Yale Law SchoolPub Date : 2001-12-01DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.295659
Alan G. Schwartz, Joel Watson
{"title":"The Law and Economics of Costly Contracting","authors":"Alan G. Schwartz, Joel Watson","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.295659","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.295659","url":null,"abstract":"In most of the contract theory literature, contracting costs are assumed either to be high enough to preclude certain forms of contracting or low enough to permit any contract to be written. Similarly researchers usually treat renegotiation as either costless or prohibitively costly. This article addresses the middle ground between these extremes, in which the costs of contracting and renegotiation can take intermediate values and the contracting parties can themselves influence these costs. The context for our analysis is the canonical problem of inducing efficient relation-specific investment and efficient ex post trade. Among our principle results are: (i) The efficiency and complexity of the initial contract are decreasing in the cost to create a contract. Hence the best mechanism design contracts can be too costly to write. (ii) When parties use the simpler contract forms, they require renegotiation to capture ex post surplus and to create efficient investment incentives. In some cases, parties want low renegotiation costs. More interesting is that, in other cases, parties have a strict preference for moderate renegotiation costs. (iii) The effect of contract law on contract form is significant but has been overlooked. In particular, the law's interpretive rules raise the cost of enforcing complex contracts, and thus induce parties to use simple contracts. Worse, the law also lowers renegotiation costs, which further undermines complex contracts and is also inappropriate for some of the simpler contracts. Copyright 2004, Oxford University Press.","PeriodicalId":171240,"journal":{"name":"Yale Law School","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128322768","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Yale Law SchoolPub Date : 1999-09-01DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.192576
Henry Hansmann
{"title":"Higher Education as an Associative Good","authors":"Henry Hansmann","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.192576","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.192576","url":null,"abstract":"Education, and particularly higher education, has an important characteristic that distinguishes it from most other goods and services: it is an \"associative\" good. The essential characteristic of an associative good is that, when choosing which producer to patronize, a consumer is interested not just in the quality and price of the firm's products, but also in the personal characteristics of the firm's other customers. When choosing among undergraduate colleges, for example, a student is interested not just -- or even primarily -- in the colleges' faculty, curriculum, and facilities, but also in the intellectual aptitude, previous accomplishments, sociability, athletic prowess, wealth, and family connections of the colleges' other students. The reason is obvious: these and other attributes of a student's classmates have a strong influence on the quality of the student's educational and social experience, the relationships (including marriage) that the student will have later in life, and the student's personal and professional reputation. Markets for associative goods do not function like markets for other goods and services. This is especially true when the producing firms are all nonprofit or governmental, as is the case in the upper reaches of higher education. Most importantly, when nonprofit firms produce associative goods, there is a particularly strong tendency for customers to become stratified across firms according to their personal characteristics. Those customers who are most desirable as fellow customers will tend to cluster at one firm, the next most desirable at another, and so on down. This essay surveys the implications of the associative character of higher educat","PeriodicalId":171240,"journal":{"name":"Yale Law School","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1999-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114919456","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Yale Law SchoolPub Date : 1900-01-01DOI: 10.2139/SSRN.192132
I. Ayres, Stewart J. Schwab
{"title":"The Employment Contract","authors":"I. Ayres, Stewart J. Schwab","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.192132","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.192132","url":null,"abstract":"This article is an edited transcript of a lecture on the Employment Contract presented to a conference of state law judges. Part I introduces a model of a well-functioning labor market, which provides all employee benefits, and only those employee benefits, that employees value more than it costs employers to provide. Part II articulates ways in which labor markets might fail to provide such cost-justified benefits. Market failures can arise from asymmetric information, asymmetric performance, or collective goods. Such failures can justify legal intervention, although policymakers must worry about the cure being worse than the disease. Additionally, even without market failure policymakers might intervene for paternalistic or distributive reasons. Part III separates out \"unequal bargaining power\" as an argument for legal intervention, and argues it does not describe a market failure and is generally an incoherent justification for legal intervention. Part IV applies this framework to evaluate legal erosions of the employment-at-will doctrine. Many courts have upheld claims that a termination breached an implied-in-fact promise not to dismiss a worker without cause. Sometimes, these claims can be justified as correcting problems of opportunism arising from asymmetric performance, problems that vary during the life cycle of a career employee. Contract protections generally are default rules, in that parties can reject them through explicit clauses in a contract. The article articulates the basic theories of default rules, which include mimic-the-market rules and penalty defaults. Other courts have recognized the tort of wrongful discharge in violation of public policy. This tort can be justified as an effort to have employers internalize third-party effects of discharges.","PeriodicalId":171240,"journal":{"name":"Yale Law School","volume":"236 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127662009","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Yale Law SchoolPub Date : 1900-01-01DOI: 10.36644/mlr.online.117.making
Jeremy Pilaar
{"title":"The Making of the Supreme Court Bar: How Business Created a Solicitor General for the Private Sector","authors":"Jeremy Pilaar","doi":"10.36644/mlr.online.117.making","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.36644/mlr.online.117.making","url":null,"abstract":"This Essay tells a simple but important story about power and the law: that of the rise of the modern Supreme Court bar. Since 1985, a small cadre of private attorneys has come to dominate Court advocacy. While the share of lawyers making their first arguments before the justices fell from 76% to 43% between 1980 and 2007, the fraction with ten or more arguments under their belt rose from 2% to 28%. Similarly, while litigators with five or more previous arguments were responsible for 5.8% of the case petitions granted in October Term 1980, that quotient soared to 55.5% by 2008.\u0000\u0000This elite bar disproportionately influences the Court's activity. Of the 17,000 lawyers who petitioned the Court from 2004 to 2012, the top sixty-six succeeded in getting their cases heard six times more often than their competitors. Interviews with former Supreme Court clerks, who read and summarize cert petitions for the justices, confirm that they place outsized weight on briefs filed by prominent advocates. Statistical analysis further shows that these lawyers significantly raise a party's chance of success on the merits.\u0000\u0000The bar's success on behalf of business has induced a form of \"docket capture.\" As legal scholar Richard Lazarus has observed, the bar has forced a surge in antitrust cases that has softened anti-monoppolistic doctrine and cleared the way for aggressive mergers. It has similarly managed to persuade the justices to limit punitive damages in mass tort litigation. The bar has therefore played a crucial role in making today's Court one of the most business friendly in the nation's history.","PeriodicalId":171240,"journal":{"name":"Yale Law School","volume":"415 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133957409","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}