The paper studies the canonical hold-up problem with one-sided investment by the buyer and full ex post bargaining power by the seller. The buyer can covertly choose any distribution of valuations at a cost and privately observes her valuation. The main result shows that in contrast to the...

This paper investigates the efficiency effects of governing vertical relationships by analyzing the incentives of firms to engage in exclusive contracts. In particular, the analysis focuses on the subcontracting context. When a downstream firm possesses a superior bargaining position, upstream...

Do the returns to quality upgrading pass through supply chains to primary producers? We explore this question in the context of Colombia's coffee sector, in which market outcomes depend on interactions between farmers, exporters (which operate mills), and international buyers, and contracts are...

Many business relationships begin with informal interactions and later transition to formal contracts. Using a repeated-games model with a finite horizon, we show that this hybrid-contracting approach can both prolong cooperation (intensive margin) and enable it across a broader range of...

We study the welfare impact of rules of origin in free trade agreements where final-good producers source customized inputs from suppliers within the trading bloc. We employ a property-rights framework that features hold-up problems in suppliers' decisions to invest, and where underinvestment is...

The paper studies the canonical hold-up problem with one-sided investment by the buyer and full ex post bargaining power by the seller. The buyer can covertly choose any distribution of valuations at a cost and privately observes her valuation. The main result shows that in contrast to the...

We investigate the role of mutual trust in long-term vertical relationships involving trades of complex goods. High complexity is associated with high contract incompleteness and hence the increased relevance of trust-based relational contracts. Contrary to expectations, we find that changes in...

We investigate how the incompleteness of an employment contract - discretionary and non-contractible effort - can affect an employer's decision about cutting nominal wages. Using matched employer-employee payroll data from Great Britain, linked to a survey of managers, we find support for the...

We study a moral hazard model in which the output is stochastically determined by both the agent's hidden effort and an uncertain state of the world. We investigate how the contractibility of the ex-post realization of the state affects the principal's incentive to provide information. While...

We study a repeated principal-agent model with transferable utility, where the principal's evaluation of the agent's performance is subjective. Our focus is on equilibria which are robust to the addition of small privately observed shocks to the payoffs. Existing constructions of positive-effort...

Explicit and implicit incentives and opportunities for mutually beneficial voluntary cooperation co-exist in many contractual relationships. In a series of eight laboratory gift-exchange experiments, we show that incentive contracts can lead to crowding out of voluntary cooperation even after...

This paper builds a model of dynamic tournaments under incomplete contract situations to analyze how the government, as a national development strategy, induces incentives or forms of competition between multiple companies (between state-owned enterprises (SOEs), between private-owned...

Explicit and implicit incentives and opportunities for mutually beneficial voluntary cooperation co-exist in many contractual relationships. In a series of eight laboratory gift-exchange experiments, we show that incentive contracts can lead to crowding out of voluntary cooperation even after...

In this paper, based on the incomplete contract perspective, we select the implementation of the Electronic Commerce Law of the People's Republic of China as a quasi-natural experiment to study the tax compliance incentive effects of platform firms. Our study finds that the Chinese experience...

A principal incentivizes an agent to maintain compliance and to truthfully announce any breaches of compliance. Compliance is imperfectly controlled by the agent's private effort choices, is partially persistent, and is verifiable by the principal only through costly inspections. We show that in...

Theory suggests that by lending to a firm, inside banks gain an informational advantage over non-lender outside banks. This informational gap hinders borrowers from switching lenders due to a winner's curse faced by competing outside banks, leading to hold-up problems. In this paper, we show...

A common justification for shareholder primacy is that shareholders' financial interests give them an incentive to pursue projects that increase social welfare. This alignment of interests occurs because shareholders hold a residual claim on firm value: Because they receive only what remains...

The productivity of smallholder coffee cultivation is declining due to ageing trees, making the rejuvenation of coffee trees with superior seeds essential. This rejuvenation process requires the support and participation of various stakeholders, including the government, banks, investors,...