Revealing Options is a law-and-economics article by Lee Anne Fennell (University of Chicago Law School), published at 118 Harvard Law Review 1399 (2005). It addresses revealing options — the structural problem of how parties in legal and economic transactions expose their preferences, outside options, and reservation prices to each other. The work is property and contract theory at the foundational level; its applicability to AI-mediated negotiation, choice architecture in AI-deployed marketplaces, and AI-deployment transparency has emerged with the rise of agentic AI.
Author: Lee Anne Fennell (University of Chicago Law School) Citation: 118 Harvard Law Review 1399 (2005)
Summary of argument
The article frames revealing options as a structural problem: how parties in legal and economic transactions expose their preferences, outside options, and reservation prices to one another. It sits within property and contract theory.
Relevance to AI-mediated markets
The framework serves as a law-and-economics anchor for several lines of contemporary AI-mediated-markets analysis tracked on related pages.
Inside My Advanced Topics Class 7.3: Aristotle's Algorithm (Farahany, March 2026) discusses choice architecture and the Competition and Markets Authority's (CMA) three-category taxonomy in its Class 7.3; the revealing-options framework is the law-and-economics anchor for the choice-architecture analysis that source operationalizes.
Agentic Interactions — Imas, Lee, Misra (2025) reports that AI-mediated bargaining shows 16.5% higher variance than human-to-human bargaining, with prompt content as the only channel for principal heterogeneity — an empirical pattern consistent with what Fennell's framework predicts when revealing-options dynamics are altered by AI mediation.
The Coasean Singularity? Demand, Supply, and Market Design with AI Agents — Shahidi, Rusak, Manning, Fradkin, Horton (2025) applies a Coasean transaction-cost lens to AI agents, a contemporary economic framework that subsumes Fennell's law-and-economics approach.
Agentic AI concerns AI agents that systematically alter what options are revealed and to whom, for which Fennell's framework serves as an analytical anchor. Lee Anne Fennell (planned) would document Fennell as a law-and-economics voice. The article predates most contemporary AI material and has drawn renewed attention as agentic AI reshapes the revealing-options dynamic.
Relationships
- supports: Inside My Advanced Topics Class 7.3: Aristotle's Algorithm (Farahany, March 2026) (law-and-economics anchor), Agentic Interactions — Imas, Lee, Misra (2025) (empirical AI-mediated companion), Agentic AI
- related: The Coasean Singularity? Demand, Supply, and Market Design with AI Agents — Shahidi, Rusak, Manning, Fradkin, Horton (2025), Lee Anne Fennell (planned)
- instance-of: AI Safety Cases and Frameworks (law-and-economics foundational anchor)