Category Archives: Law and Economics
Kim and Kim, ‘Artificial Intelligence and the Paradox of Professional Liability’
ABSTRACT Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping professional services and complicating liability design. We develop a framework where experts differing in hidden ability adopt AI and choose effort. AI lowers accident risk but raises compliance costs. Even with asymmetric information, strict liability induces efficient AI adoption and care but negligence induces shirking and inefficient adoption, unless […]
Hannu Vartiainen, ‘Recursively Renegotiation-Proof Contracts’
ABSTRACT We modify the concept of renegotiation-proofness by stating that a contract is credible if it is robust against credible redesigns. A contract that is, in this sense, recursively renegotiation-proof is shown to exist under general conditions. We provide a procedure to identify all contracts that meet the property. The framework is applied to bilateral […]
Michael Rustad, ‘Punitive Damages in Products Liability Revisited (1991-2024)’
ABSTRACT In August 2025, a Florida jury awarded a twenty-two-year-old female’s estate and another badly injured person two hundred million dollars in punitive damages in a case arising out of a 2019 Tesla crash that occurred when the car was in Autopilot mode. Punitive damages were based on the contention that Tesla’s Autopilot could not […]
Kidd and Simmons, ‘Public Choice and Public Trust’
ABSTRACT The public trust doctrine, originally a legal principle designed to protect public access to navigable waters for commerce and navigation, has been expanded far beyond its historical scope. Courts and policymakers now use the doctrine as a broad instrument of environmental intervention, often invoking it to justify sweeping regulatory mandates and restrictions on private […]
Call for Papers: ‘Economic Aspects of the Constitution’: University of Glasgow, 16-17 April 2026
The workshop seeks to explore those aspects of the constitutional order of the United Kingdom (as well as its Overseas Territories and the Crown Dependencies) which have an economic element. Any proposal for a paper which fits the workshop theme is welcome, but possible topics include the following: … (more)
Duffie and Wang, ‘Smart Contracting in Network Markets’
ABSTRACT For bilateral bargaining in network markets, we show that holdup is eliminated when contracts are atomically settled with smart contracts. Applications include over-the-counter trading networks, purchases requiring third-party financing, and other multi-agent markets in which pairs of agents bargain bilaterally over terms that could potentially affect their outside-option values in negotiations with other firms. […]
Martimort, Poudou and Thomas, ‘Optimal Contracts under Moral Hazard, Adverse Selection and Limited Liability’
ABSTRACT This paper studies optimal contracting between a risk-neutral buyer and a risk-neutral, limited-liability seller facing both adverse selection and moral hazard. Even when effort and production are separable, the optimal contract combines features of pure screening and pure moral hazard models. Screening distortions are mitigated, and effort serves as a screening tool. Efficient agents […]
Paulo Barrozo, ‘Capitalism and Jurisprudence’
ABSTRACT In our time, an amorphous and undertheorized notion of capitalism is the target of jurisprudential antipathy. Capitalism is indicted as the creator of ills and as the inhibitor of equality, freedom, truth, justice, democracy, human flourishing, planetary life, peace, and more. Among natural law and critical legal theorists in the United States, only liberalism […]
Jonathan Barnett, ‘The Free Content Illusion’
ABSTRACT Peer-to-peer file sharing in the early 2000s destabilized traditional content markets and associated business models that rely on preserving control over the use of creative assets. Academics and other commentators widely argued that robust forms of intellectual property rights had been rendered largely obsolete in a digital environment of low production and distribution costs. […]
Liu and Lin, ‘Commercialise or Sleep? Capturing Value from Patenting’
ABSTRACT We develop a sequential model to examine patent litigation, acquisition, and commercialization decisions in innovative industries. The model focuses on potential intellectual property disputes among two patent-holding firms with overlapping technologies and a non-patent-owning producer. We highlight the role of the belief gap, defined as the difference between the patent owner’s and other market […]