Econ Papers Daily / 期刊论文
合同救济与搜寻努力
Contract Remedies and Search Efforts
摘要
Contract theorists routinely assume that opportunities for efficient breach are exogeneous. This prompts the conventional approach to contract remedies, according to which expectation damages are preferred to the disgorgement rule: when ex-post renegotiations are unfeasible, the former regime facilitates efficient breach while the latter deters it. In this paper, I offer a simple model in which two parties to a contract can exert search efforts to locate better contractual alternatives. The endogeneity of efficient-breach opportunities gives rise to a novel outlook on the choice of remedies for a breach of contract. Specifically, this paper opts out of the expectation damages versus disgorgement distinction to offer two new remedies: conditional disgorgement, which ignores each party's breaching or non-breaching status and grants the breach surplus to the party who has located a better contractual alternative; and partial disgorgement, which divides the breach surplus by bestowing a fixed, predetermined share upon each party. I show that these remedies are generally superior to extant regimes in terms of inducing optimal search efforts. The underlying intuition is that under the proposed rules, each party is better off with being either the breaching or the non-breaching party, and therefore, is incentivized to carry out both selfish and cooperative search. This paper likewise makes the inner comparison between conditional and partial disgorgement, deriving conditions for the optimality of each rule. Finally, it discusses the results in light of existing contract doctrine and commercial practice.
中文摘要
合同理论家通常假设有效违约的机会是外生的。这促使了合同救济的传统方法，即预期损害赔偿优于返还规则：当事后重新谈判不可行时，前者促进有效违约，而后者则阻碍之。本文提出一个简单模型，其中合同双方可以付出搜寻努力以寻找更好的合同替代方案。有效违约机会的内生性为违约救济的选择提供了新的视角。具体而言，本文超越了预期损害赔偿与返还规则的传统区分，提出了两种新的救济方式：条件性返还，它忽略各方的违约或非违约状态，将违约盈余授予找到更好合同替代方案的一方；以及部分返还，通过向各方分配固定的预定份额来分割违约盈余。我证明，在诱导最优搜寻努力方面，这些救济方式通常优于现有制度。其基本直觉是，在提议的规则下，无论是作为违约方还是非违约方，各方都能获益，因此有动力进行既利己又合作的搜寻。本文同样对条件性返还与部分返还进行了内部比较，推导出每种规则最优性的条件。最后，结合现有合同理论与商业实践对结果进行了讨论。