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Indescribability And Its Irrelevance For Contractual Incompleteness, Takashi Kunimoto

Research Collection School Of Economics

The incomplete contracts literature often cites indescribable contingencies as a major obstacle to the creation of completecontracts. Using agents’ minimum foresight concerning possible future payoffs, Maskin and Tirole (Rev Econ Stud 66:83–114, 1999) show that indescribability does not matter for contractual incompletenessas long as there is symmetric information at both the contracting stage and the trading stage. This is called the irrelevance theorem. The following generalization of the irrelevance theorem is shown here: indescribability does not matter even in the presenceof asymmetric information at the trading stage, as long as there is symmetric information at the contracting stage. This isan …