French contract law distinguishes between contracts “to do” and contracts “to give,” with damages as the normal remedy for the former and specific performance as normal remedy for the latter. A contract to design an aircraft is a contract to do. A contract to sell an aircraft is a contract to give. A contract to build an aircraft to a certain design, and then to transfer ownership of it, is a contract both to do and to give. The distinction corresponds to the commonsense distinction between contracts for services and contracts for conveyance of land or chattels, with an intermediate area where goods are to be made in accordance with customized terms.

Steven Shavell has built a formal economic model of contract remedies that suggests that the French solution is the appropriate one, though he notes that the common law (damages as the general remedy) and German law (specific performance as the general remedy) in practice reach much the same solution by different routes, at least in the most important cases. Shavell's mathematical approach will make his paper impenetrable to most lawyers, yet its core is really fairly simple and analytically not very different from the informal models used by Kronman and Schwartz.

Shavell considers the case of a buyer who after contract must undertake some fixed reliance (to abstract from a difficult problem) and a seller who is subject to uncertainty about the cost of his contractual promise, only learning about the true cost of performance after the buyer has relied.