Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Qalys And Policy Evaluation: A New Perspective, Matthew D. Adler

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“QALYs” (Quality-Adjusted Life Years) are a metric for health and longevity very widely employed by health researchers. Surveys are used to assign health states a quality ranking on zero-one scale, with zero representing a health state no better than death and one perfect health. The total QALY value of a health profile is calculated as the time spent in its component health states, each weighted by its quality. Until a few years ago, despite the huge academic literature on QALY measurement, this approach was seldom used by policymakers in the U.S. But there have been recent signs of governmental interest …

Equity Analysis And Natural Hazards Policy, Matthew D. Adler

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What is an “equitable” policy for mitigating the impacts of hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, and other natural hazards? Economists tend to see “equity” or “distribution” as irreducibly political and subjective. But, in truth, equity analysis and cost-benefit analysis are on a par. Both require a normative justification. Moreover, normative argument can help us structure equity analysis, just as it can cost-benefit analysis. This chapter, written for a forthcoming book on natural hazards policy after Katrina, argues that equity is a normative consideration distinct from efficiency or overall well-being. It then argues that equity is individualistic, not group-based; ex post, not ex …

Federalism And Antitrust Reform, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

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Currently the Antitrust Modernization Commission is considering numerous proposals for adjusting the relationship between federal antitrust authority and state regulation. This essay examines two areas that have produced a significant amount of state-federal conflict: state regulation of insurance and the state action immunity for general state regulation. It argues that no principle of efficiency, regulatory theory, or federalism justifies the McCarran-Ferguson Act, which creates an antitrust immunity for state regulation of insurance. What few benefits the Act confers could be fully realized by an appropriate interpretation of the state action doctrine. Second, the current formulation of the antitrust state action …

Discounts And Exclusions, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

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The discounting practices of dominant firms has emerged as one of the most problematic areas of private antitrust enforcement against single-firm conduct. The most difficult discount practices to assess are bundled, or multi-product discounts in situations where no significant rival produces every product that is included in the bundle. A debate has emerged over whether such discounts are properly assessed under a legal test that analogizes them to predatory pricing or to tying. Defendants typically prefer predatory pricing analogies, requiring a showing that the price of the assembled bundle was below a relevant measure of cost, such as marginal cost …

Unilateral Refusals To License In The Us, Herbert J. Hovenkamp, Mark D. Janis, Mark A. Lemley

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Most antitrust claims relating to intellectual property involve challenges to agreements, licensing practices or affirmative conduct involving the use or disposition of the intellectual property rights or the products they cover. But sometimes an antitrust claim centers on an intellectual property owner's refusal to use or license an intellectual property right, perhaps coupled with efforts to enforce the intellectual property right against infringers. The allegation may be that the intellectual property right is so essential to competition that it must be licensed across the board, or that a refusal to license it to one particular party was discriminatory, or that …

How Do Corporations Play Politics? The Fedex Story, Jill E. Fisch

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Corporate political activity has been the subject of federal regulation since 1907, and the restrictions on corporate campaign contributions and other political expenditures continue to increase. Most recently, Congress banned soft money donations in the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 ("BCRA"), a ban upheld by the Supreme Court in McConnell v. FEC. Significantly, although the omnibus BCRA clearly was not directed exclusively at corporations, the Supreme Court began its lengthy opinion in McConnell by referencing and endorsing the efforts of Elihu Root, more than a century ago, to prohibit corporate political contributions. Repeatedly, within the broad context of campaign …

The Academic Tournament Over Executive Compensation, William W. Bratton

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No abstract provided.

Welfare, Dialectic, And Mediation In Corporate Law, William W. Bratton

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No abstract provided.

Redesigning The International Lender Of Last Resort, Patrick Bolton, David A. Skeel Jr.

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No abstract provided.

Do Institutions Matter? The Impact Of The Lead Plaintiff Provision Of The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act, Stephen Choi, Jill E. Fisch, A. C. Pritchard

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When Congress enacted the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act in 1995 (“PSLRA”), the Act’s “lead plaintiff” provision was the centerpiece of its efforts to increase investor control over securities fraud class actions. The lead plaintiff provision alters the balance of power between investors and class counsel by creating a presumption that the investor with the largest financial stake in the case will serve as lead plaintiff. The lead plaintiff then chooses class counsel and, at least in theory, negotiates the terms of counsel’s compensation.

Congress’s stated purpose in enacting the lead plaintiff provision was to encourage institutional investors—pension funds, mutual …

Architectural Censorship And The Fcc, Christopher S. Yoo

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Most First Amendment analyses of U.S. media policy have focused predominantly on “behavioral” regulation, which either prohibits the transmission of disfavored content (such as indecent programming) or mandates the dissemination of preferred content (such as children’s educational programming and political speech). In so doing, commentators have largely overlooked how program content is also affected by “structural” regulation, which focuses primarily on increasing the economic competitiveness of media industries. In this Article, Professor Christopher Yoo employs economic analysis to demonstrate how structural regulation can constitute a form of “architectural censorship” that has the unintended consequence of reducing the quantity, quality, and …

Beyond Network Neutrality, Christopher S. Yoo

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In this Article, Professor Yoo takes issue with the emerging scholarly consensus in favor of ""network neutrality,"" which would prohibit network owners from employing proprietary protocols or entering into exclusivity agreements with content providers that would reduce the transparency of the Internet. Economic theory suggests that network neutrality advocates are focusing on the wrong policy problem. Rather than directing attention on the market for Internet content and applications, the segments of the industry that are the most competitive and the most likely to remain that way, communications policy would be better served if the focus were placed on the segment …

The New Dividend Puzzle, William W. Bratton

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No abstract provided.

Environmental Trade Measures, The Shrimp-Turtle Rulings, And The Ordinary Meaning Of The Text Of The Gatt, Howard F. Chang

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No abstract provided.

Institutional Competition To Regulate Corporations: A Comment On Macey, Jill E. Fisch

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No abstract provided.

The Microfoundations Of Standard Form Contracts: Price Discrimination Vs. Behavioral Bias, Jonathan Klick

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Standard form contracts, or contracts of adhesion, appear to provide contradictory evidence for the operation of bargaining in the markets where they are common. Non-negotiated contract terms that seemingly benefit sellers to the detriment of buyers call into question the efficiency implications of the Coase Theorem, which forms the foundation of positive law and economics. Proponents of the behavioral school of law and economics have suggested that behavioral biases, observed in experimental contexts, provide the most plausible explanation for standard form contracts. However, price discrimination might provide a more parsimonious explanation for abusive terms in contracts. If there is heterogeneity …

Wealth, Utility, And The Human Dimension, Jonathan Klick, Francesco Parisi

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Functional law and economics, which draws its influence from the public choice school of economic thought, stands in stark contrast to both the Chicago and Yale schools of law and economics. While the Chicago school emphasizes the inherent efficiency of legal rules, and the Yale school views law as a solution to market failure and distributional inequality, functional law and economics recognizes the possibility for both market and legal failure. That is, while there are economic forces that lead to failures in the market, there are also structural forces that limit the law’s ability to remedy those failures on an …

Corporate Shaming Revisited: An Essay For Bill Klein, David A. Skeel Jr.

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No abstract provided.

On The Regulation Of Networks As Complex Systems: A Graph Theory Approach, Daniel F. Spulber, Christopher S. Yoo

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The dominant approach to regulating communications networks treats each network component as if it existed in isolation. In so doing, the current approach fails to capture one of the essential characteristics of networks, which is the complex manner in which components interact with one another when combined into an integrated system. In this Essay, Professors Daniel Spulber and Christopher Yoo propose a new regulatory framework based on the discipline of mathematics known as graph theory, which better captures the extent to which networks represent complex systems. They then apply the insights provided by this framework to a number of current …