Law Commons^™

Commerce Games And The Individual Mandate, Leslie Meltzer Henry, Maxwell L. Stearns

Faculty Scholarship

While the Supreme Court declined an early invitation to resolve challenges to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“PPACA”), a recent split between the United States Courts of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit (sustaining the PPACA’s “individual mandate”) and the Eleventh Circuit (striking it down) virtually ensures that the Court will decide the fate of this centerpiece of the Obama Administration’s regulatory agenda. Whatever the Court’s decision, it will likely affect Commerce Clause doctrine- and related doctrines - for years or even decades to come.

Litigants, judges, and academic commentators have focused on whether the Court’s “economic activity” tests, …

The Mythology Of Game Theory, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Mark Turner, Nick Weller

Faculty Scholarship

Non-cooperative game theory is at its heart a theory of cognition, specifically a theory of how decisions are made. Game theory's leverage is that we can design different payoffs, settings, player arrays, action possibilities, and information structures, and that these differences lead to different strategies, outcomes, and equilibria. It is well-known that, in experimental settings, people do not adopt the predicted strategies, outcomes, and equilibria. The standard response to this mismatch of prediction and observation is to add various psychological axioms to the game-theoretic framework. Regardless of the differing specific proposals and results, game theory uniformly makes certain cognitive assumptions …

The Theory Of Minds Within The Theory Of Games, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Mark Turner, Nicholas Weller

Faculty Scholarship

Classical rationality as accepted by game theory assumes that a human chooser in a given moment has consistent preferences and beliefs and that actions result consistently from those preferences and beliefs, and moreover that these preferences, beliefs, and actions remain the same across equal choice moments. Since, as is widely found in prior experiments, subjects do not follow the predictions of classical rationality, behavioral game theorists have assumed consistent deviations from classical rationality by assigning to subjects certain dispositions— risk preference, cognitive abilities, social norms, etc. All of these theories are fundamentally cognitive theories, making claims about how individual human …

The Challenge Of Flexible Intelligence For Models Of Human Behavior, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Mark Turner, Nicholas Weller

Faculty Scholarship

Game theoretic predictions about equilibrium behavior depend upon assumptions of inflexibility of belief, of accord between belief and choice, and of choice across situations that share a game-theoretic structure. However, researchers rarely possess any knowledge of the actual beliefs of subjects, and rarely compare how a subject behaves in settings that share game-theoretic structure but that differ in other respects. Our within-subject experiments utilize a belief elicitation mechanism, roughly similar to a prediction market, in a laboratory setting to identify subjects’ beliefs about other subjects’ choices and beliefs. These experiments additionally allow us to compare choices in different settings that …

When Agencies Go Nuclear: A Game Theoretic Approach To The Biggest Sticks In An Agency's Arsenal, Brigham Daniels

Faculty Scholarship

A regulatory agency’s arsenal often contains multiple weapons. Occasionally, however, an agency has the power to completely obliterate its regulatory targets or to make major waves in society by using a “regulatory nuke.” A regulatory nuke is a tool with two primary characteristics. First, it packs power sufficient to profoundly impact individual regulatory targets or significantly affect important aspects of society or the economy. Second, from the perspective of the regulatory agency, it is politically unavailable in all but the most extreme situations. They are found in many corners of the federal bureaucracy. This Article illustrates that even when individual …