Law Commons^™

This article shows that up-front payments can eliminate the overinvestment effect identified by Shavell (1980), by controlling which party breaches a contract. At the same time, "Cadillac" contracts (contracts for a very high quality or quantity) can protect against underinvestment due to Williamsonian holdups. This combination provides efficient investment incentives when courts use expectation damages as a remedy for breach. The expectation damages remedy is therefore well-suited to multidimensional but one-sided investment problems, in contrast to specific performance, which is well-suited to two-sided but unidimensional investment problems.

We explore the interactions among firms with increasing returns regulated to break even by pricing with two-part tariffs. We provide conditions for existence and for efficiency of general equilibria with n-firms. This involves finding hookup fees that are voluntarily paid and cover the firms' losses from marginal cost pricing-a problem that because of both substitution and income effects is complicated by multiple firms using two-part tariffs, but that must be solved to ensure the continuity of demands necessary to prove break-even equilibria exist.