Of course, the Coase theorem teaches that all contractable legal regimes, such as property, single-chooser, and dual-chooser rules, will allocate entitlements equally efficiently when transaction costs are nil.
The greater transparency of the costs and discipline generated in hedging particular exposures in external reinsurance markets renders them more contractable than the costs of operating a cross-country corporate structure and subjecting its managers to a governance system strong enough to control incentive conflict in the consolidated enterprise.
The overarching goal is to show that these two literatures are related, or, as the authors put it, "the particular form of imperfections that are present in the contracting environment can have major implications for economic outcomes." The central result of the paper is that employment contracts often are robust with respect to aggregate shocks only if the effort choices of both the worker and the firm are verifiable and contractable. The paper is exceptionally clear and insightful; even though the model is simple, the authors can analyze a surprisingly large number of special cases.
(1997), the government may need to manage prisons itself to the extent that the quality of prison services is not contractable and that private prison operators have an incentive to under-supply quality in order to minimize costs.[34] This does not imply that the government should own the prisons, however, for the government may lease prisons that were built and are owned by the private sector.
However, effort is something that is almost impossible to verify in court, and so is not explicitly contractable. This creates a moral hazard in that the Seller may promise e*, but then shirk.