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Regression analysis is a statistical tool for the investigation of relationships between variables. Usually, the investigator seeks to ascertain the causal effect of one variable upon another—the effect of a price increase upon demand, for example, or the effect of changes in the money supply upon the inflation rate. To explore such issues, the investigator assembles data on the underlying vari...

Many writers argue that economic organization is undergoing major transformation in the emerging knowledge economy; authority relations are withering; legal and ownership-based definitions of the boundaries of firms are becoming irrelevant and there are increasingly few constraints on the set of feasible combinations of coordination mechanisms. The present paper critically deals with these clai...

In this paper we tie together the two literatures of durable goods monopoly and exhaustible resource pricing. We show that the intertemporal no-arbitrage condition that arises if the durable good monopolist seller can commit to a price path mirrors the intertemporal no-arbitrage condition if the monopsonist buyer of an exhaustible resource can commit to a price path. The intuition is that the d...

If people are free to contract, will outcomes be efficient? We study the question through the lens of a non-cooperative model of contract negotiations, considering both compulsory and voluntary participation in negotiations. In either case, we find that all consistent equilibria of the contracting game are efficient in the case of two players. With mandatory participation, efficiency is attaina...

Sixty-five years ago, Ronald Coase (1937) asked what determines whether production will be organized in a firm or through the market, later coined the "make-or-buy" decision. This question was put center stage by Oliver Williamson (1975, 1985) who further developed transaction-costs economics (TCE), arguing that incomplete contracts and specific relationships overshadowed by opportunism, asymme...

The authors present a simple classroom experiment that can be used as a teaching device to introduce important concepts of organizational economics and incentive contracting. First, students take the role of a principal and design a contract that consists of a fixed payment and an incentive component. Second, students take the role of agents and decide on an effort level. The experiment illustr...

We study dynamic monopoly pricing of storable goods in an environment where demand changes over time. The literature on durables has focused on incentives to delay purchases. Our analysis focuses on a different intertemporal demand incentive. The key force on the consumer side is advance purchases or stockpiling. In the case of storable goods the stockpiling motive has been documented in recent...

We extend the Coase conjecture to the case of a seller with a single object, who faces n potential buyers and holds a sequence of English auctions until the object is sold. In an independent-private-values environment in which buyers and sellers share the same discount factor, we show that the (perfect Bayesian) equilibrium path of reserve prices obeys a Coasian logic. Moreover, the equilibrium...