Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Firm Boundaries And Financing With Opportunistic Stakeholder Behaviour, Madhav S. Aney, Elie Appelbaum, Sanjay Banerji

Research Collection School Of Economics

We explore the impact of strategic behaviour between three major stakeholders, namelyequity holders, debt holders, and a supplier of a critical input, on the choice of a firm’s capitalstructure and its organisational design, determining in-house production versus outsourcing theprocurement of the critical input. We show that an opportunistic coalition of the supplierand debt holders can trigger strategic bankruptcy even when the firm is solvent. Equity holdersrespond to this by either eliminating the supplier by producing the input in-house, or by reducingthe exposure to debt by funding the firm’s capital requirement through equity. Both responsescreate inefficiency since production of the input …