The growth in the information technology (IT) services market and the increasing tendency of firms to outsource some or all of their IT functions necessitate better mechanisms for selecting IT vendors. For most projects, there are a multitude of potential vendors that differ in quality and other aspects that are difficult to assess at the time of contracting. In addition, many projects have out...

Many scholars believe that notions of fault should and do pervade contract doctrine. Notwithstanding the normative and positive arguments in favor of a fault-based analysis of particular contract doctrines, I argue that contract liability is strict liability at its core. This core regime is based on two key prongs: (1) the promisor is liable to the promisee for breach, and that liability is una...

A central matter in e-commerce and e-government is digital contracting and signing. The processes to be supported are to ensure a trustable and provable sequence of acts between the parties concerned following legal rules in a fast and flexible manner. Complex infrastructures like PKIs have been established to cope this task. But still there is a big lack: creating signatures in an untrustworth...

Relational contracts typically combine explicit terms that are third-party enforceable with implicit components that can be adjusted at the parties’ discretion. While discretionary ex post adjustments lies at the heart of relational contracting, previous empirical research has been primarily motivated by the repeat purchase mechanism (RPM) of Klein and Leffler (1981), which is a relational cont...

Firms in many high technology industries utilize and build on the innovations of others, often in the face of short product life cycles. Not surprisingly, the legal “rules of the game” governing intellectual property rights (such as patents) play a pivotal role in shaping this process of cumulative innovation by, among other things, affecting how the initial rights to technologies are allocated...

Contracting is one of the tools increasingly being used to enhance the performance of health systems in both developed and developing countries; it takes different forms and cannot be limited to the mere purchase of services. Actors adopt contracting to formalize all kinds of relations established between them. A typology for this approach will demonstrate its diversity and provide a better und...

In the joint initiative ’Dynamic Contracting in Infrastructures’ the aim is to develop a contracting procedure that is able to cope with the additional complexities of recently popular performance based contracts. Commonly in maintenance of (public) infrastructures, such as a national highway network, an asset manager is responsible for high network quality and throughput, while limiting expens...

Electronic commerce has added a new complex issue to international trade. It is based upon the assumption that buyers and sellers conduct business with very little information about each other. This lack of information about the contracting parties reputation makes risk assessment more complex and the importance of trust in online contracting becomes increasingly important. The difficulties and...

We examine how social preferences affect behavior and surplus in relational contracts. Experimental subjects participate in a contracting environment similar to Brown, Falk, and Fehr [Brown, M., Falk, A. & Fehr, E., “Relational Contracts and the Nature of Market Interactions, Econometrica, 72 (2004):747-780] and in social preference experiments adapted from Charness and Rabin [Charness, G. & Ra...

Firms in many industries build on the innovations of others, often in the face of short product life cycles. Not surprisingly, legal institutions governing intellectual property (IP) play a pivotal role in shaping this process of cumulative innovation. Recent studies suggest that IP-related “hold up” is especially problematic in the face of widely dispersed, or fragmented, markets for technolog...