The DOI matches its Crossref record.
Incomplete Written Contracts: Undescribable States of Nature
Abstract
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.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cited by
Firms, Contracts, and Financial Structure
Hart, O. (1995) · doi:10.1093/0198288816.001.0001 · Cited by 4,672
Reputations, Relationships, and Contract Enforcement
MacLeod, W. B. (2007) · Journal of Economic Literature · doi:10.1257/jel.45.3.595 · Cited by 384
Gong, Y., Shenkar, O., Luo, Y., & Nyaw, M. (2007) · Strategic Management Journal · doi:10.1002/smj.626 · Cited by 192
Aragones, E., Gilboa, I., Postlewaite, A., & Schmeidler, D. (2005) · American Economic Review · doi:10.1257/000282805775014308 · Cited by 123
Axtell, R. (2018) · Handbook of Computational Economics · doi:10.1016/bs.hescom.2018.05.001 · Cited by 13
Metadata
- Authors
- Anderlini, L., & Felli, L.
- Venue
- The Quarterly Journal of Economics
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press (OUP)
- Published
- 1994-11-01
- Volume
- 109
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 1085-1124
- ISSN
- 0033-5533 (ISSN-L)
- 1531-4650
- OpenAlex
- W2066957297
- Cited by
- 162
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 18.75
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Incomplete Written Contracts: Undescribable States of Nature. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.2307/2118357
- The paper
- Anderlini, L., & Felli, L. (1994). Incomplete Written Contracts: Undescribable States of Nature. The Quarterly Journal of Economics. https://doi.org/10.2307/2118357
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
