Category Archives: Law and Economics
‘What if Producers Paid Us to Read Fine Print?’
Kelli Alces Williams, ‘Market Testing Boilerplate’, 74 Syracuse Law Review 229 (2024). One of my favorite cases from the perspective of consumer bargaining power is Boucher v Riner, which involved both my third-greatest physical fear (jumping out of a perfectly good flying airplane a few thousand feet above the ground) and my first-greatest jurisprudential concept […]
Oz Shy, ‘Whistleblowers and Product Safety’
ABSTRACT I analyze the economic value of whistleblowers for product safety. Only workers can observe cost-cutting production processes that increase the likelihood of defective products that inflict damage to the buyer. The possible emergence of whistleblowers incentivize the manufacturer to avoid cost-cutting production if the regulator reacts and forces the manufacturer to reproduce. This incentive […]
Gindis and Hodgson, ‘The Legal Nature of the Firm’
ABSTRACT In 2023 The Economist noted that a ‘realistic theory of the firm was in prospect’ in the 1990s but lamented that ‘three decades on, it is no closer’. Indeed, prevailing contractual theories of the firm, inherited from Ronald Coase and others, are unable to account for what Bengt Holmström described as one of the […]
Bix and Parisi, ‘Fairness in Contract Law: An Impossibility Theorem’
ABSTRACT Scholars have long debated whether contract law should prioritize maximizing efficiency and social welfare or, instead, prioritize justice, fairness and other deontological values. The debate is partly prescriptive (what should we try to do with contract law rules) and partly conceptual (how should we understand contract law). This chapter surveys central positions in this […]
Sergio Mittlaender, ‘The Experimental Method in the Study of Contract Law’
ABSTRACT This chapter presents the experimental method and its application to contract law and contract law & economics. With its roots in psychology and its expansion in economics, experiments evolved to identify causal relationships in highly controlled environments, but they are also capable of providing empirical evidence on people’s perceptions, opinions, and reactions when confronted […]
Stephen Crosswell, ‘The Common Law and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations’
ABSTRACT Adam Smith developed a theory of the ‘four-stage’ advancement of society as England was entering the Industrial Revolution (the fourth stage) and becoming the leading commercial centre in the world. That transition was raising new and novel legal issues that required legal solutions more complex than the earlier three stages in human advancement, as […]
Cassandra Burke Robertson, ‘Optimizing the Litigation Funding Ecosystem’
ABSTRACT Litigation finance has become increasingly prevalent in the United States, yet its regulation remains fragmented and contested. This Article challenges the conventional wisdom that uniform federal regulation is the solution to the issues posed by litigation funding. Instead, it argues that targeted improvements to the existing legal ecosystem can enhance predictability and fairness without […]
Dinkel and Lingwall, ‘Legal Origin and Emulation of Trade Secret Protections: A Cross-National Empirical Study’
ABSTRACT Why do countries enact stronger legal protections for trade secrets? Existing research on other types of intellectual property (IP) rights suggests at least three potential mechanisms. First, more powerful countries, such as the United States, coerce other countries into implementing stronger IP rights by threatening to enact trade sanctions against them. Second, countries agree […]
Michael Carroll, ‘Tailoring Intellectual Property Rights to Reduce Uniformity Cost’
ABSTRACT This chapter focuses on solutions to a second-order problem that arises with the creation of intellectual property (IP) rights – the problem of uniformity cost. The incentives created by one-size-fits-all patents and copyrights often are misaligned with those necessary to attract the optimal level of investment of capital and creative labor. Uniformity cost is […]
Gregory Mitchell, ‘Small World Behavioral Law and Economics’
ABSTRACT The history of public policy is littered with failures to solve large-scale social problems using interventions derived from behavioral science theories. In contrast, numerous small-scale problems have been solved through applications of behavioral science. This difference in outcomes reflects a mismatch between methods and aspirations. Behavioral science research relies on small world studies to […]