The limited capacity of lawmakers to intuit the unstated wishes of contracting parties constitutes a daunting obstacle to the formulation of majoritarian default rules. This paper presents a field experiment that prices consumers’ unstated understandings of contractual silence regarding...

Courts seeking the most likely intent of contracting parties should interpret contracts according to Bayes’ Rule. The best interpretation of a contract reflects both the prior likelihood (base rate) of a pair of contracting parties having a given intention as well as the probability that the...