Bridging Monopolies of Power: Foreign Tourism Trade Relations between Germany and Jordan and Constitutional Uncertainty

International tourism trade relations often operate ‘outside’ national territorialities of law. In holiday destinations without mass tourism, tour operators usually rely on local service providers to produce the tourist package tour on-site. Because tour operators are not always able to establish effective governance mechanisms with their local service providers, loss of their business – and in the worst case bankruptcy – can cause significant economic costs. The paper discusses the efficiency of tour operators’ strategies to deal with such constitutional uncertainty and to impose ‘self-enforcement’. The extensive empirical case study at hand enriches our understanding of private ordering in the service sector and thus contributes to the conceptual discussion within the New Institutional Economics of International Transactions (NIEIT).