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Incomplete Contracts

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Abstract

The past decade has witnessed a growing interest in contract theories of various kinds. This development is partly a reaction to our rather thorough understanding of the standard theory of perfect competition under complete markets, but more importantly to the resulting realization that this paradigm is insufficient to accommodate a number of important economic phenomena. Studying in more detail the process of contracting – particularly its hazards and imperfections – is a natural way to enrich and amend the idealized competitive model in an attempt to fit the evidence better.

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Hart, O. (2018). Incomplete Contracts. In: The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95189-5_694

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