Background In times of financial hardship, making innovative treatments affordable for society, accessible for patients and profitable for pharmaceutical companies is a challenge. Reimbursement is often threatened by uncertainties about the financial impact or evidence for a treatment. A contractual agreement between the payer and pharmaceutical company can link reimbursement to financial thres...

Thinking about contingencies, designing covenants and seeing through their implications is costly. Parties to a contract accordingly use heuristics and leave it incomplete. The paper develops a model of bounded rationality and examines its consequences for contractual design. It is argued that cognition is a natural source of adverse selection in contractual relationships, that contracts may be...

This paper examines whether historical wealth distributions can affect long run output and distribution despite rational saving behavior and the absence of any technological nonconvexities or externalities. We consider a model of equilibrium short period financial contracts, where poor agents face credit constraints owing to moral hazard and limited liability, and principals and agents are rand...

Advancing upon taxonomical research on interfirm alliances, we investigate the design of entrepreneurial firms’ alliances in more fine-grained terms by focusing on the specific contractual provisions that firms negotiate into their alliance contracts. Drawing upon transaction cost arguments, we examine the determinants of the contractual complexity of collaborative agreements in the German tele...

It has recently been argued by a number of writers that the evolutionary theory of the firm is a genuine theoretical rival to the contractual theory of the firm. This paper presents a reconstruction of the evolutionary theory of the firm. A taxonomy developed by the Polish philosopher Krajewski is then utilized for the purpose of the discussing the relations between the evolutionary and the con...

This Essay argues that the “psychological contract”—the parties’ respective, subjective, idiosyncratic understandings of their contractual obligations to one another—is important and predictable. The common law of contract tells us how to discern the legal promise. By contrast, the “psychological contract” describes how the parties themselves understand their agreements, an inquiry that refers ...