A More Complete View of Incomplete Contracts

不完整合同的更完整视图

• 批准号: 9112076
• 负责人: Benjamin Hermalin
• 金额: $ 7.52万
• 依托单位: University of California-Berkeley
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 1991
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1991-09-01 至 1993-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9112076&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: More; Complete; View; Incomplete; Contracts

A central feature of contracts is that they are necessarily incomplete. It is a fact of life that contracts between parties often require renegotiation and even legal intervention for definition, clarification, execution, and enforcement. Yet, there has been limited attention in the literature to either the process of renegotiation or the effects of legal frameworks on contracting and the anticipation of contracting opportunities. Through formal modelling, Drs. Hermalin and Katz seek to assess the relative efficiency of renegotiation and judicial interpretation as ways of handling the incompleteness of contracts. The work addresses three classes of contracts--sales contracts, debt or bankruptcy contracts, and a "best effort" service or franchise contract. For each area, these investigators will examine (1) the basic assumptions about the information structure of the parties (including the judge), (2) the nature of the contracts that private parties would reach in a given legal environment, and (3) the outcomes of handling incompleteness under alternative legal regimes. This research should produce results that will further our basic understanding of contracting and the role of courts in contract enforcement. As important, the project ties the developing economics literature on contracting closer to the empirical realities of law by focusing on the role of the contract enforcement and damage rules administered by the courts. Also, the work adds new sophistication to the law and economics literature on contract damages by closely scrutinizing the information available to the parties and the conditions before them for renegotiation. Finally, this effort--in particular, the emphasis on renegotiation--could very well change our view of why contracts are incomplete and what the courts can and should do to deal with this incompleteness.

合同的一个核心特征是它们必然是不完整的。 事实是，当事人之间的合同经常需要重新谈判，甚至需要法律干预来进行定义、澄清、执行和强制执行。 然而，文献中对重新谈判过程或法律框架对合同的影响以及合同机会的预期的关注有限。 通过正式建模，博士。赫尔马林和卡茨试图评估重新谈判和司法解释作为处理合同不完整性的方式的相对效率。 该著作涉及三类合同——销售合同、债务或破产合同以及“尽力而为”服务或特许经营合同。 对于每个领域，这些调查人员将检查（1）有关当事人（包括法官）信息结构的基本假设，（2）私人当事人在给定法律环境中达成的合同的性质，以及（3）在替代法律制度下处理不完整性的结果。 这项研究应该产生的结果将进一步加深我们对合同以及法院在合同执行中的作用的基本理解。 同样重要的是，该项目通过关注法院执行的合同执行和损害赔偿规则的作用，将不断发展的合同经济学文献与法律的经验现实联系起来。 此外，该著作还通过仔细审查当事人可获得的信息以及重新谈判的条件，为有关合同损害赔偿的法律和经济学文献增添了新的复杂性。 最后，这种努力——特别是对重新谈判的强调——很可能会改变我们对合同为何不完整以及法院能够和应该采取哪些措施来处理这种不完整的看法。