Contract theory as a unified discipline (On the occasion of the Russian publication of “Contract Theory” by Patrick Bolton and Mathias Dewatripont)

Abstract

The article is devoted to the Russian edition in 2019 of perhaps the most important textbook on the theory of contracts in the last twenty-thirty years. From the very moment of its publication, in 2005, “Contract theory” by Bolton and Dewatripont has become the definitive English text on the topic for graduate students in all leading economic universities of the world. The translation of the book into Russian is an important event, since this textbook is unique: it provides the most general systemic overview of the huge field of contemporary economics, called contract theory, and which has evolved greatly for the last 30 years. The article gives the general overview of the book and briefly describes the evolution of the theory of contracts and general approach to the analysis of exchange of goods and services in the economy on the basis of this book and other literature. The article focuses on reviewing general ideas and concepts introduced by contract theory and the main models and methods that have made this domain a unified science.