Audio mp3 of this article It's after Christmas dinner at your brother's house. The fire is crackling in the fireplace. Kids are running around. You're drinking egg nog, feeling warm all over. Your ...

Baker, George P., Robert Gibbons, and Kevin J. Murphy. "Relational Contracts and the Theory of the Firm." Quarterly Journal of Economics 117, no. 1 (February 2002).

Social psychology's Relational Models Theory suggests that we interact with each other following two distinct sets of social rules. One is business mode, in which you keep track of who owes what. The ...