This paper analyzes the role of damage clauses in labor contracts, using a model in which a worker may want to terminate his current employment relationship and work for another firm. It is shown that the initial parties to a contract have an incentive to stipulate excessive damage clauses,...

Even if contract enforcers are as opportunistic as ordinary traders, a system of adjudication can increase the degree to which contractual obligations on large anonymous markets are fulfilled. Only if arbitrators receive a fixed income, occasional mistakes will not favour the untrustworthy. It...

Withdrawal rights protect buyers in distance selling, for example when ordering via the Internet. After introducing such a law in Germany the proportion of returned goods drastically increased although most sellers had already offered a return option before. We experimentally investigate...

Recent empirical research has established what many assumed - few people read form contracts. This research employs an online experimental design to fill gaps in the literature by asking two important questions: (1) To what extent does information about the exchange beyond the contract...

Disclosure has long been the preferred regulatory approach to prevent one-sided standard-form contract terms, but its efficacy is unclear. For disclosure to be effective, it must increase readership of contracts and, conditional on reading, affect decisions. I use clickstream data on software...

Recent evidence from the field (Hossain and List, 2009) suggests that contracts framed in terms of a loss (a deduction is taken for failing to meet a threshold) lead to greater effort than contracts framed in terms of a gain (a bonus is given for meeting a threshold). We investigate two...

The doctrine of efficient breach is based on the belief that the risk of postcontractual bargaining failure under property rules is greater than the risk of the courts' miscalculation of damages under liability rules. The article presents the findings of two experiments that challenge this...

This paper reports further experimental results on exclusive dealing contracts. We extend Landeo and Spier's (2009) work by studying Naked Exclusion in a strategic environment that involves a four-player, two-stage game. In addition to the roles of seller and buyers, our experimental environment...

This paper develops a protocol for using a familiar data set on force majeure provisions in corporate acquisitions agreements to tokenize and calibrate a machine-learning algorithm of textual analysis. Our protocol, built on regular expression (RE) and latent semantic analysis (LSA) approaches,...

Consumers make mistakes, and sophisticated market actors exploit those mistakes. Efforts to promote consumer protection through soft paternalistic interventions, most notably improved disclosure regimes, run into the problem that consumers are overwhelmed by information and may not to invest the...