Law Commons^™

Provisional Measures In Aid Of Arbitration, Ronald A. Brand

Articles

The success of the New York Convention has made arbitration a preferred means of dispute resolution for international commercial transactions. Success in arbitration often depends on the extent to which a party may secure assets, evidence, or the status quo between parties prior to the completion of the arbitration process. This makes the availability of provisional measures granted by either arbitral tribunals or by courts fundamental to the arbitration. In this Article, I consider the existing legal framework for provisional measures in aid of arbitration, with particular attention to the sources of the rules providing for such measures. Those sources …

Leases As Forms, David A. Hoffman, Anton Strezhnev

All Faculty Scholarship

We offer the first large scale descriptive study of residential leases, based on a dataset of ~170,000 residential leases filed in support of over ~200,000 Philadelphia eviction proceedings from 2005 through 2019. These leases are highly likely to contain unenforceable terms, and their pro-landlord tilt has increased sharply over time. Matching leases with individual tenant characteristics, we show that unlawful terms are surprisingly likely to be associated with more expensive leaseholds in richer, whiter parts of the city. This result is linked to landlords' growing adoption of shared forms, originally created by non-profit landlord associations, and more recently available online …

Contractual Arbitrage, Stephen J. Choi, G. Mitu Gulati, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

Standard-form contracts are likely to be incomplete because they are not tailored to the needs of particular deals. In an attempt to reduce incompleteness, standard-form contracts often contain clauses with vague or ambiguous terms. Terms with indeterminate meaning present opportunities for strategic behavior well after a contract has been executed. This linguistic uncertainty in standard-form commercial contracts creates an opportunity for “contractual arbitrage”: parties may argue ex post that the uncertainties in expression mean something that the contracting parties did not contemplate ex ante. This chapter argues that the scope for contractual arbitrage is a direct function of the techniques …

The Behavioral Economics Of Multilevel Marketing, Heidi H. Liu

All Faculty Scholarship

Multilevel marketing companies (MLMs) - sales organizations that compensate independent consultants based on the sales and recruitment of other consultants - form a significant part of the American economy. Yet, MLMs provide little information to regulators and potential participants regarding potentially material information. Although MLMs are often compared to pyramid schemes, consultants argue that participation in a MLM allows them to make money outside of the traditional full-time labor force. This paper examines the law, economics, and psychology of MLMs, suggesting that MLMs may draw on prospective consultants' cognitive biases in persuading consultants to join and continue a MLM. Consultants …

The Common Sense Of Contract Formation, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan, David A. Hoffman

All Faculty Scholarship

What parties know and think they know about contract law affects their obligations under the law and their intuitive obligations toward one another. Drawing on a series of new experimental questionnaire studies, this Article makes two contributions.First, it lays out what information and beliefs ordinary individuals have about how to form contracts with one another. We find that the colloquial understanding of contract law is almost entirely focused on formalization rather than actual assent, though the modern doctrine of contract formation takes the opposite stance. The second Part of the Article tries to get at whether this misunderstanding matters. Is …

Demand For Breach, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan

All Faculty Scholarship

These studies elicit behavioral evidence for how people weigh monetary and non-monetary incentives in efficient breach. Study 1 is an experimental game designed to capture the salient features of the efficient breach decision. Subjects in a behavioral lab were offered different amounts of money to break the deal they had made with a partner. 18.6% of participants indicated willingness to break a deal for any amount of profit, 27.9% were unwilling to breach for the highest payout, and the remaining subjects identified a break-point in between. Study 2 is an online questionnaire asking subjects to take the perspectives of buyers …

From Pigs To Hogs, Stephen J. Choi, Mitu Gulati

Faculty Scholarship

The question of whether, and to what extent, markets price contract terms in government bond issues has been one of considerable debate in the literature. We use a natural experiment thrown up by the Euro area sovereign debt crisis of 2010-2013 to test whether a particular set of contract terms – ones that gave an advantage to sovereign guaranteed bonds over garden variety sovereign bonds – was priced. These contract terms turned out to be important for the holders of guaranteed bonds during the Greek debt restructuring of 2012, where they helped the holders of guaranteed bonds escape the haircut …

The Psychology Of Contract Precautions, David A. Hoffman, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan

All Faculty Scholarship

This research tests the intuition that parties to a contract approach each other differently before the contract is formed than they do once it is finalized. We argue that one of the most important determinants of self-protective behavior is whether the promisee considers herself to be in negotiations or already in an ongoing contract relationship. That shift affects precaution-taking even when it has no practical bearing on the costs and benefits of self-protection: the moment of contracting is a reference point that frames the costs and benefits of taking precautions. We present the results of three questionnaire studies in which …

United States Sovereign Debt: A Thought Experiment On Default And Restructuring, Charles W. Mooney Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

This chapter adopts the working assumption that it is conceivable that at some time in the future it would be in the interest of the United States to restructure its sovereign debt (i.e., to reduce the principal amount). It addresses in particular U.S. Treasury Securities. The chapter first provides an overview of the intermediated, tiered holding system for book-entry Treasuries. For the first time the chapter then explores whether and how—logistically and legally—such a restructuring could be effected. It posits the sort of dire scenario that might make such a restructuring advantageous. It then outlines a novel scheme …

A Moral Contractual Approach To Labor Law Reform: A Template For Using Ethical Principles To Regulate Behavior Where Law Failed To Do So Effectively, Zev J. Eigen, David S. Sherwyn

Faculty Working Papers

If laws cease to work as they should or as intended, legislators and scholars propose new laws to replace or amend them. This paper posits an alternative—offering regulated parties the opportunity to contractually bind themselves to behave ethically. The perfect test-case for this proposal is labor law, because (1) labor law has not been amended for decades, (2) proposals to amend it have failed for political reasons, and are focused on union election win rates, and less on the election process itself, (3) it is an area of law already statutorily regulating parties' reciprocal contractual obligations, and (4) moral means …

Do Liquidated Damages Encourage Breach? A Psychological Experiment, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article offers experimental evidence that parties are more willing to exploit efficient-breach opportunities when the contract in question includes a liquidated-damages clause. Economists claim that the theory of efficient breach allows us to predict when parties will choose to breach a contract if the legal remedy for breach is expectation damages. However, the economic assumption of rational wealth-maximizing actors fails to capture important, shared, nonmonetary values and incentives that shape behavior in predictable ways. When interpersonal obligations are informal or underspecified, people act in accordance with shared community norms, like the moral norm of keeping promises. However, when sanctions …

Breach Is For Suckers, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan, David A. Hoffman

All Faculty Scholarship

This paper presents results from three experiments offering evidence that parties see breach of contract as a form of exploitation, making disappointed promisees into “suckers.” In psychology, being a sucker turns on a three-part definition: betrayal, inequity, and intention. We used web-based questionnaires to test the effect of each of the three factors separately. Our results support the hypothesis that when breach of contract cues an exploitation schema, people become angry, offended, and inclined to retaliate even when retaliation is costly. This theory offers a useful advance insofar it explains why victims of breach demand more than similarly situated tort …

The Economics Of Deal Risk: Allocating Risk Through Mac Clauses In Business Combination Agreements, Robert T. Miller

Working Paper Series

In any large corporate acquisition, there is a delay between the time the parties enter into a merger agreement (the signing) and the time the merger is effected and the purchase price paid (the closing). During this period, the business of one of the parties may deteriorate. When this happens to a target company in a cash deal, or to either party in a stock-for-stock deal, the counterparty may no longer want to consummate the transaction. The primary contractual protection parties have in such situations is the merger agreement’s “material adverse change” (MAC) clause. Such clauses are heavily negotiated and …

Using The Unidroit Principles To Fill Gaps In The Cisg, John Y. Gotanda

Working Paper Series

The United Nations Convention on the International Sale of Goods (CISG) sets forth only a basic framework for the recovery of damages, thereby giving a court of tribunal broad authority to determine an aggrieved party’s loss based on circumstances of the particular case. Unfortunately, the lack of specificity has resulted in much litigation, and seemingly conflicting results. To remedy this problem, some have argued that the gaps in the CISG damages provisions should be filled with the UNIDROIT Principles of International Commercial Contracts. In this paper, I argue that the gap-filling rules of CISG preclude the UNIDROIT Principles from being …

It’S Not About The Money: The Role Of Preferences, Cognitive Biases And Heuristics Among Professional Athletes, Michael Mccann

Law Faculty Scholarship

Professional athletes are often regarded as selfish, greedy, and out-of-touch with regular people. They hire agents who are vilified for negotiating employment contracts that occasionally yield compensation in excess of national gross domestic products. Professional athletes are thus commonly assumed to most value economic remuneration, rather than the love of the game or some other intangible, romanticized inclination.

Lending credibility to this intuition is the rational actor model, a law and economic precept which presupposes that when individuals are presented with a set of choices, they rationally weigh costs and benefits, and select the course of action that maximizes their …

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

All Faculty Scholarship

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 …

Credible Coercion, Oren Bar-Gill, Omri Ben-Shahar

Law & Economics Working Papers Archive: 2003-2009

The ideal of individual liberty and autonomy requires that society provide relief against coercion. In the law, this requirement is often translated into rules that operate “post-coercion” to undo the legal consequences of acts and promises extracted under duress. This Article argues that these ex-post anti-duress measures, rather than helping the coerced party, might in fact hurt her. When coercion is credible—when a credible threat to inflict an even worse outcome underlies the surrender of the coerced party—ex post relief will only induce the strong party to execute the threatened outcome, to the detriment of the coerced party. Anti-duress relief …

"Agreeing To Disagree": Filling Gaps In Deliberately Incomplete Contracts, Omri Ben-Shahar

Law & Economics Working Papers Archive: 2003-2009

This Article develops a new standard for gap filling in incomplete contracts. It focuses on an important class of situations in which parties leave their agreement deliberately incomplete, with the intent to further negotiate and resolve the remaining issues. In these situations, neither the traditional no-enforcement result nor the usual gap filling approaches accord with the parties’ partial consent. Instead, the Article develops the concept of pro-defendant gap-fillers, under which each party is granted an option to enforce the transaction supplemented with terms most favorable (within reason) to the other party. A deliberately incomplete contract with pro-defendant gap fillers transforms …

Valuation Averaging: A New Procedure For Resolving Valuation Disputes, Keith Sharfman

Rutgers Law School (Newark) Faculty Papers

In this Article, Professor Sharfman addresses the problem of "discretionary valuation": that courts resolve valuation disputes arbitrarily and unpredictably, thus harming litigants and society. As a solution, he proposes the enactment of "valuation averaging," a new procedure for resolving valuation disputes modeled on the algorithmic valuation processes often agreed to by sophisticated private firms in advance of any dispute. He argues that by replacing the discretion of judges and juries with a mechanical valuation process, valuation averaging would cause litigants to introduce more plausible and conciliatory valuations into evidence and thereby reduce the cost of valuation litigation and increase the …

The Functions Of Transaction Costs: Rethinking Transaction Cost Minimization In A World Of Friction, David M. Driesen, Shubha Ghosh

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

This article critically examines the goal of minimizing transaction costs, including the costs of legal decision-making. This goal permeates the law and economics literature and has profoundly influenced public policy. While most transaction cost scholarship has focused upon private law, this influence has been especially pervasive in public law, where it has contributed to a variety of legal changes aimed at reducing public transaction costs, often through privatization.

We argue that transaction costs perform useful functions. They frequently enable those engaging in transactions to obtain information needed to correct for information asymmetries or inadequate information. They facilitate efficient transactions, allow …

Sovereign Bonds And The Collective Will, Lee C. Buchheit, G. Mitu Gulati

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A Contractual Approach To Data Privacy, Stephanos Bibas

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The "Nexus Of Contracts" Corporation: A Critical Appraisal, William W. Bratton

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.