Revolutionizing the Stock Market With Blockchain

This chapter explores the drawbacks of conventional centralized share exchange frameworks, like those of higher transaction costs, central and vulnerable regulation to exploitation, and lack of revelation to business behavior and practices by introducing a revolutionary model that utilizes blockchain to establish a decentralized stock exchange and a transparent persistent economy. The suggested model utilizes exclusive contracts to implement the validity of the privileges of the owner and the proper accomplishment and settlement of the transactions, thereby mitigating the need for a centralized authority to ensure the accuracy of the stock exchange mechanism. The experimental findings convincingly demonstrate that the decentralized solution can provide lower transaction costs by progressively replacing brokerage costs and centralized officials' commissions with mining charges, which reward the miners for their backbreaking work in maintaining the system and enforcing the laws.

Long‐Term Contracting With Time‐Inconsistent Agents

We study contracts between naive present‐biased consumers and risk‐neutral firms. We show that the welfare loss from present bias vanishes as the contracting horizon grows. This is true both when bargaining power is on the consumers' and on the firms' side, when consumers cannot commit to long‐term contracts, and when firms do not know the consumers' naiveté. However, the welfare loss from present bias does not vanish when firms do not know the consumers' present bias or when they cannot offer exclusive contracts.

(Pseudo) “Exclusive” Contracts: An Insidious Business Practice that Selectively Damages IR

Contracting is an important part of running the business of private practice interventional radiology. A basic knowledge of contracting is vital for the practicing interventionalist to best position him or herself to excel in private practice. Exclusive contracts are common in interventional, diagnostic, and radiology practices. Such contracts, however, may significantly limit the practice of individual interventional radiologists and impede the growth of interventional procedures in communities at large. This article outlines the role of exclusive contracts in interventional practices, and describes the limitations of such contracts.

International Business and Emerging Markets in Historical Perspective

This chapter provides a long-run historical perspective on international business in emerging markets. It focuses on the role of Western MNEs, and examines their strategies and the management challenges they faced. In the first era of globalization from the 19th century to the 1920s, MNEs sought access to natural resources, and benefitted from exclusive contracts. Innovation was focused on overcoming logistical challenges. During the Great Reversal during the middle decades of the 20th century, the main challenges faced by MNEs were political. Mounting hostility led many firms to divest, and to invest elsewhere. In the contemporary global economy, political risks declined, but corporate strategies needed to carefully manage relations with the government. Emerging markets were increasingly seen as indispensable by MNEs. They were both a place to locate activities in the lower end of global value chains and a growing market.

Naked Exclusion with Private Offers

We consider a seller's ability to deter potential entrants by offering exclusive contracts to downstream buyers. Previous literature has shown that this can be a profitable strategy if there is a coordination failure on the part of the buyers or if the seller can make discriminatory “divide-and-conquer” offers. This literature assumes that all offers are public. We show that if buyers cannot observe each other's offers and have passive or wary out-of-equilibrium beliefs, the divide-and-conquer exclusion strategy fails. Equilibria in which the incumbent obtains exclusion due to a coordination failure, on the other hand, exist for all out-of-equilibrium beliefs. (JEL D43, D83, D86, L13, L22, L40)

Exclusive Contracts and Market Dominance

We propose a new theory of exclusive dealing. The theory is based on the assumption that a dominant firm has a competitive advantage over its rivals, and that the buyers' willingness to pay for the product is private information. In this setting, the dominant firm can impose contractual restrictions on buyers without necessarily compensating them, implying that exclusive dealing contracts can be both profitable and anticompetitive. We discuss the general implications of the theory for competition policy and illustrate by examples its applicability to antitrust cases. (JEL D21, D43, D82, D86, K21, L13, L40)