A co-authored October 2020 Harvard Business Review (“HBR”) article promotes the use of “formal relational contracts” as a means of obviating or limiting opportunistic behaviors by contracting parties, including parties contending with cataclysmic events or factors in or outside the...

Bargaining power affects the terms of trade negotiated between agents in the economy. When multiple players with interrelated payoffs negotiate contracts, the outcome of each negotiation depends on all the players' bargaining powers. In a model in which a buyer negotiates in sequence with two...

I analyze a simple model of hold-up with asymmetric information at the contracting stage. I show that contractual signalling and efficiency of investment can conflict if only quantity is contractible. This is because contracted quantity encourages investment in the relationship but also signals...

In Atlantic Marine Construction Company v. United States District Court, the Supreme Court held that a “contractually valid” forum selection clause should be enforced by federal courts absent extraordinary circumstances. Unfortunately, the Court provided no guidance on how to assess whether...

A contract is a system composed of numerous terms, many of which interact with one another in a variety of ways. As a result of these interactions, a contract is more complex than the sum of its terms. To fully understand a contract, one must go beyond the individual terms and examine the...

Due to the spatial and temporal separations between clients and freelancers, online labor markets (OLMs) are particularly susceptible to issues related to information asymmetry. Based on the economics of information, we hypothesize that the choice of contract type—i.e., between the...

We introduce the contraction rule for updating ambiguous beliefs. With the rule, a realized event renders an individual’s belief unambiguous when and only when the event has small ambiguity. The contraction rule is continuous and insensitive to priors that are less likely given the...

This paper analyzes how lenders address managerial agency problems in loan contracts using sweep covenants. Sweeps require a (partial) prepayment when triggered and are included in many contracts. Exploiting exogenous reductions in analyst coverage due to brokerage house mergers and closures, we...

We study physician agency and optimal payment policy in the context of an expensive medication used in dialysis care. Using Medicare claims data we estimate a structural model of treatment decisions, in which physicians differ in their altruism and marginal costs, and this heterogeneity is...

The paper examines the architecture of contracting and the instruments to control the exercise and the abuse of private regulatory power along supply chains. The design of the contractual architecture and its implementation may cause significant unfairness in power distribution that can...