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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Legal Studies

Georgetown University Law Center

Legal scholarship

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Against Endowment Theory: Experimental Economics And Legal Scholarship, Gregory Klass, Kathryn Zeiler Jun 2013

Against Endowment Theory: Experimental Economics And Legal Scholarship, Gregory Klass, Kathryn Zeiler

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Endowment theory holds the mere ownership of a thing causes people to assign greater value to it than they otherwise would. The theory entered legal scholarship in the early 1990s and quickly eclipsed other accounts of how ownership affects valuation. Today, appeals to a generic “endowment effect” can be found throughout the legal literature. More recent experimental results, however, suggest that the empirical evidence for endowment theory is weak at best. When the procedures used in laboratory experiments are altered to rule out alternative explanations, the “endowment effect” disappears. This and other recent evidence suggest that mere ownership does not …


Mark Tushnet: A Personal Reminiscence, Louis Michael Seidman Jan 2001

Mark Tushnet: A Personal Reminiscence, Louis Michael Seidman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this essay the author pays tribute to Mark Tushnet, a prominent scholar of constitutional law and legal history, who also served on the faculty of the Georgetown University Law Center for many years.