Gastón de los Reyes (George Washington University: Business) – KCON Scholarship Spotlight

The conference is over but the scholarship lives on. This is one of a series of posts highlighting several KCON XII presenters who graciously provided me with abstracts or summaries of their presentations.

Not from guile, but from entitlement: Lawful opportunism haunts the cracks in contracts

Gastón de los Reyes and Kirsten Martin (George Washington University School of Business)

Abstract (KCON Presentation by Gastón de los Reyes)

Opportunistic acts are not all cut from the same cloth. While the blatant opportunism that results from “self-interest seeking with guile” is widely acknowledged, the lawful opportunism that Williamson paints as the bane of hybrid governance remains obscure and little understood. We examine the construct of lawful opportunism and empirically explore its connection to the known and studied contracting behaviors of blatant opportunism and cooperation. Using a series of contracting vignette surveys, we demonstrate that lawful opportunism is a theoretically distinct intended behavior across a variety of contracting scenarios. A contractor’s sense of entitlement, we find, is the primary driver of intended lawful opportunism. In contrast, and perhaps surprisingly, the more a contractor views the exchange in economic terms, the less likely they are to act with blatant opportunism. The study has implications for the study of contracting and hybrid governance across disciplines and for prescription to contracting parties.