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We study a contracting model with unforeseen contingencies in which the court is an active player. Ex ante, the contracting parties cannot include the risky unforeseen contingencies in the contract they draw up. Ex post, the court observes whether an unforeseen contingency occurred and decides whether to void or uphold the contract. If the contract is voided by the court, the parties can renegotiate a new agreement ex post. There are two effects of a court that voids contracts. The parties' incentives to undertake relationship-specific investment are reduced, and the parties enjoy greater insurance against the unforeseen contingencies that the ex ante contract cannot account for. In this context, we fully characterize the optimal decision rule for the court. The behavior of the optimal court is determined by the trade-off between the need for incentives and the gains from insurance that voiding in some circumstances offers to the agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We incorporate campaign contributions in the citizen-candidate model of representative democracy with endogenous lobbying of Felli and Merlo (2006). In equilibrium, lobbies contribute to the electoral campaign of candidates whose policy preferences are aligned with their own. In the event that their preferred candidate does not win the election, lobbies also transfer resources to elected politicians with opposed preferences to induce policy compromise. On the other hand, lobbies never make post electoral transfers to winning candidates whose electoral campaign they supported. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We develop a model of undescribable events. Examples of events that are well understood by economic agents but are prohibitively difficult to describe in advance abound in real life. This notion has also pervaded a substantial amount of economic literature. Undescribable events in our model are understood by economic agents—their consequences and probabilities are known—but are such that every finite description of such events necessarily leaves out relevant features that have a non-negligible impact on the parties’ expected utilities. We illustrate our results using a simple coinsurance problem as a backdrop. When the only uncertainty faced by the two agents is an undescribable event the optimal finite coinsurance contract is no contract at all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we present a citizen-candidate model of representative democracy with endogenous lobbying. We find that lobbying induces policy compromise and always affects equilibrium policy outcomes. In particular, even though the policy preferences of lobbies are relatively extreme, lobbying biases the outcome of the political process toward the center of the policy space, and extreme policies cannot emerge in equilibrium. Moreover, in equilibrium, not all lobbies participate in the policy-making process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the extent to which ex ante transaction costs may lead to failures of the Coase Theorem. In particular we identify the basic ‘hold-up problem’ that arises whenever the parties to a Coasian negotiation have to pay ex ante costs for the negotiation to take place. We then show that a ‘Coasian solution’ to this problem is not available: a Coasian solution typically entails a negotiation about the payment of the costs associated with the future negotiation, which in turn is associated with a fresh set of ex ante costs, and hence a new hold-up problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the extent to which the incompleteness of contracts can be attributed to their formal nature the form, usually written, that contracts are required to take to be enforceable in a court of law by legal prescription, common practice, or simply the contracting parties' will We model the formal nature of state-contingent contracts as the requirement that the mapping from states of the world to the corresponding outcomes must be of an algorithmic nature. It is shown that such algorithmic nature, although by itself is not enough to generate incomplete contracts, when paired with a similar restriction on the contracting parties' selection process yields endogenously incomplete optimal contracts

This section discusses the changes in the format of "The Economic Journal" beginning July 2004.