Abstract
In this paper and its companion paper, Board & Chung (2021), we provide foundations for a model of unawareness that can be used to distinguish between what an agent is unaware of and what she simply does not know. At an informal level, this distinction plays a key role in a number of recent papers such as Tirole (2009) and Chung & Fortnow (2016). Here we provide a set-theoretic (i.e., non-linguistic) version of our framework. We use our object-based unawareness structures to investigate two applications. The first application provides a justification for the contra proferentem doctrine of contract interpretation, under which ambiguous terms in a contract are construed against the drafter. Our second application examines speculative trade.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1-43 |
| Number of pages | 43 |
| Journal | Journal of Mechanism and Institutional Design |
| Volume | 7 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Dec 2022 |
User-Defined Keywords
- Unawareness
- legal doctrine
- no-trade theorem