This paper examines empirically the importance of relationship investments in determining the duration of coal contracts negotiated between coal suppliers and electric utilities, using data for 277 coal contracts. For each contract, measures of the duration of contractual commitments agreed to by the parties at the contract execution stage and measures of the importance of relationship specific investments are developed. The results provide strong support for the view that buyers and sellers make longer commitments to the terms of future trade at the contract execution stage, and rely less on repeated bargaining, when relationship-specific investments are more important. Copyright 1987 by American Economic Association.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Christopher F. Baum).
Related research
Keywords:
Other versions of this item:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.) This item has more than 25 citations. To prevent cluttering this page, these citations are listed on a separate page.