in a...

We present a simple model of personal finance in which an incumbent lender has an information advantage "vis-à-vis" both potential competitors and households. In order to extract more consumer surplus, a lender with sufficient market power may engage in 'irresponsible' lending, approving credit...

This article analyses the impact of retail mergers on product variety. We show that, following a merger, a retailer may want to enhance its buyer power by committing to a 'single-sourcing' purchasing strategy. Anticipating further concentration in the retail industry, suppliers will...

We examine the effect of competition for scarce corporate financial resources on managers' incentives to generate profitable investment opportunities. Operating an active internal capital market is unambiguously beneficial only if divisions have the same level of financial resources and the same...

We study the optimal strategy of a durable-goods monopolist who can offer goods in different qualities. The key finding is that the presence of the additional sorting variable further undermines the firm's commitment problem, leading to results that contrast sharply with those of standard...

We show that in contrast to results in the extant literature, single sourcing may not be the optimal strategy of a buyer facing suppliers with strictly convex costs. As we argue, previous findings relied crucially on the joint assumption that, first, there is only a single buyer and that,...

Contract design under incomplete information is often analysed in a bilaterally monopolistic setting. If the informed party's reservation value does not depend on its private information (its type), it is a standard result that the uninformed side offers "low" types distorted contracts to reduce...

We analyze the short- and long-run implications of third-degree price discrimination in input markets. In contrast to the extant literature, which typically assumes that the supplier is an unconstrained monopolist, in our model input prices are constrained by the threat of demand-side...