Lambda the Ultimate

An important question in programming languages seems to be how to optimize the expression of common cases or how to allow writing programs in you-know-what-I-mean style -- some tools for that are default or implicit parameters, implicit conversions, inheritance. They all can be explained in terms of some kind of merge operation that takes some base information and combines that with user-provided information. All these features make languages more practical and more complex.

Are there any papers or projects that specifically explore defaults, implicits and inheritance as related topics?