IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ags/uqsers/151190.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

A Matter of Interpretation: Bargaining over Ambiguous Contracts

Author

Listed:
  • Grant, Simon
  • Kline, Jeff
  • Quiggin, John

Abstract

We present a formal treatment of contracting in the face of ambiguity. The central idea is that boundedly rational individuals will not always interpret the same situation in the same way. More specifically, even with well defined contracts, the precise actions to be taken by each party to the contract might be disputable. Taking this potential for dispute into account, we analyze the effects of ambiguity on contracting. We find that risk averse agents will engage in ambiguous contracts for risk sharing reasons. We provide an application where ambiguity motivates the use of a liquidated damages contract.

Suggested Citation

  • 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.
    • Handle: RePEc:ags:uqsers:151190
    DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.151190
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/151190/files/WPR09_03.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.22004/ag.econ.151190?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Oliver Hart & John Moore, 1999. "Foundations of Incomplete Contracts," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 66(1), pages 115-138.
    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. Oliver Board, 2008. "Object-Based Unawareness: Theory and Applications," Working Paper 378, Department of Economics, University of Pittsburgh, revised Mar 2009.
    4. Kathryn E. Spier, 1992. "Incomplete Contracts and Signalling," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 23(3), pages 432-443, Autumn.
    5. Kim-Sau Chung & Oliver Board, 2007. "Object-Based Unawareness," Working Papers 2007-2, University of Minnesota, Department of Economics, revised 24 Aug 2007.
    6. Heifetz, Aviad & Meier, Martin & Schipper, Burkhard C., 2006. "Interactive unawareness," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 130(1), pages 78-94, September.
    7. Bernheim, B Douglas & Whinston, Michael D, 1998. "Incomplete Contracts and Strategic Ambiguity," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 88(4), pages 902-932, September.
    8. 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.
    9. 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.
    10. Gilboa, Itzhak & Schmeidler, David, 1989. "Maxmin expected utility with non-unique prior," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 18(2), pages 141-153, April.
    11. Grant, Simon & Kajii, Atsushi, 1995. "A Cardinal Characterization of the Rubinstein-Safra-Thomson Axiomatic Bargaining Theory," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 63(5), pages 1241-1249, September.
    12. Mukerji, Sujoy, 1998. "Ambiguity Aversion and Incompleteness of Contractual Form," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 88(5), pages 1207-1231, December.
    13. Ilya Segal, 1999. "Complexity and Renegotiation: A Foundation for Incomplete Contracts," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 66(1), pages 57-82.
    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. Halpern, Joseph Y. & Kets, Willemien, 2015. "Ambiguous language and common priors," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 90(C), pages 171-180.

    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. Marie-Louise Vierø, 2012. "Contracting in Vague Environments," American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 4(2), pages 104-130, May.
    3. Dessi, Roberta, 2009. "Contractual Execution, Strategic Incompleteness and Venture Capital," TSE Working Papers 09-075, Toulouse School of Economics (TSE).
    4. Toru Suzuki, 2020. "Efficiently Imprecise Contracts," Working Paper Series 2020/07, Economics Discipline Group, UTS Business School, University of Technology, Sydney.
    5. Lucy White & Mark Williams, 2009. "Bargaining with imperfect enforcement," RAND Journal of Economics, RAND Corporation, vol. 40(2), pages 317-339, June.
    6. Oliver Hart & John Moore, 2004. "Agreeing Now to Agree Later: Contracts that Rule Out but do not Rule In," Edinburgh School of Economics Discussion Paper Series 109, Edinburgh School of Economics, University of Edinburgh.
    7. Burkhard Schipper, 2010. "Revealed Unawareness," Working Papers 303, University of California, Davis, Department of Economics.
    8. Mehrdad Vahabi, 1999. "From Walrasian General Equilibrium to Incomplete Contracts: Making Sense of Institutions," Post-Print halshs-03704424, HAL.
    9. 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.
    10. Lewis A. Kornhauser & W. Bentley MacLeod, 2012. "Contracts between Legal Persons [The Handbook of Organizational Economics]," Introductory Chapters,, Princeton University Press.
    11. Grant, Simon & Kline, J. Jude & Quiggin, John, 2014. "A matter of interpretation: Ambiguous contracts and liquidated damages," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 85(C), pages 180-187.
    12. Makoto Hanazono, 2004. "Holdup with Subsidized Investment," Econometric Society 2004 Far Eastern Meetings 640, Econometric Society.
    13. Salvatore Piccolo & David Martimort, 2006. "The Strategic Value of Incomplete Contracting in a Competing Hierarchies Environment," CSEF Working Papers 160, Centre for Studies in Economics and Finance (CSEF), University of Naples, Italy, revised 08 Dec 2006.
    14. Hoppe, Eva I. & Schmitz, Patrick W., 2011. "Can contracts solve the hold-up problem? Experimental evidence," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 73(1), pages 186-199, September.
    15. Burkhard Schipper, 2013. "Awareness-dependent subjective expected utility," International Journal of Game Theory, Springer;Game Theory Society, vol. 42(3), pages 725-753, August.
    16. Diego Puga & Daniel Trefler, 2002. "Knowledge Creation and Control in Organizations," NBER Working Papers 9121, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    17. Kochov, Asen, 2018. "A behavioral definition of unforeseen contingencies," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 175(C), pages 265-290.
    18. Maskin, Eric, 2002. "On indescribable contingencies and incomplete contracts," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 46(4-5), pages 725-733, May.
    19. Hojin Jung, 2016. "Renegotiation on incomplete procurement contracts," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 48(23), pages 2125-2138, May.
    20. Gene M. Grossman & Elhanan Helpman, 1999. "Incomplete Contracts and Industrial Organization," Harvard Institute of Economic Research Working Papers 1876, Harvard - Institute of Economic Research.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Risk and Uncertainty;

    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:ags:uqsers:151190. 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: AgEcon Search (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/decuqau.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.