Économie et ordre juridique de l'espace virtuel

The aim of this paper is to determine the legal regulation adapted to the development of Internet. We show that the law and economics model is partially transposable in cyberspace legal order. Starting from the statement of similarity between real and virtual world judicial problems, we explain the coexistence of the property rules and the liability rules. From a normative point of view, transaction costs importance and information asymmetries are the major determinants of the efficiency of each type of rule. However, because of the Internet technological and geographical characteristics, implementation of these rules raise specific problems. As cyberspace does not know about legal borders, some obstacles exist to the (centralized) regulation by courts charged to apply legal rules. Following, the paper studies the opportunity of a decentralized application with private jurisdictions and concludes with a discussion concerning the relevance from the reference to the lex mercatoria for the construction of the Internet legal order. Classification JEL : K10, L86