Many couples do not sign prenuptial agreements, even though this often leads to costly and inefficient litigation in case of divorce. In this paper we show that strategic reasons may prevent agents from signing prenuptial agreements. Partners who value more the benefit of the marriage wish to...

This paper offers an explanation of rationally incomplete contracts where incompleteness refers to unforeseen contingencies. Agents enter a relationship with two-sided moral hazard in which a commitment to discard parts of the joint resources may be ex ante efficient. This happens through costly...

Contrary to previous literature, we show that the assignment of authority decision matters in optimal contract design with bilateral specific self-investments. This is the case when we enlarge the set of the states of nature, to explicitly consider the event that a party's market option turns...

In the hold-up problem incomplete contracts cause the proceeds of relation-specific investments to be allocated by ex-post bargaining. The present paper investigates the efficiency of incomplete contracts if individuals have heterogeneous preferences implying heterogeneous bargaining behavior...

This paper offers an explanation of rationally incomplete contracts, where incompleteness refers to unforeseen contingencies. Agents enter a two-sided moral hazard relationship, in which a commitment to discard parts of the joint resources may be ex-ante efficient. This happens through costly...

We use economic experiments to examine the nature of relational trading under a menu of incomplete contracts ranging from the repeat purchase mechanism of Klein and Leffler (1981) to highly incomplete contracts that are completely unenforceable by third-parties. Our results suggest that, with...

This paper investigates a procurement relationship between a welfare-oriented government and a private supplier. The agents face several versions of the trading good which differ in quality and production costs, and the differences between those items are undescribable ex ante. In presence of...