Let's Work It Out (or We'll See You in Court): Litigation and Private Dispute Resolution in Vertical Exchange Relationships
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
We examine how partners in vertical exchange relationships actually resolve disputes that are sufficiently serious to get lawyers involved. Reaching beyond the usual domain of organizational and management research, we leverage findings from law and economics to offer a novel organizational perspective on litigation and private dispute resolution, and we develop hypotheses about the likelihood of litigation in different exchange settings. Our empirical analysis generates three sets of new findings: First, counter to the received wisdom, we see that the involvement of lawyers does not necessarily signal the bitter end of an exchange relationship, because firms frequently manage to avoid litigation and resolve their disputes privately, and they do so in a manner that accords with our theoretical predictions. Second, we see that familiarity with exchange partners does not automatically lead to increased willingness to work things out; rather, our empirical results suggest that the impact of exchange duration on parties' willingness to resolve disputes privately is contingent on the development of norms of cooperation: in the event that such norms do not develop, the probability of a litigated outcome actually increases over time. Finally, we see that firms' willingness to work things out privately is also influenced positively by the shadow of the future. These findings are suggestive of a “discriminating alignment” between exchange characteristics and the choice of dispute resolution procedure, and they thus inject important new evidence into ongoing discussions about the legal underpinnings of different governance forms.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it