契约经济学: 起源、演进及其本土化发展

面临交易成本问题、不确定性和风险约束,现代契约设计的核心是缔约方权利与责任的治理结构安排;有限理性、交易成本、未来不确定性及风险所引致的理性不完全,不可避免地导致了契约不完全,而契约不完全导致的剩余权利与交易匹配是实现经济效率的必要条件。契约经济学本土化发展的不足与挑战是交易费用度量困难、风险对称配置机理模糊、契约履约机制研究薄弱和非正式规则在契约自我实施中的作用机理研究匮乏。如何通过正式和非正式制度协调安排,降低契约实施成本,是中国市场经济实现健康有序发展的重要途径,也是值得研究者重视的重要课题。

Contract Economics: Origin,Evolution and Its Development in China

Based on a systematic analysis on the evolution of contract economics, combining with China’s status quo of contract economics research, this paper aims to explore the issues over its application of contract economics in China. Beginning with the evolution of the contract conception, an analysis on the causes of incomplete contract is followed by an examination on the issue of incentive mechanism design under information constraints. Having originated in the religious thoughts of the rights-based contract, the evolution of the connotation of the contract has experienced a transformation from the debtor-creditor agreement in legal contracts, to the norms and informal arrangements in political contracts, and then to the paradigm of transaction analysis in economic contracts. The contract had also become an important category in economic research from the ″outdated legal concept″ in the 1870s. The economic contract lies in taking a step towards repairing the paradigm of the general equilibrium in neoclassical economics, which can be broadly divided into formal and informal contracts, explicit and implicit contracts. Formal contracts and informal contracts tend to be parallel in practice. The choice of contract arrangement is essentially determined by the signing and enforcing costs. The economics of contracts is broadly divided into three main branches: principal-agent theory, transaction cost theory and the property rights theory. These three branches provide explanations for the contract arrangements from the perspective of symmetric allocation of rights, economization of transaction costs and internalization of externalities and risks, respectively. Modern contract is the governance structure regarding contracting parties’ rights and responsibility under the constraint of transaction costs, uncertainty and risks. Bonded rationality and incomplete rationality inevitably lead to contract incompleteness. The matching of exchange and residual rights in incomplete contract is the prerequisite for the achievement of economic efficiency. Comprehensive research of economics of contracts have been conducted in China covering the issues of contract incentive mechanism, connotation of transaction cost, risk allocation and property rights distribution in incomplete contracts. Localization and further development of the economics of contract is facing with the difficulty in the measurement of transaction cost, the lack of research on contract enforcement mechanism, and function of trust and reputation in self-enforcement contract. A market economy is in essence a contract economy, the contract is the institutional foundation to ensure that the market transaction is predictable, stable and reliable More attentions should be given to the issue how to ensure the implementation of the contract through the coordination of formal and informal institutional arrangements, which is the major obstacle to the healthy and orderly development of China’s market economy.