Patrick W. Schmitz
Economics Letters, Vol. 99 (3), 2008, 577-580.
Abstract. In the standard property rights approach to the theory of the firm, joint ownership cannot be optimal, because it induces smaller investments in human capital than ownership by a single party. This result holds under the assumption that bargaining is always ex post efficient due to symmetric information. However, joint ownership can be optimal if the parties have private information about the payoffs that they can realize on their own.
The working paper version is available for download (CEPR Discussion Paper 6478).
The paper is available for download.