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Complete contract

The notion of a complete contract plays an important role in contract theory. If the parties to an agreement could specify their respective rights and duties for all possible future states of the world, their contract would be complete. There would be no gaps in the terms of the contract. Because it would be prohibitively expensive to right a complete contract, contracts in the real world are usually incomplete. When a dispute arises and the case falls into a gap in the contract, the courts must step in and fill in the gap. The idea of a complete contract is closely related to the notion of Default rules, e.g. legal rules that will fill the gap in a contract in the absence of a agreed upon provision.

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