Person:

Hart, Oliver

We study two parties who desire a smooth trading relationship under conditions of value and cost uncertainty. A contract fixing price works well in normal times because there is nothing to argue about. However, when value or cost is unusually high or low, one party will deviate from the contract and hold up the other party, causing deadweight losses as parties withhold cooperation. We show that allocating asset ownership and indexing contracts can reduce the incentives to engage in hold-up. In contrast to much of the literature, the driving force in our model is payoff uncertainty, rather than noncontractible investments.

We consider an economy that has to decide how assets are to be used. Agents have ideas, but these ideas conflict. We suppose that decision‐making authority is determined by hierarchy: each asset has a chain of command, and the most senior person with an idea exercises authority. We analyze the optimal hierarchical structure given that some agents coordinate and other specialize. Among other things, our theory explains why coordinators should typically be senior to specialists and why pyramidal hierarchies may be optimal. Our theory also throws light on the optimal degree of decentralization inside a firm and on firm boundaries.

Insolvency practitioners from 88 countries describe how debt enforcement will proceed against an identical hotel about to default on its debt. We use the data on time, cost, and the likely disposition of the assets (preservation as a going concern vs. piecemeal sale) to construct a measure of the efficiency of debt enforcement in each country. This measure is strongly correlated with per capita income and legal origin and predicts debt market development. Several characteristics of debt enforcement procedures, such as the structure of appeals and availability of floating charge finance, influence efficiency.