Category Archives: Law and Economics
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 […]
Lora, Benítez-Rueda and Rueda-Sanz, ‘Property Informality and Its Effect on Rural Land Prices in Colombia’
ABSTRACT This study investigates the impact of property informality on rural land prices in Colombia. It utilizes data for 16 land size categories for a fifth of Colombia’s municipalities. It employs the Gaussian copula approach to overcome endogeneity issues. The main finding is that an exogenous variation of property informality significantly reduces rural land prices […]
Glynn Lunney, ‘Copyright, Incentives, and Popular Music Composition’
ABSTRACT The rise of file sharing and the subsequent collapse in sales of recorded music offer a rare glimpse into a counterfactual world where copyright, for a time, was weakened. Comparing creative output before and after this exogenous shock allows us to test empirically whether incentives to copyright owners were correlated with creative output. In […]
Parisi and Bix, ‘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 article surveys central positions in this […]
Anna Chadwick, ‘Towards a Legal Theory of Price’
ABSTRACT A new wave of legal scholarship has challenged the dominant neoclassical account of price formation, demonstrating that prices are not formed according to its prescripts and do not perform the task of economic coordination in line with its axioms. As opposed to emerging from voluntary exchanges between private actors, prices on this alternative reading […]
Peter O’Loughlin, ‘The Limits of Behavioral Law and Economics’ Predictive Power’
ABSTRACT Behavioral economics’ most severe criticism is that it lacks a coherent theory for predicting when irrationality will govern decision-making. BE is often therefore identified as a body of anomalies residual or exceptional to rational choice theory. This Article answers the question of why this is the case and does so by distinguishing between two […]
Neeman, Hernandez and Zultan, ‘Deterrence of Unwanted Behavior: a Theoretical and Experimental Investigation’
ABSTRACT We study whether concentrating enforcement resources – raising sanction probabilities in some areas or times while lowering them elsewhere – reduces socially undesirable behavior. Using a theoretical model and a laboratory experiment, we examine whether splitting a uniform sanction probability $p$ into a higher~$p_H$ and a lower $p_L$ can decrease overall violations. Our analysis […]
Max Fang, ‘The Tragedy of the AI Data Commons: Legal Constraints and the Economics of AI Innovation’
ABSTRACT The exponential growth of artificial intelligence (AI) has brought data governance to the forefront of legal and economic debate. As global AI models hunger for massive datasets, the legal restrictions around data ownership, privacy, and intellectual property are increasingly shaping and fragmenting what kinds of data are available, how they are accessed, and who […]
‘Does the Hand Formula Express Efficiency or Justice? Or Both?’
Emad H Atiq, ‘The Disaggregated Hand Formula’, 114 California Law Review (forthcoming 2026), available at SSRN (1 March 2025). The Learned Hand test is both famous and infamous. The main source of its fame is the law and economics movement, which drew attention to the test in the 1970s. According to Richard Posner and other […]
Guinea, Pandya, Sharma and Zilli, ‘The Impact of Increased Mass Litigation in the UK’
SUMMARY Over the past decade, the United Kingdom has seen a marked rise in collective litigation, transforming what was once a niche legal, rarely employed, tool into a fast-growing business model with wide-ranging economic implications. At a time when the country seeks to boost investment, support innovation and attract global business, the proliferation of mass […]