Category Archives: Law and Economics
Dari-Mattiacci, Onderstal, Parisi and Singh, ‘The Value of Silence: Optimal Disclosure Default Rules in Contract Law’
ABSTRACT Sellers are generally required to disclose ‘negative’ information about hidden defects of the products they sell. By contrast, buyers are generally under no comparable duties to disclose ‘positive’ information about hidden qualities of the products they buy. The leading explanation for the law’s disparate treatment of buyers and sellers is that imposing disclosure duties […]
Sergio Mittlaender, ‘Contractual Interests, Ranked’
ABSTRACT Traditional legal scholarship and Law & Economics posit that all contractual interests are, and should be, protected by contract law. This article challenges this notion by examining whether public perceptions align with legal doctrine. In an experiment, respondents report their perceived social appropriateness of breach and the appropriate level of damages considering different types […]
Guichardaz, Lefebvre, Igersheim and Pénin, ‘Personality, creativity and adherence to intellectual property: a lab experiment on copyright’
ABSTRACT This paper presents an original experiment to test a key prediction of the personalist rationale for copyright, which argues that intellectual property is morally justified because creative works are extensions of the creator’s personality. According to this theory, people should adhere more strongly to copyright when a creation reflects a higher degree of personal […]
Lucian Bebchuk, ‘Suing Solely to Extract a Settlement Offer’
ABSTRACT In many disputes, the expected value to the plaintiff from going to trial is negative, either because the chances of winning are small or because the litigation costs are large. While such a plaintiff would not go to trial, he might sue in the hope of extracting a settlement offer: the defendant might make […]
‘Planning for Bargaining Power’
Albert H Choi and George G Triantis, ‘Designing Contract Modification’, University of Chicago Law Review (forthcoming), available at SSRN (2 February 2025). This article by Professors Choi and Triantis hits close to home with how closely it models my personal experiences with oil and gas leases on my family’s farm during the leasing boom of […]
Danisz Okulicz, ‘Should Lawyers Lie to Their Clients? Biased Expertise in Negotiations’
ABSTRACT I propose a theoretical model to analyze the effects of cheap-talk legal advice on pretrial negotiations with asymmetric information when a conflict of interest between plaintiffs and attorneys is possible. An informed defendant makes a settlement offer to an uninformed plaintiff who may consult her attorney before taking the decision. Hiring an attorney biased […]
Edward Iacobucci, ‘Trebilcock and trade-offs’
ABSTRACT Through discussion of a sample of his work, this article identifies a key theme in Michael Trebilcock’s astonishingly deep and broad body of scholarship: trade-offs matter. Trebilcock’s analysis of a House of Lords case, Macaulay v Schroeder Publishing, demonstrates the perils of one-sided economic analysis: the court ignored trade-offs in determining that a contract […]
Anthony Marino, ‘Ideological Bias and Breach of the Fiduciary Duty of Care’
ABSTRACT This paper analyzes a remedy for breach of the fiduciary duty of care in a principal-advisor relationship. The advisor’s effort cost is ideologically too high for a certain investment. This bias can lead to a breach of care, if the advisor’s investigative effort is unobservable by the principal. The principal audits and sues the […]
Alex Raskolnikov, ‘A new view of formal equality and a case for predistribution’
ABSTRACT A long-held egalitarian view is that formal equality – the absence of formal legal distinctions based on the material resources of individuals – is regressive. If legal rules are the same for the rich and the poor, the rich benefit and the poor suffer. This Essay argues that this view is mistaken. Far from […]
Vincent Okonkwo, ‘Is Money Money? Digital Currencies, Moneyness, and the Future of the Legal Fiction of Money’
ABSTRACT Most academic analyses on the ‘money’ status of cryptocurrency are performed either formalistically or superficially. The paper on the subject and the unity of conclusions are suggestive of this fact. These assessments religiously ask whether cryptocurrencies meet ‘definitive’ standards of ‘money-ness’ in monetary economics. They would mostly resolve that cryptocurrencies do not. This article […]