Category Archives: Law and Economics
Harris and Kaufman, ‘Consumer Law Meets the New Company Store’
ABSTRACT Firms have discovered new ways to extract value from workers beyond traditional labor exploitation. In labor markets increasingly characterized by monopsony power, platform work, and financialization, employers push a variety of financial products onto workers and establish surveillance systems that monetize worker data. This Article introduces the Triple Extraction Model to explain how firms […]
Gaston Rey, ‘Hayek Displaced: Can AI Solve the Socialist Calculation Problem?’
ABSTRACT The algorithmic capacity of contemporary artificial intelligence revives the socialist calculation controversy that Mises and Hayek were long thought to have closed. If algorithms can synthesize the dispersed information that Hayek identified as the irreducible obstacle to central economic planning, has the Hayekian argument been technically falsified? This article argues that the answer requires […]
Nikolas Guggenberger, ‘The Platform-Property Paradox’
ABSTRACT In digital markets, the essential functions of property turn against each other. Common law property divides the world into mine, yours, and others’ by excluding non-owners. This exclusion strategy generally serves three essential functions in economic ordering: internalizing externalities by channeling positive and negative effects on third parties back to the owner; creating modularity […]
Korobkin and Rachlinski, ‘Legal Analysis After the Behavioral Revolution’
ABSTRACT The incorporation of behavioral economics and cognitive psychology has profoundly challenged traditional legal scholarship’s understanding of human decision making. This Article explores how insights from the behavioral sciences have fundamentally recast the academy’s approach to legal doctrine in the private law subjects that have long been the foundation of legal training. By demonstrating systematic […]
Ewan McGaughey, ‘Economic Growth and Labour Rights: The Case of the Employment Rights Act 2025’
ABSTRACT How do labour rights affect economic growth, and what may we predict from the Employment Rights Act 2025? The UK government says its first mission is ‘growth’, and improving workers’ rights is part of this. However, the government chose to define its ‘growth’ mission solely in terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). GDP often […]
Gold and Helleringer, ‘Finding Loyalty in Good Faith’
ABSTRACT The merits of contractual loyalty duties have been obscured by two leading views on loyalty. The first view, associated with the law and economics movement, tends to see fiduciary loyalty as contractual across the board. The second view claims that by its very nature loyalty cannot be contractual. This Article views the conceptual landscape […]
Grenadier and Grenadier, ‘Discovery as Strategic Search: A Theory of Litigation Burden and Procedure’
ABSTRACT This paper develops a model of civil discovery as strategic search. Plaintiff and defendant choose discovery intensities that determine the stochastic arrival of favorable evidence over a finite discovery period. Search improves a party’s expected litigation position but also imposes burdens on the opposing side. The model provides a framework for analyzing how civil-procedure […]
Palonen and Pekkarinen, ‘Avoidance, Auditing, and Optimal Contracts’
ABSTRACT We consider a principal-agent model in which the principal designs contracts for the agent specifying a transfer, an allocation, and an audit rule. With auditing, the principal can verify a breach of contract and impose a fine defined by exogenous contract law. However, the agent can make the principal’s audit fail by engaging in […]
Steven Medema, ‘Modeling Coase Theorem Worlds: Why the History of Economic Analysis Matters for the History of (Economic) Science’
ABSTRACT This paper uses the two-decade controversy over the Coase theorem’s long-run validity to highlight the importance of the history of economic analysis for understanding and writing the history of (economic) science. The argument is that in many instances a reasonably accurate understanding of why economic ideas evolved as they did and thus of particulars […]
Mark Skousen, ‘The Genius of Adam Smith’
ABSTRACT Published to mark the 250th anniversary of the publication of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, this IEA Discussion Paper by Mark Skousen argues that Smith’s central insight, that individuals pursuing their own self-interest can be channelled through a ‘system of natural liberty’ to promote the public good, remains one of the most consequential […]