“…The scholarly study of project governance is said to be a 'fledging field' [Pitsis et al, (2014), p.1285] drawing on theoretical perspectives from other scholarly domains, including principalagent theory (Jensen and Meckling, 1976;Eisenhardt, 1989) examining the costs and contracts of separating ownership and control, transaction cost economics (Williamson, 1975) arguing that organisations select a governance structure that minimises the cost of transactions, shareholder theory (Friedman, 1962) focusing narrowly on maximising returns on investment for owners, stakeholder theory (Freeman, 1984;Donaldson and Preston, 1995;Miles, 2015) considering the differing interests of a broad group of constituents, stewardship theory (Donaldson and Davis, 1991;Davis et al, 1997) emphasising trust between principals and managers, and resource dependence theory (Pfeffer and Salancik, 1978) examining the power exerted by the external controllers of scarce resources. According to literature reviews and bibliometric analysis (Biesenthal and Wilden, 2014;Ahola et al 2014), the perspectives of principal-agent theory, stakeholder theory, and transaction cost economics are particularly prominent in the nascent literature on project governance. After drawing on some conceptual arguments from stakeholder theory and principal-agent theory in the next section, the remainder of this article departs from prior project governance research by drawing exclusively on game theory and on evidence and examples from the project management literature for model development and analysis.…”