Formal Contracts, Relational Contracts, and the Threat-Point Effect
研究了正式合同如何通过影响交易双方的威胁点来解决敲竹杠问题，发现基于产品交付的固定价格合同在关系专用投资纯合作时仍有价值，且这一结论具有一般性。
We investigate whether formal contracts can help in resolving the holdup problem by studying repeated transactions between a seller and a buyer. Contrary to previous findings, we demonstrate that a simple fixed-price contract based on product delivery is of value even when relation-specific investment is purely cooperative. Furthermore, we show that focusing our attention on fixed-price contracts as a form of formal contracts is without loss of generality. The key driving force is a possibility that the relation-specific investment decreases the surplus under no trade. This possibility, although very plausible, has been largely ignored in previous analyses of the holdup problem.