IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/mhr/jinste/urnsici0932-4569(200803)1641_76vtcwpi_2.0.tx_2-c.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Vague Terms: Contracting when Precision in Terms is Infeasible

Author

Listed:
  • Benjamin E. Hermalin

Abstract

This article considers the consequence of incomplete contracts that arise due to difficulties in precisely describing potentially relevant contingencies. Unlike much of the literature, this article concludes that the resulting incompleteness could often be immaterial with respect to economic efficiency. Indeed, attempts to "improve" matters by increasing the accuracy with which the courts determine which events occurred can, in fact, be welfare reducing, casting doubt on the view that greater judicial accuracy is always beneficial.

Suggested Citation

  • Benjamin E. Hermalin, 2008. "Vague Terms: Contracting when Precision in Terms is Infeasible," Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics (JITE), Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, vol. 164(1), pages 76-94, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:mhr:jinste:urn:sici:0932-4569(200803)164:1_76:vtcwpi_2.0.tx_2-c
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.mohrsiebeck.com/en/article/vague-terms-contracting-when-precision-in-terms-is-infeasible-101628jite-2008-0002
    Download Restriction: Fulltext access is included for subscribers to the printed version.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Luca Anderlini & Leonardo Felli, 1994. "Incomplete Written Contracts: Undescribable States of Nature," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 109(4), pages 1085-1124.
    2. Fudenberg, Drew & Tirole, Jean, 1990. "Moral Hazard and Renegotiation in Agency Contracts," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 58(6), pages 1279-1319, November.
    3. Dye, Ronald A, 1985. "Costly Contract Contingencies," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 26(1), pages 233-250, February.
    4. Grossman, Sanford J & Hart, Oliver D, 1983. "An Analysis of the Principal-Agent Problem," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 51(1), pages 7-45, January.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Ola Kvaløy & Trond E. Olsen, 2009. "Endogenous Verifiability and Relational Contracting," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 99(5), pages 2193-2208, December.
    2. Christoph Engel & Urs Schweizer, 2008. "Editorial Preface," Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics (JITE), Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, vol. 164(1), pages 1-3, March.
    3. Ola Kvaløy & Trond E. Olsen, 2016. "Incentive Provision when Contracting is Costly," Economica, London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 83(332), pages 741-767, October.
    4. Fernando Gomez, 2008. "The Charms of Vagueness in Contracts. Comment," Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics (JITE), Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, vol. 164(1), pages 99-105, March.

    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. Nabil I. Al-Najjar & Luca Anderlini & Leonardo Felli, 2006. "Undescribable Events," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 73(4), pages 849-868.
    2. Nicola Gennaioli & Giacomo A. M. Ponzetto, 2015. "Optimally vague contracts and the law," Economics Working Papers 1410, Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, revised Jan 2017.
    3. Alan Schwartz, 2004. "The Law and Economics of Costly Contracting," The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, Oxford University Press, vol. 20(1), pages 2-31, April.
    4. Okat, Deniz & Nash, John G.F., 2024. "Delegating trial and error," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 217(C).
    5. Lang, Matthias, 2019. "Communicating subjective evaluations," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 179(C), pages 163-199.
    6. Radner, Roy, 1991. "Dynamic games in organization theory," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 16(1-2), pages 217-260, July.
    7. Dan Anderberg & Carlo Perroni, "undated". "Renegotiation of Social Contracts by Majority Rule," EPRU Working Paper Series 00-15, Economic Policy Research Unit (EPRU), University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics.
    8. Mehrdad Vahabi, 1999. "From Walrasian General Equilibrium to Incomplete Contracts: Making Sense of Institutions," Post-Print halshs-03704424, HAL.
    9. Ari Hyytinen & Frode Steen & Otto Toivanen, 2019. "An Anatomy of Cartel Contracts," The Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 129(621), pages 2155-2191.
    10. Luca Anderlini & Leonardo Felli, 1999. "Incomplete Contracts and Complexity Costs," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 46(1), pages 23-50, February.
    11. Patrick Bolton & Antoine Faure-Grimaud, 2010. "Satisficing Contracts," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 77(3), pages 937-971.
    12. Ying-Ju Chen & Xiaojian Zhao, 2013. "Solution Concepts of Principal-Agent Models with Unawareness of Actions," Games, MDPI, vol. 4(3), pages 1-24, August.
    13. Francesco Squintani, 1999. "Moral Hazard," Discussion Papers 1269, Northwestern University, Center for Mathematical Studies in Economics and Management Science.
    14. Ola Kvaløy & Trond E. Olsen, 2016. "Incentive Provision when Contracting is Costly," Economica, London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 83(332), pages 741-767, October.
    15. Zhao, Rui R., 2007. "Dynamic risk-sharing with two-sided moral hazard," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 136(1), pages 601-640, September.
    16. Daniel Danau, 2019. "Contract law and Contract theory. A survey and some considerations," Economics Working Paper Archive (University of Rennes & University of Caen) 2019-04, Center for Research in Economics and Management (CREM), University of Rennes, University of Caen and CNRS.
    17. Dessi, Roberta, 2009. "Contractual Execution, Strategic Incompleteness and Venture Capital," TSE Working Papers 09-075, Toulouse School of Economics (TSE).
    18. Nikolaev, Valeri V., 2018. "Scope for renegotiation in private debt contracts," Journal of Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 65(2), pages 270-301.
    19. M. Martin Boyer, 2004. "On the Use of Hierarchies to Complete Contracts when Players Have Limited Abilities," CIRANO Working Papers 2004s-41, CIRANO.
    20. Toru Suzuki, 2020. "Efficiently Imprecise Contracts," Working Paper Series 2020/07, Economics Discipline Group, UTS Business School, University of Technology, Sydney.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • K12 - Law and Economics - - Basic Areas of Law - - - Contract Law
    • K41 - Law and Economics - - Legal Procedure, the Legal System, and Illegal Behavior - - - Litigation Process
    • D86 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Economics of Contract Law

    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:mhr:jinste:urn:sici:0932-4569(200803)164:1_76:vtcwpi_2.0.tx_2-c. 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: Thomas Wolpert (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.mohrsiebeck.com/jite .

    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.