Completely relationship-specific investments, transaction costs, and the property rights theory

Abstract

In the property rights approach to the theory of the firm, ownership matters if parties have to make partly relationship-specific investments, but ownership would be irrelevant if the investments were completely relationship-specific. We show that if negotiations after the investment stage require transaction costs to be paid, then ownership matters even when investments are completely relationship-specific. While in the standard model without transaction costs there are underinvestments compared to the first-best benchmark, in our setting a party may overinvest in order to induce the other party to incur the transaction costs that are necessary to enter the negotiation stage.