Law Commons^™

Time-Shifted Rationality And The Law Of Law's Leverage: Behavioral Economics Meets Behavioral Biology, Owen D. Jones

Owen Jones

A flood of recent scholarship explores legal implications of seemingly irrational behaviors by invoking cognitive psychology and notions of bounded rationality. In this article, I argue that advances in behavioral biology have largely overtaken existing notions of bounded rationality, revealing them to be misleadingly imprecise - and rooted in outdated assumptions that are not only demonstrably wrong, but also wrong in ways that have material implications for subsequent legal conclusions. This can be remedied. Specifically, I argue that behavioral biology offers three things of immediate use. First, behavioral biology can lay a foundation for both revising bounded rationality and fashioning …

Endowment Effects In Chimpanzees, Owen D. Jones, Sarah F. Brosnan, Susan P. Lambeth, Mary Catherine Mareno, Amanda S. Richardson, Steven Schapiro

Owen Jones

Human behavior is not always consistent with standard rational choice predictions. The much-investigated variety of apparent deviations from rational choice predictions provides a promising arena for the merger of economics and biology. Although little is known about the extent to which other species also exhibit these seemingly irrational patterns of human decision-making and choice behavior, similarities across species would suggest a common evolutionary root to the phenomena.

The present study investigated whether chimpanzees exhibit an endowment effect, a seemingly paradoxical behavior in which humans tend to value a good they have just come to possess more than they would have …

Law, Biology, And Property: A New Theory Of The Endowment Effect, Owen D. Jones, Sarah F. Brosnan

Owen Jones

Recent work at the intersection of law and behavioral biology has suggested numerous contexts in which legal thinking could benefit by integrating knowledge from behavioral biology. In one of those contexts, behavioral biology may help to provide theoretical foundation for, and potentially increased predictive power concerning, various psychological traits relevant to law. This Article describes an experiment that explores that context.

The paradoxical psychological bias known as the endowment effect puzzles economists, skews market behavior, impedes efficient exchange of goods and rights, and thereby poses important problems for law. Although the effect is known to vary widely, there are at …

Law And Behavioral Biology, Owen D. Jones, Timothy H. Goldsmith

Owen Jones

Society uses law to encourage people to behave differently than they would behave in the absence of law. This fundamental purpose makes law highly dependent on sound understandings of the multiple causes of human behavior. The better those understandings, the better law can achieve social goals with legal tools. In this Article, Professors Jones and Goldsmith argue that many long held understandings about where behavior comes from are rapidly obsolescing as a consequence of developments in the various fields constituting behavioral biology. By helping to refine law's understandings of behavior's causes, they argue, behavioral biology can help to improve law's …

Behavioral Public Choice And The Law, Gary M. Lucas Jr., Slavisa Tasic

Gary M. Lucas Jr.

No abstract provided.

Beyond Individualism In Law And Economics, Robert B. Ahdieh

Robert B. Ahdieh

The study of law and economics was built upon two pillars. The first is the familiar assumption of individual rationality. The second, less familiar, is the principle of methodological individualism. Over the last twenty years, law and economics has largely internalized behavioral critiques of the rationality assumption. By contrast, the field has failed to appreciate the implications of growing challenges to its methodological individualism. Where social norms shape individual choices, network externalities are strong, coordination is the operative goal, or information is a substantial determinant of value, a methodology strongly oriented to the analysis of individuals overlooks at least as …

The Psychology Of Patent Protection, Stephanie Plamondon Bair

Stephanie Bair

This Article offers the first comprehensive assessment of the major justifications for our patent system using a behavioral psychology framework. Applying insights from the behavioral literature that I argue more accurately account for the realities of human action than previous analytical tools, I critically evaluate each of the major justifications for patents — incentive theory, disclosure theory, prospect theory, commercialization theory, patent racing theory, and non-utilitarian theories. I ask whether our current patent system is an effective regime for meeting the stated goals of these accounts. When the answer to this question is no, I again turn to the behavioral …

Allowing Patients To Waive The Right To Sue For Medical Malpractice: A Response To Thaler And Sunstein, Tom Baker, Timothy D. Lytton

Timothy D. Lytton

This essay critically evaluates Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s proposal to allow patients to prospectively waive their rights to bring a malpractice claim, presented in their recent, much acclaimed book, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness. We show that the behavioral insights that undergird Nudge do not support the waiver proposal. In addition, we demonstrate that Thaler and Sunstein have not provided a persuasive cost-benefit justification for the proposal. Finally, we argue that their liberty-based defense of waivers rests on misleading analogies and polemical rhetoric that ignore the liberty and other interests served by patients’ tort law rights. …

Building A Framework For Governance: Retrospective Review And Rulemaking Petitions, Reeve T. Bull

Reeve T Bull

Of the various regulatory reform efforts advocated by legal scholars and politicians in recent years, perhaps none holds greater promise than retrospective review of agency regulations, whereby agencies revisit existing rules to determine whether they remain appropriate in light of changed circumstances. The Obama Administration has embraced the principles of retrospective review, issuing three executive orders on the subject, and it has trumpeted billions of dollars in economic savings resulting from those efforts. Nevertheless, numerous scholars have criticized these initiatives, contending that agencies reviewing their own regulations are unlikely to repeal or fundamentally overhaul existing rules. This article addresses the …

Facilitating Incomplete Contracts, Wendy Netter Epstein

Wendy Netter Epstein

Barriers To Effective Risk Management, Michelle Harner

Michelle M. Harner

“As long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing.”** This now infamous quote by Charles Prince, Citigroup’s former Chief Executive Officer, captures the high-risk, high-reward mentality and overconfidence that permeates much of corporate America. These attributes in turn helped to facilitate a global recession and some of the largest economic losses ever experienced in the financial sector. They also represent certain cognitive biases and cultural norms in corporate boardrooms and management suites that make implementing a meaningful risk culture and thereby mitigating the impact of future economic downturns a challenging proposition. The …

Barriers To Effective Risk Management, Michelle M. Harner

Michelle M. Harner

“As long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing.”** This now infamous quote by Charles Prince, Citigroup’s former Chief Executive Officer, captures the high-risk, high-reward mentality and overconfidence that permeates much of corporate America. These attributes in turn helped to facilitate a global recession and some of the largest economic losses ever experienced in the financial sector. They also represent certain cognitive biases and cultural norms in corporate boardrooms and management suites that make implementing a meaningful risk culture and thereby mitigating the impact of future economic downturns a challenging proposition. The …

Barriers To Effective Risk Management, Michelle M. Harner

Michelle M. Harner

“As long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing.”** This now infamous quote by Charles Prince, Citigroup’s former Chief Executive Officer, captures the high-risk, high-reward mentality and overconfidence that permeates much of corporate America. These attributes in turn helped to facilitate a global recession and some of the largest economic losses ever experienced in the financial sector. They also represent certain cognitive biases and cultural norms in corporate boardrooms and management suites that make implementing a meaningful risk culture and thereby mitigating the impact of future economic downturns a challenging proposition. The …

Legal Bargaining Theory's New "Prospecting" Agenda: It May Be Social Science, But Is It News?, Robert J. Condlin

Robert J. Condlin

In the good old days legal bargaining scholarship was based mostly on negotiator war stories exuberantly told. The social-scientific study of the subject did not begin in earnest until the nineteen-seventies. Since then, however, the literature of storytelling has gone into a pronounced eclipse and social-scientific study is now the principal scholarly game in town. This article questions the wisdom of this shift, almost seismic in its proportions, and argues that it is too soon to jump on the social science bandwagon. Discussion focuses on the uses made of the Prospect Theory of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky and the …

For Both Love And Money: Viviana Zelizer's "The Purchase Of Intimacy", Martha M. Ertman

Martha M. Ertman

Viviana Zelizer’s recent book, The Purchase of Intimacy (2005) presents an innovative theory of how social and legal actors negotiate rights and obligations when money changes hands in intimate relationships--a perspective that could change how we understand many things, from valuations of homemaking labor to the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund. This essay describes Zelizer’s critique of the reductionist “Hostile Worlds” and “Nothing But” approaches to economic exchange in intimate relationships, then explains her more three-dimensional approach, “Connected Lives.” While Zelizer focuses on family law, the essay goes beyond that context, extending Zelizer’s approach to transfers of genetic material, and concluding …

Behavioral Economic Issues In American And Islamic Marriage & Divorce Law, Ryan M. Riegg

Ryan M. Riegg

Legal Bargaining Theory's New "Prospecting" Agenda: It May Be Social Science, But Is It News?, Robert J. Condlin

Robert J. Condlin

In the good old days legal bargaining scholarship was based mostly on negotiator war stories exuberantly told. The social-scientific study of the subject did not begin in earnest until the nineteen-seventies. Since then, however, the literature of storytelling has gone into a pronounced eclipse and social-scientific study is now the principal scholarly game in town. This article questions the wisdom of this shift, almost seismic in its proportions, and argues that it is too soon to jump on the social science bandwagon. Discussion focuses on the uses made of the Prospect Theory of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky and the …

Using Salience And Influence To Narrow The Tax Gap, Susan Morse

Susan Cleary Morse

Most self-employed and small business taxpayers cheat on their taxes. In fact, in the aggregate, they fail to pay about half the tax they owe to the government, and this unpaid tax amounts to about $150 billion annually. This amount is about half the "tax gap," or the amount of tax due that the federal government does not collect.

This paper argues that more salient government communications and greater attention to principles of influence would improve existing and proposed policies to encourage self-employed and small business taxpayers to pay their taxes. Reversing the widespread tax evasion among self-employed and small …

Legal Bargaining Theory's New "Prospecting" Agenda: It May Be Social Science, But Is It News?, Robert J. Condlin

Robert J. Condlin

In the good old days legal bargaining scholarship was based mostly on negotiator war stories exuberantly told. The social-scientific study of the subject did not begin in earnest until the nineteen-seventies. Since then, however, the literature of storytelling has gone into a pronounced eclipse and social-scientific study is now the principal scholarly game in town. This article questions the wisdom of this shift, almost seismic in its proportions, and argues that it is too soon to jump on the social science bandwagon. Discussion focuses to the uses made of the Prospect Theory of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky and the …