International joint venture: Buy-out and subsidiary

This paper deals with the issue of instability of joint ventures in the context of international investment. In an adverse selection framework, we show (a) the partial share adjustment of a joint venture by a multinational corporation (MNC) and (b) the possibility of setting up a subsidiary by the MNC to compete with its existing joint venture counterpart. In our principal agent framework of buy-out, we find an interesting implication that under certain parameter configurations, the principal (MNC) prefers to offer a pooling contract as opposed to a separating contract, thereby deciding not to acquire the agent's true private information.