IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/rsm/riskun/r06_3.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Lost in Translation: Honest Misunderstandings and Ex Post Disputes

Author

Listed:
  • Simon Grant

    (Department of Economics, Rice University)

  • Jeff Kline

    (Bond University)

  • John Quiggin

    (Department of Economics, University of Queensland)

Abstract

We give a formal treatment of optimal risk sharing contracts in the face of ambiguity. The central idea is that boundedly rational individuals do not have access to a language sufficiently rich to describe all possible states of nature. The ambiguity in a contract arises from contractual clauses that are interpreted by the parties in different ways. The cost of ambiguity is represented in terms of dispute costs. Taking the potential for dispute into account, we find that risk averse agents may forgo potential gains from risk sharing and choose incomplete contracts instead.

Suggested Citation

  • Simon Grant & Jeff Kline & John Quiggin, 2006. "Lost in Translation: Honest Misunderstandings and Ex Post Disputes," Risk & Uncertainty Working Papers WP3R06, Risk and Sustainable Management Group, University of Queensland.
    • Handle: RePEc:rsm:riskun:r06_3
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.uq.edu.au/rsmg/WP/WPR06_3.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Itzhak Gilboa & David Schmeidler, 1995. "Case-Based Decision Theory," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 110(3), pages 605-639.
    2. Sujoy Mukerji & Jean-Marc Tallon, 2001. "Ambiguity Aversion and Incompleteness of Financial Markets," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 68(4), pages 883-904.
    3. Eric Maskin & Jean Tirole, 1999. "Unforeseen Contingencies and Incomplete Contracts," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 66(1), pages 83-114.
    4. Yaari, Menahem E., 1969. "Some remarks on measures of risk aversion and on their uses," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 1(3), pages 315-329, October.
    5. Heifetz, Aviad & Meier, Martin & Schipper, Burkhard C., 2006. "Interactive unawareness," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 130(1), pages 78-94, September.
    6. Martin J. Osborne & Ariel Rubinstein, 1994. "A Course in Game Theory," MIT Press Books, The MIT Press, edition 1, volume 1, number 0262650401, December.
    7. Simon Grant & John Quiggin, 2005. "Learning and Discovery," Risk & Uncertainty Working Papers WP7R05, Risk and Sustainable Management Group, University of Queensland.
    8. Chew Soo Hong & Jacob S. Sagi, 2006. "Event Exchangeability: Probabilistic Sophistication Without Continuity or Monotonicity," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 74(3), pages 771-786, May.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Grant, Simon & Kline, J. Jude & Quiggin, John, 2012. "Differential awareness, ambiguity, and incomplete contracts: A model of contractual disputes," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 82(2), pages 494-504.
    2. Grant, Simon & Kline, Jeff & Quiggin, John, 2009. "A Matter of Interpretation: Bargaining over Ambiguous Contracts," Risk and Sustainable Management Group Working Papers 151190, University of Queensland, School of Economics.
    3. Simon Grant & John Quiggin, 2013. "Inductive reasoning about unawareness," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 54(3), pages 717-755, November.
    4. Thibault Gajdos & Jean-Marc Tallon & Jean-Christophe Vergnaud, 2002. "Coping with imprecise information: a decision theoretic approach," Cahiers de la Maison des Sciences Economiques v04056, Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris 1), revised May 2004.
    5. Kochov, Asen, 2018. "A behavioral definition of unforeseen contingencies," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 175(C), pages 265-290.
    6. Burkhard Schipper, 2010. "Revealed Unawareness," Working Papers 303, University of California, Davis, Department of Economics.
    7. Simon Grant & John Quiggin, 2005. "Learning and Discovery," Risk & Uncertainty Working Papers WP7R05, Risk and Sustainable Management Group, University of Queensland.
    8. Zhao, Xiaojian, 2011. "Framing contingencies in contracts," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 61(1), pages 31-40, January.
    9. Filiz-Ozbay, Emel, 2012. "Incorporating unawareness into contract theory," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 76(1), pages 181-194.
    10. Wenjun Ma & Burkhard C. Schipper, 2017. "Does exposure to unawareness affect risk preferences? A preliminary result," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 83(2), pages 245-257, August.
    11. Heifetz, Aviad & Meier, Martin & Schipper, Burkhard C., 2013. "Dynamic unawareness and rationalizable behavior," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 81(C), pages 50-68.
    12. Antoine Dubus, 2017. "Asymmetric Awareness and Heterogeneous Agents," Working Papers hal-01521487, HAL.
    13. Araujo, Aloisio & Chateauneuf, Alain & Faro, José Heleno, 2018. "Financial market structures revealed by pricing rules: Efficient complete markets are prevalent," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 173(C), pages 257-288.
    14. Karni, Edi & Vierø, Marie-Louise, 2017. "Awareness of unawareness: A theory of decision making in the face of ignorance," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 168(C), pages 301-328.
    15. Mehmet S. Ismail, 2023. "Human and Machine Intelligence in n-Person Games with Partial Knowledge: Theory and Computation," Papers 2302.13937, arXiv.org, revised Feb 2024.
    16. Kaneko, Mamoru & Kline, J. Jude, 2008. "Inductive game theory: A basic scenario," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 44(12), pages 1332-1363, December.
    17. Matthias Lang, 2017. "First-Order and Second-Order Ambiguity Aversion," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 63(4), pages 1254-1269, April.
    18. Mengel, Friederike, 2012. "Learning across games," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 74(2), pages 601-619.
    19. Eric Maskin & John Moore, 1998. "Implementation and Renegotiation - (Now published in Review of Economic Studies, vol.66 (1), 1999, pp.39-56.)," STICERD - Theoretical Economics Paper Series 366, Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines, LSE.
    20. Guarino, Pierfrancesco, 2020. "An epistemic analysis of dynamic games with unawareness," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 120(C), pages 257-288.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ambiguity; bounded rationality; incomplete contracts;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D80 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - General
    • D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design

    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:rsm:riskun:r06_3. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: David Adamson (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/rsmuqau.html .

    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.