This article is a comparative economic analysis of the disparate doctrines governing the good faith purchase of stolen or misappropriated goods. Good faith purchase questions have occupied the courts and commentators of many nations for millennia. We argue that prior treatments have misconceived...

Market damages - the difference between the market price for goods or services at the time of breach and the contract price - are the best default rule whenever parties trade in thick markets: they induce parties to contract efficiently and to trade if and only if trade is efficient, and they do...

This paper explores how the opportunity to recontract affects investment and trade in contractual relationships when it is assumed that renegotiation is costly. In this world, recontracting retains much of the benefit that has been ascribed to it, including the realization of any surplus that is...

When deciding when to make a purchase, people often compare their outcomes to those that would have occurred had they purchased earlier or later. In this article, we examine how pre- and postpurchase comparisons affect regret and satisfaction, and whether consumers learn to avoid decisions that...

An increasing trend of economic agents is to form productive associations such as networks, platforms and other hybrids. Subsets of these agents contract with each other to further their network project and these contracts can create benefits for, or impose costs on, agents who are not contract...

In most of the contract theory literature, contracting costs are assumed either to be high enough to preclude certain forms of contracting, or low enough to permit any contract to be written. Similarly, researchers usually treat renegotiation as either costless or prohibitively costly. This...

In a common commercial pattern, the seller of a standard product contracts with one buyer and then sells to another at the contract price after the initial buyer breaches. Sellers argue, and courts largely agree, that the seller could have served the contract buyer as well as the later buyer;...

Contract law encourages parties to make relation-specific investments by enforcing the contracts the parties make, and by denying liability when the parties had failed to agree. For decades, the law has had difficulty with cases where parties sink costs in the pursuit of projects under...

Contract law's liquidated damage rules prevent enforcement of contractual damage measures that require the promisor, if it breaches, to transfer to the promisee a sum that exceeds the net gain the promisee expected to make from performance; but these rules permit the promisor to transfer less than...

Much productive activity that once took place within a single firm now occurs when two firms collaborate to produce a new product such as a drug or software program. The agreements that govern these collaborations are not enforceable contracts; they lack standard terms such as prices and...