IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/amlawe/v6y2004i2p369-409.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Agency Law and Contract Formation

Author

Listed:
  • Eric Rasmusen

Abstract

Various issues in the common law arise when agents make contracts on behalf of principals. Should a principal be bound when his agent makes a contract on his behalf that he would immediately wish to disavow? The tradeoffs resemble those in tort, so the least-cost avoider principle is useful for deciding which agreements are binding and can unify a number of different doctrines in agency law. In particular, an efficiency explanation can be found for the undisclosed-principal rule, under which the agent's agreement binds the principal even when the third party with whom the contract is made is unaware that the agent is acting as an agent. Copyright 2004, Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Eric Rasmusen, 2004. "Agency Law and Contract Formation," American Law and Economics Review, American Law and Economics Association, vol. 6(2), pages 369-409.
  • Handle: RePEc:oup:amlawe:v:6:y:2004:i:2:p:369-409
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Bruce I. Carlin & Simon Gervais, 2009. "Legal Protection in Retail Financial Markets," NBER Working Papers 14972, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Caspar Rose, 2010. "The transfer of property rights by theft: an economic analysis," European Journal of Law and Economics, Springer, vol. 30(3), pages 247-266, December.
    3. Marianna Succurro, 2006. "An economic analysis of contracts signed between tour operators and travel agents," European Journal of Law and Economics, Springer, vol. 22(3), pages 199-218, November.
    4. Bruce Ian Carlin & Simon Gervais, 2012. "Legal Protection in Retail Financial Markets," The Review of Corporate Finance Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 1(1), pages 68-108.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:amlawe:v:6:y:2004:i:2:p:369-409. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/aler .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.