A research poster from the School of Settled Matters models who should own the surface treatment that suits a polymer nanofiller to one matrix, and finds the answer turns on whose investment weighs more.
A research poster from the School of Settled Matters sets out a property-rights model of the coupling agent between filler supplier and compounder
The School of Settled Matters has spent much of its history on the question of who holds what once a transaction closes. Its newest research poster, Who Should Own the Coupling Agent?, carries that question onto the compounding floor, where a polymer nanofiller takes on the surface treatment that suits it to one matrix and, to a degree, to no other.
The poster is led by Dr Clemency Tredinnick, Lecturer in the School, with Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist of the School of Emergent Priorities and Associate Professor Casimir Beng of the School of Continuous Improvement. It builds a formal model in which a filler supplier and a compounder each commit to a relationship no contract can fully describe, and asks which ownership arrangement best sustains that commitment. The answer, the authors find, turns less on how specialised the coating is than on whose contribution carries more of the value.
There is a particular satisfaction in lending a question to another School and having it returned in better order than it left. I expect we will be borrowing it back before long.
— Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist, Director, Master of Priority Studies
Dr Tredinnick said the project had shown the School “how much of what it knows about title was always a theory of incentives, waiting for someone to write it down.”
The University counts the poster among a widening body of work in which its Schools lend one another their instruments, and in which a law school’s habits of reading prove at home well beyond the land register.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.9pfrup.