Organizations and Markets

Behavioral Contract Theory

12 December 2014 at 1:08 pm Peter G. Klein 2 comments

| Peter Klein |

The December 2014 issue of the Journal of Economic Literature contains a nice review article on “Behavioral Contract Theory” by Botond Köszegi. Abstract below, ungated version here.

This review provides a critical survey of psychology-and-economics (“behavioral-economics”) research in contract theory. First, I introduce the theories of individual decision making most frequently used in behavioral contract theory, and formally illustrate some of their implications in contracting settings. Second, I provide a more comprehensive (but informal) survey of the psychology-and-economics work on classical contract-theoretic topics: moral hazard, screening, mechanism design, and incomplete contracts. I also summarize research on a new topic spawned by psychology and economics, exploitative contracting, that studies contracts designed primarily to take advantage of agent mistakes.

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