Contract Structure for Joint Production: Risk and Ambiguity under Compensatory Damages

We develop a model in which the parties to a joint production project have a choice of specifying contractual performance in terms of actions or deliverables. Penalties for noncompliance are not specified; rather, they are left to the courts under the legal doctrine of compensatory damages. We analyze three scenarios of increasing uncertainty: full information, where implications of partner actions are known; risk, where implications can be probabilistically quantified; and ambiguity, where implications cannot be so quantified. Under full information, action requirements dominate: they always induce the maximum economic value. This dominance vanishes in the risk scenario. Under ambiguity, deliverables specifications can interact with compensatory damages to create a form of “ambiguity insurance,” where ambiguity aversion is assuaged in a way that increases the aggregate, perceived value of the project. This effect does not arise under contracts specifying action requirements. Thus, deliverables contracts ...

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