Abstract This paper considers a firm that must issue common stock to raise cash to
undertake a valuable investment opportunity. Management is assumed to know more about
the firm's value than potential investors. Investors interpret the firm's actions rationally. An

Chapter 1 is short and preliminary. It consists of an introduction to the theory of individual
decision making considered in an abstract setting. It introduces the decision maker and her
choice problem, and it describes two related approaches to modeling her decisions. One,

The'Evolution of Cooperation'addresses a simple yet age-old question; If living things evolve
through competition, how can cooperation ever emerge? Despite the abundant evidence of
cooperation all around us, there existed no purely naturalistic answer to this question until

The principal purposes of this paper are to examine the factors which induce a shift of
transactions from market to internal organization and, within internal organization, to explain
the types of hierarchical relations that predictably emerge. It is generally acknowledged that

Continuing his groundbreaking analysis of economic structures, Douglass North develops
an analytical framework for explaining the ways in which institutions and institutional change
affect the performance of economies, both at a given time and over time. Institutions exist, he

The family in the Western world has been radically altered—some claim almost destroyed—
by events of the last three decades. The rapid growth in divorce rates has greatly increased
the number of households headed by women and the number of children growing up in

Abstract This paper integrates elements from the theory of agency, the theory of property
rights and the theory of finance to develop a theory of the ownership structure of the firm. We
define the concept of agency costs, show its relationship to the 'separation and control'issue,

Abstract This paper develops a theory of financial intermediation based on minimizing the
cost of monitoring information which is useful for resolving incentive problems between
borrowers and lenders. It presents a characterization of the costs of providing incentives for

THIS PAPER'S TITLE IS INTENDED to remind you of Fischer Black's well-known note on"
The Dividend Puzzle," which he closed by saying," What should the corporation do about
dividend policy? We don't know."[6, p. 8] I will start by asking," How do firms choose their

The authors integrate theory developed in several disciplines to determine five cognitive
processes through which industrial buyers can develop trust of a supplier firm and its
salesperson. These processes provide a theoretical framework used to identify antecedents