A principal hires an agent to provide a verifiable service. Initially, the agent can exert unobservable effort to reduce his disutility from providing the service. If the agent is free to waive his right to quit, he may voluntarily sign a contract specifying an inefficiently large service level,...

Default rules in contract law grant a buyer the right to terminate an installment contract (i.e., a contract over the recurrent delivery in multiple periods) and cancel future deliveries if, and only if, past deliveries by the seller are sufficiently defective (putting the seller in "material...

The Fisher Body-General Motors case illustrates the costs of using inherently imperfect long-term contracts to solve potential holdup problems, and therefore the advantages of vertical integration. Fisher Body held up General Motors by renegotiating its body supply contract so that, contrary to...

We argue that a contract provides a reference point for a trading relationship: more precisely, for parties' feelings of entitlement. A party's ex post performance depends on whether he gets what he is entitled to relative to outcomes permitted by the contract. A party who is shortchanged shades...

Buyers may try to motivate their sellers to make relationship-specific investments to reduce the probability that the design of the goods they procure is defective. In some countries, courts examine how much real authority the seller had in performing the work to assign liability for a design...

A buyer wants to purchase an innovative good from a seller. Both parties are risk-neutral, and payments from the buyer to the seller must be non-negative. After the contract is signed, the seller privately observes a signal, which may be informative about the seller's costs. We compare two...

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...

Teams are formed because input from different people is needed. Providing incentives to team members, however, can be diffcult. According to received wisdom, declaring all members responsible fails because real responsibility for team output "diffuses". But why? And why and when does formally...

Most major jurisdictions require websites to provide customers with privacy policies. A privacy policy’s most important function is to provide consumers with a description of the online service provider’s current privacy practices. We argue that these policies also serve a second,...

Transactions of any complexity between buyers and sellers are supported by long-term contracts and these contracts are inevitably incomplete. We propose an approach for overcoming contractual incompleteness based on the idea that most people are inclined to follow widely accepted social norms,...