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Retribution And The Experience Of Punishment, Christopher J. Buccafusco, J. Bronsteen, J. Masur
Retribution And The Experience Of Punishment, Christopher J. Buccafusco, J. Bronsteen, J. Masur
All Faculty Scholarship
In a prior article, we argued that punishment theorists need to take into account the counterintuitive findings from hedonic psychology about how offenders typically experience punishment. Punishment generally involves the imposition of negative experience. The reason that greater fines and prison sentences constitute more severe punishments than lesser ones is, in large part, that they are assumed to impose greater negative experience. Hedonic adaptation reduces that difference in negative experience, thereby undermining efforts to achieve proportionality in punishment. Anyone who values punishing more serious crimes more severely than less serious crimes by an appropriate amount - as virtually everyone does …
Valuing Intellectual Property: An Experiment, Christopher J. Buccafusco, C. Sprigman
Valuing Intellectual Property: An Experiment, Christopher J. Buccafusco, C. Sprigman
All Faculty Scholarship
In this article we report on the results of an experiment we performed to determine whether transactions in intellectual property (IP) are subject to the valuation anomalies commonly referred to as “endowment effects”. Traditional conceptions of the value of IP rely on assumptions about human rationality derived from classical economics. The law assumes that when people make decisions about buying, selling, and licensing IP they do so with fixed, context-independent preferences. Over the past several decades, this rational actor model of classical economics has come under attack by behavioral data showing that people do not always make strictly rational decisions. …
Welfare As Happiness (With J. Bronsteen & J. Masur), Christopher J. Buccafusco
Welfare As Happiness (With J. Bronsteen & J. Masur), Christopher J. Buccafusco
All Faculty Scholarship
Perhaps the most important goal of law and policy is improving people’s lives. But what constitutes improvement? What is quality of life, and how can it be measured? In previous articles, we have used insights from the new field of hedonic psychology to analyze central questions in civil and criminal justice, and we now apply those insights to a broader inquiry: how can the law make life better? The leading accounts of human welfare in law, economics, and philosophy are preference-satisfaction - getting what one wants - and objective list approaches - possessing an enumerated set of capabilities. This Article …
Valuing Intellectual Property: An Experiment, Christopher J. Buccafusco, C. Sprigman
Valuing Intellectual Property: An Experiment, Christopher J. Buccafusco, C. Sprigman
Christopher J. Buccafusco
In this article we report on the results of an experiment we performed to determine whether transactions in intellectual property (IP) are subject to the valuation anomalies commonly referred to as “endowment effects”. Traditional conceptions of the value of IP rely on assumptions about human rationality derived from classical economics. The law assumes that when people make decisions about buying, selling, and licensing IP they do so with fixed, context-independent preferences. Over the past several decades, this rational actor model of classical economics has come under attack by behavioral data showing that people do not always make strictly rational decisions. …
Welfare As Happiness (With J. Bronsteen & J. Masur), Christopher J. Buccafusco
Welfare As Happiness (With J. Bronsteen & J. Masur), Christopher J. Buccafusco
Christopher J. Buccafusco
Perhaps the most important goal of law and policy is improving people’s lives. But what constitutes improvement? What is quality of life, and how can it be measured? In previous articles, we have used insights from the new field of hedonic psychology to analyze central questions in civil and criminal justice, and we now apply those insights to a broader inquiry: how can the law make life better? The leading accounts of human welfare in law, economics, and philosophy are preference-satisfaction - getting what one wants - and objective list approaches - possessing an enumerated set of capabilities. This Article …
Retribution And The Experience Of Punishment, Christopher J. Buccafusco, J. Bronsteen, J. Masur
Retribution And The Experience Of Punishment, Christopher J. Buccafusco, J. Bronsteen, J. Masur
Christopher J. Buccafusco
In a prior article, we argued that punishment theorists need to take into account the counterintuitive findings from hedonic psychology about how offenders typically experience punishment. Punishment generally involves the imposition of negative experience. The reason that greater fines and prison sentences constitute more severe punishments than lesser ones is, in large part, that they are assumed to impose greater negative experience. Hedonic adaptation reduces that difference in negative experience, thereby undermining efforts to achieve proportionality in punishment. Anyone who values punishing more serious crimes more severely than less serious crimes by an appropriate amount - as virtually everyone does …