Abstract
Abstract Concepts of pre-contractual good faith, culpa in contrahendo and promissory estoppel have received increasing attention from legal scholars, law makers and practitioners. Those concepts appear as fundamental in all civil and common law systems and yet as ones whose nature and contents are still ill-defined. Moreover, recent doctrinal developments in Chinese and in the modernized French Law of contracts call for further systematic assessment. This paper fills the gap by providing an evaluation of the English, French, German and Chinese law of contracts. It offers a comparative law and economics evaluation and argues that those duties serve as a multi-functional judicial mechanism enabling ex post screening between socially desirable and undesirable behavior. They set the behavioral standards and serve as deterrence mechanisms that attempt to discourage certain socially undesirable behaviour in the course of the negotiations. The paper seeks to find out what new light the comparative law and economic analysis can shed on the issues of pre-contractual good faith, culpa in contrahendo and promissory estoppel to help to clarify it.
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