American Law and Economics Review Advance Access originally published online on July 28, 2006
American Law and Economics Review 2006 8(3):523-561; doi:10.1093/aler/ahl011
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Incomplete Contracts with Asymmetric Information: Exclusive Versus Optional Remedies
Northwestern University School of Law
Robinson College of Business, Georgia State University
Send correspondence to: Ronen Avraham, Northwestern University School of Law, 357 East Chicago Avenue, Chicago, IL 60611; E-mail: r-avraham{at}law.northwestern.edu.
Scholars have been debating for years the comparative advantage of damages and specific performance. Yet, most work has compared a single remedy contract to another single remedy contract. But contract law provides the non-breaching party with a variety of optional remedies to choose from in case of a breach, and parties themselves regularly write contracts which provide such options. In this article, we start filling this gap by studying multi-remedy contracts. Specifically, we compare a contract that grants the non-breaching party an option to choose between liquidated damages and specific performance with an exclusive remedy contract, which restricts the non-breaching partys remedy to liquidated damages only.