The following case study investigates the contract enforcement institutions that enable German customers to purchase software in Asia and Eastern Europe. The case study shows that nation-states are hardly able to generate a legal "shadow" for cross-border business relations. The same holds true...

We develop a model of strategic contractual incompleteness that identifies conditions under which principals might omit even costlessly verifiable terms. We then use experiments to test comparative statics predictions of the model. While it is well known that verifiability imperfections can...

Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmström were awarded the 2016 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for their fundamental contributions to contract theory. This article offers a short summary and discussion of their path breaking work.