We study partnership contracts under uncertainty but with clauses that admit downstream flexibility. The focus is on effects of flexibility on the synergy set, the core, of the contract. In a partnership context the value of flexibility is captured by the partners who own the right to exercise. On one side, there are cooperative options, which are exercised jointly and in the interest of maximi...

We study partnership contracts under uncertainty but with clauses that admit downstream flexibility. The focus is on effects of flexibility on the synergy set, the core, of the contract. In a partnership context the value of flexibility is captured by the partners who own the right to exercise. On one side, there are cooperative options, which are exercised jointly and in the interest of maximi...

The use of linear wholesale price contract has long been recognized as a threat to achieving channel effciency. Many formats of nonlinear pricing contract have been proposed to achieve vertical channel coordination. Examples include two-part tariff and quantity discount. A two-part tariff charges the downstream party a fixed fee for participation and a uniform unit price. A quantity discount co...

Fixed-term contract employment has increasingly replaced regular open-ended employment as the predominant form of employment notably in developing countries. Guided by factory-level evidence showing nuanced patterns of co-movements of regular and contract wages, we propose a two-tiered task based model with self-enforcing contracts in which firms allocate complex tasks to long term employees at...

This paper explores the productivity and income distribution effects of asymmetric information and risk preferences on the credit market. A model of contract design in the presence of moral hazard is developed in which competitive, risk neutral lenders offer contracts to risk averse agents who hold the option to invest capital and labor time in an entrepreneurial activity. The model gives rise ...

This paper develops an economic production quantity model in a three-echelon supply chain composing of a supplier, a manufacturer and a wholesaler under two scenarios. As the first scenario, we consider a return contract between the outside supplier and the supplier and also between the manufacturer and the wholesaler, but in the second one, the return policy between the manufacturer and the wh...

I competitive wholesale electricity markets, regulated load-serving entities (LSEs) and marketers with default service contracts have obligations to serve fluctuating load at predetermined fixed prices while meeting their obligation through combinations of long-term contracts, wholesale purchases, and self-generation that are subject to volatile prices or opportunity cost. Hence, their net prof...

Health care administrators commonly employ two types of resource flexibilities (demand upgrades and staffing flexibility) to efficiently coordinate two critical internal resources, nursing staff and beds, and an external resource (contract nurses) to satisfy stochastic patient demand. Under demand upgrades, when beds are unavailable for patients in a less acute unit, patients are upgraded to a ...

Americans are increasingly in charge of their own fi nancial security after retirement. With the shift from defi ned benefi t (DB) to defi ned contribution (DC) pension plans, workers have to decide not only how much to save for retirement but also how to allocate their pension wealth. Moreover, in recent decades the complexity of fi nancial instruments has increased and individuals have to dea...

This paper considers a manufacturer selling to a newsvendor retailer that possesses superior demand-forecast information. We show that the manufacturer’s expected profit is convex in the retailer’s forecasting accuracy: The manufacturer benefits from selling to a better-forecasting retailer if and only if the retailer is already a good forecaster. If the retailer has poor forecasting capabiliti...