Contract today increasingly links entrepreneurial innovations to the efforts and finance necessary to transform ideas into value. In this Chapter, we describe the match between a form of contract that "braids" formal and informal contractual elements in novel ways and the process by which...

Contract design that motivates parties to invest and trade more efficiently occurs primarily in thin markets characterized by bespoke, bilateral agreements between commercial parties. In that environment, the cost of producing each contract is relatively high. Those costs are justified by...

Despite recent advances in our understanding of contracting behavior, economic contract theory has yet to identify the principal causes and effects of contract breach. In this Essay, I argue that opportunism is a primary explanation for why commercial parties deliberately breach their contracts....

This article studies the impact of exogenous legal change on whether and how lawyers across four different deal types revise their contracts' governing law clauses in order to solve the problem that the legal change created. The governing law clause is present in practically every contract...

This article sets out a normative theory to guide decisionmakers in the regulation of contracts between firms. Commercial law for centuries has drawn a distinction between mercantile contracts and others, but modern scholars have not systematically pursued the normative implications of this...

Contract terms that improve or reduce the likelihood of repayment of a debt should impact its price. That's basic economics. But what about a contract that is hundreds of pages long and has lengthy and complex terms that even the lawyers are unwilling to read? Believers in efficient markets...