The Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) has eliminated a need for consideration for firm offers between merchants in some limited circumstances.
In relation to certain types of asset (principally land), in many countries an option must be registered in order to be binding on a third party.
Once the promisee performed completely, consideration was satisfied and a contract was formed and only the promisor was bound to his promise.
The modern view of how option contracts apply now provides some security to the promisee in the above scenario.
The promisor impliedly promises not to revoke the offer and the promisee impliedly promises to furnish complete performance, but as the name suggests, the promisee still retains the "option" of not completing performance.
[10] As has been pointed out by Tirole (1999), this debate is at the center of the discussions about the foundations of the incomplete contracts theory.
[11] In a laboratory experiment, Hoppe and Schmitz (2011) have confirmed that non-renegotiable option contracts can indeed solve the hold-up problem.
The latter observation can be explained by Hart and Moore’s (2008) idea that an important role of contracts is to serve as reference points.