Law Commons^™

Facilitating Incomplete Contracts, Wendy Epstein

College of Law Faculty

Contract law abhors incompleteness. Although no contract can be entirely complete, the idea of a purposefully incomplete or underspecified contract is antithetical to lawyers’ ideals of certainty for the parties and for the law. Indeed, contract law is designed to incentivize parties to specifically articulate their intentions. Yet there is a growing body of interdisciplinary work in economics and cognitive psychology demonstrating that highly specified contracts tend to stifle intrinsic motivation and innovation, whereas less-specified contracts — particularly in public-private contracting, IP, and contracting for innovation — can induce higher effort levels and a more cooperative principal-agent relationship than the …