Category Archives: Law and Economics
Hylton and Kim, ‘The Economics of Appeals’
ABSTRACT This paper examines the incentive to appeal. While existing literature focuses on appeals as a mechanism for correcting errors or controlling judicial incentives, we explore individual litigants’ incentives in civil and criminal cases by modeling the opportunity cost of the trial court judgment for litigants when deciding whether to appeal. In civil trials, this […]
Friedman and Adler, ‘Moral Capitalism: A Biblical Perspective’
ABSTRACT We argue that laissez-faire capitalism in its current form is unsustainable, and that if it is to survive, we need to develop a new moral capitalism. An underexplored source on the subject that may provide insight into current difficulties is the Hebrew Bible. We explicate four basic principles of the Hebrew Bible and Talmud […]
Ella Corren, ‘Privacy Law’s Reality Check’
ABSTRACT The past decade has seen an unprecedented wave of regulatory activity aimed at governing the information economy, with privacy, antitrust, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) at the forefront. Yet despite a surge of lawmaking and enforcement – especially in the United States and the European Union – persistent concerns over the harms of digital markets […]
Ayouni, Friehe and Gabuthy, ‘Ignorance Is Bliss? Information Avoidance in Litigation’
ABSTRACT This paper examines defendants’ choice to learn about their fault level and its impact on litigation outcomes. Fault-level information is free of cost and has a positive instrumental value for defendants. However, identity concerns can induce defendants to avoid the information. Information avoidance favors settlement relative to trial. Conversely, reputation concerns tend to increase […]
Lynn LoPucki, ‘Against Limited Liability’
ABSTRACT Limited liability is an entity characteristic that excuses the entity’s investors from liability for damages caused by the entity’s wrongful acts. Although prominent scholars have referred to limited liability as ‘one of mankind’s greatest ideas’, limited tort liability is a costly economic mistake. Limited liability channels investment away from projects that increase social wealth […]
Gregory Dickinson, ‘The Vanishing Economics of Trade Secret Value’
ABSTRACT Trade secret law is built around a simple economic fact. Information can yield supracompetitive returns only when prospective competitors are prevented from using it – as when it is kept secret from them. A successful trade secret plaintiff must therefore show that the alleged trade secret derives ‘independent economic value’ from not being generally […]
FE Guerra-Pujol, ‘Coase’s Fable’
ABSTRACT This paper is a sequel to two of my previous works: my law review article ‘Coase’s Parable’ (Guerra-Pujol 2023) and my game theory paper ‘Modelling the Coase Theorem’ (Guerra-Pujol 2013). Here, I make three new contributions to the literature on Coase: (i) I describe Ronald Coase’s insight that harms are a reciprocal problem as […]
Faure and Visscher, ‘Medical liability Under Limited Resources: A Law and Economics Perspective’
ABSTRACT This paper presents an analysis of how limited resources in healthcare should affect medical liability. This has become a significant intellectual question in the debate on how to construct an efficient medical liability system. The question has, moreover, received a lot of attention where healthcare systems face increasing pressure from budget constraints. This was […]
Roee Sarel, ‘Explaining the Global Spread of Collective Litigation: A Law & Economics Perspective’
ABSTRACT This paper was developed for the workshop on ‘The Globalization of Class Actions’ (Stanford Law School, April 24, 2026). It explores possible Law & Economics explanations for why representative collective litigation procedures have spread to over fifty jurisdictions in recent decades. The analysis is organized around a simple cost-benefit inequality: a country might adopt […]
Ruhl and Salzman, ‘Property Law for Positive Externalities: Carving New Sticks for the Bundle’
ABSTRACT Property law has long confronted a troubling puzzle: Why does doctrine focus so much on eliminating harms flowing as negative externalities from uses of property – curbing pollution, nuisances, and other harmful land uses – while largely ignoring the potential to encourage positive externalities? Why such a strong focus on preventing bads instead of […]