IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/jleorg/v11y1995i2p313-34.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Cheap Talk about Specific Investments

Author

Listed:
  • Farrell, Joseph
  • Gibbons, Robert

Abstract

We consider a problem in which a buyer has private information about the efficient scale or nature of a relationship-specific investment by a producer. We show that reducing the producer's ex post bargaining power may enhance efficiency by providing incentives for the buyer to reveal his private information before the investment is made. This consideration can outweigh the well-known "hold-up" problem that arises if the producer does not have all the bargaining power. Copyright 1995 by Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Farrell, Joseph & Gibbons, Robert, 1995. "Cheap Talk about Specific Investments," The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, Oxford University Press, vol. 11(2), pages 313-334, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:jleorg:v:11:y:1995:i:2:p:313-34
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Lau, Stephanie, 2011. "Investment incentives in bilateral trading," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 73(2), pages 538-552.
    2. Frisell, Lars & Lagerlöf, Johan N.M., 2008. "Eliciting demand information through cheap talk: An argument in favor of a ban on price discrimination," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 99(3), pages 421-424, June.
    3. Patrick W. Schmitz, 2006. "Information Gathering, Transaction Costs, and the Property Rights Approach," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 96(1), pages 422-434, March.
    4. Schmitz, Patrick W., 2002. "Simple contracts, renegotiation under asymmetric information, and the hold-up problem," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 46(1), pages 169-188, January.
    5. Lagerlof, Johan & Frisell, Lars, 2005. "Eliciting Demand Information through Cheap Talk: An Argument in Favour of Price Regulations," CEPR Discussion Papers 5343, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    6. Schmitz, Patrick W., 2010. "Contractual solutions to hold-up problems with quality uncertainty and unobservable investments," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 46(5), pages 807-816, September.
    7. Schmitz, Patrick W, 2001. "The Hold-up Problem and Incomplete Contracts: A Survey of Recent Topics in Contract Theory," Bulletin of Economic Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 53(1), pages 1-17, January.
    8. Ohlendorf, Susanne & Schmitz, Patrick, 2009. "Signaling an Outside Option," Discussion Paper Series of SFB/TR 15 Governance and the Efficiency of Economic Systems 281, Free University of Berlin, Humboldt University of Berlin, University of Bonn, University of Mannheim, University of Munich.
    9. Estache, Antonio & Foucart, Renaud, 2021. "On the political economy of industrial, labor and social reforms as complements," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 137(C).
    10. Schmitz, Patrick W., 2002. "On the Interplay of Hidden Action and Hidden Information in Simple Bilateral Trading Problems," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 103(2), pages 444-460, April.
    11. Schmitz, Patrick W., 2013. "Bargaining position, bargaining power, and the property rights approach," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 119(1), pages 28-31.
    12. Cahuc, Pierre & Kramarz, Francis, 1997. "Voice and Loyalty as a Delegation of Authority: A Model and a Test on Matched Worker-Firm Panels," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 15(4), pages 658-688, October.
    13. Kirsten Foss & Nicolai J. Foss, 1999. "Understanding Ownership Residual Rights of Control and Appropriable Control Rights," DRUID Working Papers 99-4, DRUID, Copenhagen Business School, Department of Industrial Economics and Strategy/Aalborg University, Department of Business Studies.
    14. Xiaotong Li, 2005. "Cheap Talk and Bogus Network Externalities in the Emerging Technology Market," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 24(4), pages 531-543, October.
    15. Birger Wernerfelt, 2008. "Bargaining Before or After Communication?," Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics (JITE), Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, vol. 164(2), pages 211-229, June.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:jleorg:v:11:y:1995:i:2:p:313-34. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/jleo .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.