What explains cross-country differences in the cost of contract enforcement? Previous findings suggest that fewer legal complexities support lower contract enforcement costs. In addition, recent work finds that individuals may rely on informal, cultural means to enforce agreements. Building from these two main bodies of work, this paper seeks to understand the variation of the costs of enforcin...

Design by Contract (DbC) and runtime enforcement of program assertions enables the construction of more robust software. It also enables the assignment of blame in error reporting. Unfortunately, there is no support for runtime contract enforcement and blame assignment for Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP). Extending DbC to also cover aspects brings forward a plethora of issues related to the c...

When the quality of a good is at the discretion of the seller, how can buyers assure that the seller provides the mutually efficient level of quality? Contracts that provide a bonus to the seller if the quality is acceptable, or impose a penalty on the seller if quality is unacceptable, can in theory provide efficient incentives. But how are such contracts enforced? While the courts can be used...

We provide evidence that long-term relationships between trading parties emerge endogenously in the absence of third party enforcement of contracts and are associated with a fundamental change in the nature of market interactions. Without third party enforcement, the vast majority of trades are initiated with private offers and the parties share the gains from trade equally. Low effort or bad q...

The real exchange rate is very volatile relative to major macroeconomic aggregates and its correlation with the ratio of domestic over foreign consumption is negative (BackusSmith puzzle). These two observations constitute a puzzle to standard international macroeconomic theory. This paper develops a two country model with complete asset markets and limited enforcement for international financi...

=255223 (on file with the Columbia Law Review) (reviewing experimental evidence on fairness and reciprocity). 156. Scott & Stephan, Leviathan, supra note 143, at 102. 157. Id. 158. Fehr 8c Gächter, Fairness and Retaliation, supra note 143, at lbO-70. 159. Ernst Fehr 8c Simon Gächter, Do Incentive Contracts Undermine Voluntary Cooperation? 1 (Inst. for Empirical Research in Econ., Univ. of Zuric...

T complexity and scope of outsourced information technology (IT) demands relationship-specific investments from vendors, which, when combined with contract incompleteness, may result in underinvestment and inefficient bargaining, referred to as the holdup problem. Using a unique data set of over 100 IT outsourcing contracts, we examine whether contract extensiveness, i.e., the extent to which f...

Access control has traditionally assumed a single, monolithic authorization policy, generally expressed as an access matrix. We argue that this assumption does not fit ecommerce applications, which are governed by a potentially large set of independently stated, evolving contracts. In order to support this growing class of applications we propose an enforcement mechanism which uses certified-co...

Run-time enforcement of behavioral contracts has been studied extensively in procedural and object-oriented languages. This research has led to a better understanding of specific techniques, including pre-processing compilers or wrappers. However, component-based software engineering (CBSE) imposes additional restrictions and it is appropriate to consider how to extend these techniques when the...