We identify and investigate the basic ‘hold-up problem’ which arises whenever each party to a contract has to pay some … ex-ante cost for the contract to become feasible. We then proceed to show that, under plausible circumstances, a … typically entails writing a ‘contract over a contract’ which generates a fresh set of ex-ante costs, and hence is associated …

when the first-best risk-sharing contract varies with the states of nature in a complex way that makes it highly sensitive …

with a definition of contract incompleteness that seems both appealing and widely applicable. Our first task is then to … which the complexity costs of a contract are explicitly taken into accoaunt. We consider a broad (axiomatically defined …

We analyze the degree of contract completeness with respect to staging of venture capital investments using a hand …-collected German data set of contract data from 464 rounds into 290 entrepreneurial firms. We distinguish three forms of staging (pure … milestone financing, pure round financing and mixes). Thereby, contract completeness reduces when going from pure milestone …