Despite the advances in New Institutional Economics about the economic consequences of institutions and legal rules, up to now we have only limited knowledge about the mechanisms of the evolution of law. By combining the main ideas of Evolutionary Economics and New Institutional Economics this...

The rapid expansion of sharing economy platforms has generated enormous controversy. Law and the "Sharing Economy" closely examines the challenges that arise from this phenomenon with regard to labour, market, technology and regulation through a legal and interdisciplinary lens. The controversy...

Judges become ambitious decision makers when they face appellate review. This paper applies a contract theoretic perspective to the behavior of self-interested trial judges in a twolevel court system and analyzes the consequences for contracting in “the shadow of” the court. Confronted with...

When investments are nonverifiable, inducing cooperative investments with simple contracts may not be as difficult as previously thought. Indeed, modeling "expectation damages" close to legal practice, we show that the default remedy of contract law induces the first best. Yet, in order to lower...

Contract law and the economics of contract have, for the most part, developed independently of each other. In this essay, we briefly review the notion of a contract from the perspective of lawyer, and then use this framework to organize the economics literature on contract. The title, Contracts...

The majority of American jurisdictions do not allow punitive damages for breach of contract unless the breach constitutes an independent tort. Increasingly, courts and commentators have relied on the theory of “efficient breach” to explain the rule against punitive damages in contracts. In...