Freshman class

Wheeling and dealing

Brian Quinn, assistant professor of law

JD, Stanford Law School

Representative publication, "Bulletproof: Mandatory Rules for Deal Protection," Journal of Corporation Law, June 2007

I am investigating how people use contract and deal structures to overcome conflicting interests. A colleague and I recently surveyed farmers and middlemen in the fruit markets of Vietnam's Mekong Delta to understand how strangers structure their transactions to compensate for the cheating that inevitably occurs. The principles used to secure cooperation among competing parties are remarkably similar across business sectors and markets, and precautions that minimize opportunistic behavior at the farmers' market have application to transactions in the corporate world.