The Centre for Corporate Reputation co-hosted two days of presentations and discussions exploring the dynamics of relational contracts.
The symposium included some of the leading thinkers in this space and a number of outstanding practitioners who have a particularly acute understanding of how to navigate successfully both legal and extra-legal norms. Participants in this two-day event included Oliver Hart, winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2016, and Ugur Sahin, CEO of BioNTech, creators of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.
The past decades have seen a burgeoning interest in the subject from both economists and legal scholars writing in the law and economics tradition. The aim of the two-day online gathering was to further our understanding of relational contracts by bringing the business and legal people who draft, perform, and enforce them into a conversation with leading academics to see what theory can learn from real-world practices and what the real-world can learn from theory.
The event was jointly sponsored by the Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation, World Commerce and Contracting (formerly the IACCM), The Stigler Center and the Becker Friedman Institute for Economics at the University of Chicago, and the Workshop on Relational Contracts, and we are extremely grateful to Lisa Bernstein, Wilson Dickinson Professor of Law at Chicago Law School, for organising such a brilliant event.
