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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™
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Articles 1 - 3 of 3
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Self-Handicapping And Managers’ Duty Of Care, David A. Hoffman
Self-Handicapping And Managers’ Duty Of Care, David A. Hoffman
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This symposium essay focuses on the relationship between managers' duty of care and self-handicapping, or constructing obstacles to performance with the goal of influencing subsequent explanations about outcomes. Conventional explanations for failures of caretaking by managers have focused on motives (greed) and incentives (agency costs). This account of manager behavior has led some modern jurists, concerned about recent corporate scandals, to advocate for stronger deterrent measures to realign manager and shareholder incentives. * Self-handicapping theory, by contrast, teaches that bad manager behavior may occur even when incentives are well-aligned. Highly successful individuals in particular come to fear the pressure of …
The Best Puffery Article Ever, David A. Hoffman
The Best Puffery Article Ever, David A. Hoffman
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This Article provides the first extensive legal treatment of an important defense in the law of fraud and contracts: puffery. Legal authorities commonly say they make decisions about whether defendants should be able to utter exaggerated, optimistic, lies based on assumptions about buyer behavior, concluding that consumers do not rely on such speech. However, as the Article shows, such analyses are proxies for a deeper analytical question: does the speech encourage or discourage a type of consumption activity that the court deems welfare maximizing? The Article presents a novel constitutional analysis of puffery doctrine that focuses on the meaning of …
The "Duty" To Be A Rational Shareholder, David A. Hoffman
The "Duty" To Be A Rational Shareholder, David A. Hoffman
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How and when do courts determine that corporate disclosures are actionable under the federal securities laws? The applicable standard is materiality: would a (mythical) reasonable investor have considered a given disclosure important. As I establish through empirical and statistical testing of approximately 500 cases analyzing the materiality standard, judicial findings of immateriality are remarkably common, and have been stable over time. Materiality's scope results in the dismissal of a large number of claims, and creates a set of cases in which courts attempt to explain and defend their vision of who is, and is not, a reasonable investor. Thus, materiality …