Breach Remedies Inducing Hybrid Investments

We show that parties in bilateral trade can rely on the default common law breach remedy of `expectation damages' to induce simultaneously first-best relationship-specific investments of both the selfish and the cooperative kind. This can be achieved by writing a contract that specifies a sufficiently high quality level. In contrast, the result by Che and Chung (1999) that `reliance damages' induce the first best in a setting of purely cooperative investments, does not generalize to the hybrid case. Different from Plambeck and Taylor (2007) we argue that properly specified expectation damages perform well in close to any situation given that sufficient information is available to assess them. The main role for alternative regimes such as specific performance or reliance damages would then be to offer alternative solutions for situations where accounting systems render them easier to assess than expectation damages