Department of Economics, UCSD

We explore the conceptual basis of "verifiability" by explicitly modeling the process of evidence production in contractual relationships of complete information. Evidence is represented by documents, on the submission of which an enforcement authority conditions transfers between the contracting parties. Our analysis includes the opportunity for parties to engage in side-dealing and renegotiation during the enforcement phase. The central contracting problem involves determining whether a contract can be designed to induce given transfers as a function of the outcome of productive interaction. We study how this objective is constrained by the need to motivate parties to disclose documents during the enforcement phase. We prove the Full Disclosure Principle, justifying constraining attention to equilibria in which all documents are disclosed in every contingency. We also obtain insights on the implications of "positive" and "negative" evidence and we briefly discuss the relevance of our results to the design of legal institutions.