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 studies the effect bargaining power has on self-enforcing contracts. Optimal contracts are characterized under three enforcement regimes. When enforcement is absent, I show that as the agent's bargaining power increases, her incentive payments decrease even though her total...

The following case study investigates the contract enforcement institutions that enable German customers to purchase software in Asia and Eastern Europe. The case study shows that nation-states are hardly able to generate a legal "shadow" for cross-border business relations. The same holds true...

It has been taken for granted in the literature on the determinants of vertical integration that the effectiveness of contract enforcement is guaranteed, which is far from true even in some developed countries. In this paper, using a World Bank data set of manufacturing firms in China, we...

In this paper, a setting of bilateral selfish reliance investments and post contractual two-sided asymmetric information is explored. Since the pioneering work of Rogerson (1992) and Hermalin-Katz (1993), it is by now well known that the comprehensive contracts can implement the first best even...

As carbon sinks, forests play a critical role in helping to mitigate the growing threat from anthropogenic climate change. Forest carbon offsets transacted between GHG emitters in industrialised countries and sellers in developing countries have emerged as a useful climate policy tool. A model...

Complex business contracts are notoriously difficult to write and read. Certainly, when litigation arises, courts scarcely have an easy time interpreting them. Indeed, contracts don't look at all as though they are written to tell a court what the parties want. Why can't smart, well-motivated...

I build a model of state verification by judges and study its consequences for contracting and welfare. I assume that judges have imperfect information about a state of nature and can use it selectively to implement their idiosyncratic/biased preferences. The interplay between judges' imperfect...

This article proposes relational contract as a model for analyzing marriage under Canadian law. In contrast, in Bracklow v. Bracklow, the Supreme Court of Canada recognized two "competing" models of marriage and three models of spousal support. The difficult policy issues in the law of spousal...