Contract Theory
Contract Theory

Author: Patrick Bolton

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2004-12-10

Total Pages: 746

ISBN-13: 9780262025768

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A comprehensive introduction to contract theory, emphasizing common themes and methodologies as well as applications in key areas. Despite the vast research literature on topics relating to contract theory, only a few of the field's core ideas are covered in microeconomics textbooks. This long-awaited book fills the need for a comprehensive textbook on contract theory suitable for use at the graduate and advanced undergraduate levels. It covers the areas of agency theory, information economics, and organization theory, highlighting common themes and methodologies and presenting the main ideas in an accessible way. It also presents many applications in all areas of economics, especially labor economics, industrial organization, and corporate finance. The book emphasizes applications rather than general theorems while providing self-contained, intuitive treatment of the simple models analyzed. In this way, it can also serve as a reference for researchers interested in building contract-theoretic models in applied contexts.The book covers all the major topics in contract theory taught in most graduate courses. It begins by discussing such basic ideas in incentive and information theory as screening, signaling, and moral hazard. Subsequent sections treat multilateral contracting with private information or hidden actions, covering auction theory, bilateral trade under private information, and the theory of the internal organization of firms; long-term contracts with private information or hidden actions; and incomplete contracts, the theory of ownership and control, and contracting with externalities. Each chapter ends with a guide to the relevant literature. Exercises appear in a separate chapter at the end of the book.

Firms, Contracts, and Financial Structure
Firms, Contracts, and Financial Structure

Author: Oliver Hart

Publisher: Clarendon Press

Published: 1995-10-05

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 019160688X

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This book provides a framework for thinking about economic instiutions such as firms. The basic idea is that institutions arise in situations where people write incomplete contracts and where the allocation of power or control is therefore important. Power and control are not standard concepts in economic theory. The book begins by pointing out that traditional approaches cannot explain on the one hand why all transactions do not take place in one huge firm and on the other hand why firms matter at all. An incomplete contracting or property rights approach is then developed. It is argued that this approach can throw light on the boundaries of firms and on the meaning of asset ownership. In the remainder of the book, incomplete contacting ideas are applied to understand firms' financial decisions, in particular, the nature of debt and equity (why equity has votes and creditors have foreclosure rights); the capital structure decisions of public companies; optimal bankruptcy procedure; and the allocation of voting rights across a company's shares. The book is written in a fairly non-technical style and includes many examples. It is aimed at advanced undergraduate and graduate students, academic and business economists, and lawyers as well as those with an interest in corporate finance, privatization and regulation, and transitional issues in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and China. Little background knowledge is required, since the concepts are developed as the book progresses and the existing literature is fully reviewed.

Organization Theory
Organization Theory

Author: Oliver E. Williamson

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 0195098307

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This collection of papers is edited by renowned business thinker Oliver Williamson, who is currently Transamerica Professor of Corporate Strategy at the School of Business Administration at Berkeley. The fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Chester I. Barnard's remarkable and still influential book, The Functions of the Executive, was celebrated with a seminar series at the University of California, Berkeley in the Spring of 1988. Eight of those lectures are published here. The contributors include organization specialists and sociologists (Barbara Levitt and James March; W. Richard Scott; Glenn Carroll; Jeffrey Pfeffer), an anthropologist, a political scientist, and two economists (Mary Douglas; Terry Moe; Oliver Hart; Oliver Williamson). An important contribution to organization theory, this volume reports on recent progress in this field, and projects a productive research future.

Changing Concepts of Contract
Changing Concepts of Contract

Author: David Campbell

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-02-28

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 1137269278

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Changing Concepts of Contract is a prestigious collection of essays that re-examines the remarkable contributions of Ian Macneil to the study of contract law and contracting behaviour. Ian Macneil, who taught at Cornell University, the University of Virginia and, latterly, at Northwestern University, was the principal architect of relational contract theory, an approach that sought to direct attention to the context in which contracts are made. In this collection, nine leading UK contract law scholars re-consider Macneil's work and examine his theories in light of new social and technological circumstances. In doing so, they reveal relational contract theory to be a pertinent and insightful framework for the study and practice of the subject, one that presents a powerful challenge to the limits of orthodox contract law scholarship. In tandem with his academic life, Ian Macneil was also the 46th Chief of the Clan Macneil. Included in this volume is a Preface by his son Rory Macneil, the 47th Chief, who reflects on the influences on his father's thinking of those experiences outside academia. The collection also includes a Foreword by Stewart Macaulay, Malcolm Pitman Sharp Hilldale Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and an Introduction by Jay M Feinman, Distinguished Professor of Law at Rutgers School of Law.

The Nature of the Firm
The Nature of the Firm

Author: Oliver E. Williamson

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9780195083569

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This volume features a series of essays which arose from a conference on economics, addressing the question: what is the nature of the firm in economic analysis? This paperback edition includes the Nobel Lecture of R.N. Case.

Post-Keynesian Essays from Down Under Volume III: Essays on Ethics, Social Justice and Economics
Post-Keynesian Essays from Down Under Volume III: Essays on Ethics, Social Justice and Economics

Author: G. Harcourt

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-11-16

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 1137475323

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Joseph Halevi, G. C. Harcourt, Peter Kriesler and J. W. Nevile bring together a collection of their most influential papers on post-Keynesian thought. Their work stresses the importance of the underlying institutional framework, of the economy as a historical process and, therefore, of path determinacy. In addition, their essays suggest the ultimate goal of economics is as a tool to inform policy and make the world a better place, with better being defined by an overriding concern with social justice. Volume III explores the ethics of economics.