Specific investments, holdup, and the outside option principle [An article from: European Economic Review]

This digital document is a journal article from European Economic Review, published by Elsevier in 2004. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
According to the outside option principle the holdup problem can be solved when the non-investor has a binding outside option. The investor then becomes residual claimant, creating efficient investment incentives. This paper reports about an experiment designed to test this. We find that when the outside option is binding investment levels fall short of the efficient level, but holdup is less of a problem than predicted when the outside option is non-binding.