In even the most market-oriented economies, most economic transactions occur not in markets but inside managed organizations, particularly business firms. Organizational economics seeks to understand the nature and workings of such organizations and their impact on economic performance. This landmark book assembles the leading figures in organizational economics to present the first comprehensive view of both the current state of research in this fast-emerging field and where it might be headed.

	The Handbook of Organizational Economics surveys the major theories, evidence, and methods used in the field. It displays the breadth of topics in organizational economics, including the roles of individuals and groups in organizations, organizational structures and processes, the boundaries of the firm, contracts between and within firms, and more.

	The defining book on the subject, The Handbook of Organizational Economics is essential reading for researchers and students looking to understand this emerging field in economics.

	
		Presents the first comprehensive treatment of organizational economics
	
		Features contributions by leaders in the field
	
		Unifies and extends existing literatures
	
		Describes theoretical and empirical methods used today

The Handbook of Organizational Economics

Alternatives to the archetypal model of full-time regular employment are now both prevalent and wide-ranging. Over a fifth of U.S. workers, and even more globally, now perform economic work under arrangements that differ from full-time regular employment. Yet most of our management and social science notions about economic work are based on the full-time employment model. We know relatively little about the operation and consequences of alternative arrangements in part because while these arrangements vary considerably, they are commonly grouped together for research purposes using existing classification systems. We outline an inclusive classification system that distinguishes clearly between employment and its alternatives. It also distinguishes among the alternatives themselves by grouping work arrangements into categories that share common properties and that are distinct from each other in ways that matter for practice and for research. The classification system is based on distinctions about the sou...

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Classifying Work in the New Economy

A central task underlying many of the activities of attorneys is inferring the legal consequences of a given set of facts. GREBE (GeneratoR of Exemplar-Based Explanations) is a system that uses detailed knowledge of the facts and reasoning of specific past cases, together with legal rules and common-sense knowledge, to determine and justify the legal consequences of new cases. GREBE can apply either rule-based reasoning or case-based reasoning to goals at any level of its analysis. GREBE uses an approach to case-based reasoning in which new cases are compared with the smallest collections of precedent facts that justified an individual inference step in the explanation of a precedent case. This enables knowledge of the interactions among individual inference steps in a precedent to be used in case comparison. Case comparison is also assisted by an expressive semantic network representation of case facts. Techniques are presented for retrieving and comparing cases represented in this formalism. GREBE's output is a memorandum that justifies a legal conclusion in terms of the applicable precedents and legal rules.

Building explanations from rules and structured cases

An Overview of the Current ART, the Dilemmas They Surface, and the Role of DLPBA in the Positive Law

The last few decades have witnessed dramatic changes affecting the institutions of family and parenthood. If, in the past, the classic family was defined sociologically as a pair of heterosexual parents living together under one roof along with their children, different sociological changes have led to a rapid and extreme transformation in the definitions of family, marital relations, parenthood, and the relationship between parents and children. Dr Yehezkel Margalit explores whether and to what extent there is room, legally and ethically, for the use of modern contractual devices and doctrines to privately regulate the establishment of legal parentage. This book offers intentional parenthood as the most appropriate and flexible normative doctrine for resolving the dilemmas which have surfaced in the field of determining legal parentage. By using the certainty of contract law, determining the legal status of parenthood will be seen as the best method to sort out ambiguities and assure both parental and children rights.

Determining Legal Parentage: Between Family Law and Contract Law

The Development of the Employment at Will Rule

When one struggles against ancient concepts-and their labels-it seems almost impossible to avoid being misunderstood, even by very perceptive people.1 Ian R. Macneil INTRODUCTION This Symposium, commemorating Ian Macneil's four decades as a contract law teacher and scholar, is filled with irony. All of the participants recognize the immense contribution Macneil has made to contracts scholarship, but only a few of us could be considered enthusiastic devotees of relational contract theory as articulated by Macneil. Even more ironically, while Macneil's work is widely cited, the level of engagement with its details has not been commensurate with its contribution, and the work is frequently misread by scholars. Moreover, Macneil's theory has had a limited direct impact on contract law as determined by the courts and legislatures. Finally-and this is an irony I would like to highlight in this Article-despite the limited engagement with Macneil's work, there have been significant developments in the law itself that are roughly parallel to the approaches he has suggested. In this Article, I want to situate Macneil's relational contract theory within the story of the development of contract law, to describe the parallel developments in the law, and to draw out some of the implications of the theory and the developments. Macneil's scholarship inhabits the broader realm of social theory as well as the narrower realm of contract law, but it is only the narrower realm that I consider here. At each stage of the story I will consider three issues about the version of contract law under discussion. First, what is the scope or structure of the field? What does it contain, and how is its subject matter defined in relation to related fields? Second, what method does the field use? What tools of analysis does it employ to decide cases? Third, what is the field's substance? What are its core principles and purposes? I. CLASSICAL AND NEOCLASSICAL CONTRACT LAW Relational contract is one of the latest steps in the scholarly project of responding to the inadequacies of classical contract law, so the appropriate starting point is the familiar story of classical law,2 along the three dimensions of scope, method, and substance. The scope of contract law as conceived by classical scholars and judges was very broad. Classical contract law was the realm of consensual relations, as distinguished from the nonconsensual relations governed by tort law. All consensual relations of any kind were within the realm of contract. A single body of law could govern such a wide range of transactions because of its method. The classical method involved the application of relatively clear rules of legal doctrine, typically framed at a high level of generality and presenting dichotomous choices. The scope and method served the substance; as the realm of consensual relations, contract law simply set ground rules for self-maximizing private ordering. By the time of its enshrinement in Williston's treatise 3 and the original Restatement of Contracts, classical contract law already was under attack. The essence of the criticism of classical law and its reconstruction through succeeding scholarly generations was contextualization; the more classical contract law was placed in context, the less sense it made. The contextualization took two forms, one internal and the other external to the body of law itself.4 The internal criticism compared the ostensible rules with the results in the cases, finding that the rules did not explain the cases and that no formal, general rules ever could. The external criticism situated the rules in the world of actual contracting practice, arguing that the law's approach needed to be changed to serve the objectives of contract law. Neoclassical contract law-the law of the Uniform Commercial Code, the Restatement (Second) of Contracts, and today-is the product of this criticism. …

Relational Contract Theory in Context

The Jurisprudence of Classification

Promissory Estoppel and Judicial Method

This article uses relational contract theory to discuss the standard to be applied to evaluate the behavior of insurance companies in first-party bad faith cases. The article first briefly summarizes relational contract theory and describes the insurance contract as a prime example of a relational contract. It then describes the law of bad faith in first-party insurance cases-cases in which a policyholder alleges that the insurance company has violated the duty of good faith and fair dealing that is present in every contract and intensified in insurance contracts. The most widely adopted standard for bad faith is the “fairly debatable” test, under which an insurance company is liable only if it lacks a reasonable basis for denying benefits of the policy and knows or recklessly disregards the lack of a reasonable basis for denying the claim. Therefore, where a claim is “fairly debatable,” the company is held to have not acted in bad faith. Moreover, courts have created a procedural elaboration on the fairly debatable test, under which a policyholder who could not have established as a matter of law a right to summary judgment on the substantive claim is not entitled to assert a claim for an insurer’s bad-faith refusal to pay the claim. The article argues that from the perspective of relational contract theory, the fairly debatable rule and the summary judgment elaboration are deeply flawed. Instead, negligence is a better rule because it recognizes that the relationship between the company and policyholder is one of security, in which the company has adopted a role of acting not as an adverse party to its insured, but in a responsible manner to give the insured the benefits it reasonably expects. A negligence rule also recognizes and deters the possibility of insurer opportunism in the area of claim practices. The rule also serves the broader social role of the insurance relation in providing indemnity and security for large numbers of people.This article is a contribution to a symposium in memory of Professor Richard Speidel.

Jay M. Feinman

Papers

The Development of the Employment at Will Rule

Relational Contract Theory in Context

The Jurisprudence of Classification

Promissory Estoppel and Judicial Method

The Insurance Relationship as Relational Contract and the 'Fairly Debatable' Rule for First-Party Bad Faith