Sunk Investment, Bargaining and Choice of Capital Structure
研究企业如何通过选择债务水平来影响与工人或投入供应商的谈判结果，发现债务可以缓解因无法签订承诺合同导致的投资不足问题，并可能实现帕累托改进。
This paper shows how a firm might optimally choose debt to affect the outcome of bilateral bargaining with workers or other input suppliers. It is shown that debt may alleviate the well known underinvestment problem associated with the inability to write precommitment contracts. Also, in such circumstances, debt could be Pareto improving over complete equity financing. The relationship between the optimal level of debt and asset specificity of investment and bargaining power of the firm vis-a-vis the workers is explored. The Williamson conjecture that higher asset specificity will lead to less debt is shown not to be valid in general.