Lanterna Rally

Author: Aikaterini Florou

Publisher:

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13:

The relationship between international investment treaties and the underlying contracts remains a highly disputed matter in international investment law. This thesis explored the contract-treaty interaction by using the renegotiation of regulatory contracts in the sector of energy infrastructure as a natural experiment, with a particular emphasis on the arbitral disputes that arose from the Argentine crisis. It deployed to this end an original analytical framework drawing from transaction cost economics and relational contract theory. The result of the novel combination of these two analytical frameworks is the construction of an interpretative methodology that takes an integrated approach to the two instruments - the contract and the overarching treaty - in a way that achieves a more sustainable balance between the competing public and private interests. In particular, the thesis rests on three arguments: the first is the relational-contract nature of dynamic treaty standards, which require the long-term cooperation of the parties. The second is the status of these vague standards as default rules complemented by the provisions of the underlying contracts, which are also relational, and act as gap-fillers. The last, normative argument is that the relationship between these (default) treaty rules and the (gap-filling) contractual provisions should be determined by transaction cost economics, and specifically the goal of economizing on the transaction costs of bounded rationality and opportunism when and interpreting relational treaty standards.