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Full-Text Articles in Law
Are Risk Preferences Stable Across Contexts? Evidence From Insurance Data, Levon Barseghyan, Jeffrey Prince, Joshua C. Teitelbaum
Are Risk Preferences Stable Across Contexts? Evidence From Insurance Data, Levon Barseghyan, Jeffrey Prince, Joshua C. Teitelbaum
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Using a unique data set, the authors test whether households' deductible choices in auto and home insurance reflect stable risk preferences. Their test relies on a structural model that assumes households are objective expected utility maximizers and claims are generated by household-coverage specific Poisson processes. They find that the hypothesis of stable risk preferences is rejected by the data. Their analysis suggests that many households exhibit greater risk aversion in their home deductible choices than their auto deductible choices. They find that their results are robust to several alternative modeling assumptions.
Financial Stability Is A Volume Business: A Comment On The Legal Infrastructure Of Ex Post Consumer Debtor Protections, Anna Gelpern
Financial Stability Is A Volume Business: A Comment On The Legal Infrastructure Of Ex Post Consumer Debtor Protections, Anna Gelpern
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Professor Melissa B. Jacoby's essay pays homage to Stewart Macaulay's classic study of the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, a U.S. federal consumer protection law that, according to Macaulay, was virtually unknown to the lawyers whose clients needed it the most. The moral of Macaulay's study is that even good consumer protection laws on the books often fail to deliver in action for complex cultural, institutional, and economic reasons. Yet reducing Professor Jacoby's essay to this very important moral undersells its contribution. A fragmented infrastructure for legal service delivery of the sort she describes does not merely fail consumers more often than …
The Behavioral Economics Of Mergers And Acquisitions, Donald C. Langevoort
The Behavioral Economics Of Mergers And Acquisitions, Donald C. Langevoort
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
The world of mergers and acquisitions seems like a setting in which rationality necessarily dominates. There are high stakes, focused and sustained attention, and expert advisers who are repeat players. In the economics and management literature, however, there has been a great deal of research on what might be called “behavioral M&A”—using insights from psychology to explain observed patterns of behavior in the acquisitions marketplace. To date, the law has largely been uninterested in the psychological dynamics of corporate acquisitions. This essay looks at recent research on such issues as the role of overconfidence, hubris, anchoring, etc. in explaining buy-side …
Law As Asymmetric Information: Theory, Application, And Results In The Context Of Foreign Direct Investment In Real Estate, Patrick J. Glen
Law As Asymmetric Information: Theory, Application, And Results In The Context Of Foreign Direct Investment In Real Estate, Patrick J. Glen
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
In his seminal 1970 article on lemon markets, George Akerlof posited the possibility of market failure in the presence of asymmetric information regarding a good’s value. In the intervening four decades, the importance of accurate valuation information has grown as transnational trade has boomed. The aim of the instant article is to assess the potential impact on transnational trade of asymmetric information regarding the legal attributes of a given good. Inaccurate or asymmetric information regarding relevant legal attributes may give rise to the same problem of market failure that Akerlof initially posited. If buyers are unsure of the ownership of …