Unforeseen Contingencies, Property Rights, and Incomplete Contracts

We scrutinize the conceptual framework commonly used in the incomplete contract literature. This literature usually assumes that contractual incompleteness is due to the transaction costs of describing - or of even foreseeing - the possible states of nature in advance. We argue, however, that such transaction costs need not interfere with optimal contracting (i.e., transaction costs need not be relevant), provided that agents can probabilistically forecast their possible future payoffs (even if other aspects of the state of the nature cannot be forecast). In other words, all that is required for optimality is that agents be able to perform dynamic programming, an assumption always invoked by the incomplete contract literature. Under weak assumptions, this conclusion remains true even if contract renegotiation cannot be ruled out. We also reexamine the literature on assignment of property rights and conclude with some suggestions for future research