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Contentious Contracts

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Author Info
Hege, Ulrich
Viala, Pascale

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Abstract

This paper offers an explanation of rationally incomplete contracts, where incompleteness refers to unforeseen contingencies. Agents enter a two-sided moral hazard relationship, in which a commitment to discard parts of the joint resources may be ex-ante efficient. This happens through costly legal dispute which arises when contract terms are missing for undesirable outcomes. We show that an optimal contract needs only to specify the obligation for the more litigious party to assure a certain output level – the threshold between foreseen and unforeseen contingencies – and a linear sharing rule for the foreseen contingencies. If litigation reveals some information about the effort levels of the agents, less costly dispute is typically needed and the allocation will improve.

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Paper provided by C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers in its series CEPR Discussion Papers with number 1910.

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Date of creation: Jun 1998
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Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:1910

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Related research
Keywords: burning money; contract law; Incomplete Contracts; Team Production; unforeseen contingencies;

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information
K12 - Law and Economics - - Basic Areas of Law - - - Contract Law

References listed on IDEAS
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    Other versions:
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    Other versions:
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