Private law theory must confront the plurality of values that inform the problems that private law addresses in practice. We consider Hanoch Dagan's and Michael Heller's The Choice Theory of Contracts as a case-study in the promise and perils that embracing plural values poses for private law...

The expectation interest remedy requires the promisor to transfer a sum equal to the promisee's expected gain from performance if the promisor reallocates her resources to another use. The theory of efficient breach justifies the remedy because the promisor will either perform, when the...

We defend contract law’s preference to protect the expectation with a liability rule against prominent doctrinal and moral critics who argue that a promisee should have a right to specific performance or to a restitutionary remedy. These critics argue that liability rule protection limited to...

Much contemporary discussion of “the market” assumes that markets have a true nature or immanent logic. In fact, however, markets arise and operate through law, so that no particular market structure is inevitable and every market order is the result of a complex set of legal and political...

Economic thought has in recent years increasingly departed from the paradigm of narrow self-interestedness to take up other-regarding preferences. We study one class of such preferences - individual preferences for giving. We use graphical representations of modified Dictator Games that vary the...

Proportional representation is often thought a democratic ideal. But whatever proportional representation's virtues in ordinary politics, it is poorly suited to sustaining democratic legitimacy in what might, speaking loosely, be called constitutional politics. Proportional representation may...

We report a laboratory experiment that enables us to distinguish preferences for altruism (concerning tradeoffs between own payoffs and the payoffs of others) from social preferences (concerning tradeoffs between the payoffs of others). By using graphical representations of three-person Dictator...

This paper reports a rigorous experimental test of Pareto-damaging behaviors. We introduce a new graphical representation of dictator games with step-shaped sets of feasible payoffs to persons self and other on which strongly Pareto efficient allocations involve substantial inequality. The...

Behavioral economics—arising from the insight that people make recognizable, systematic mistakes—has revolutionized policymaking. For example, in governments around the world, including the US, teams of experts have recently arisen to harness these insights, promising to do things like...

The law of contracts, at least in its orthodox expression, concerns voluntary, or chosen, legal obligations. When Brody accepts Susan’s offer to sell him a canoe for a set price, the parties’ choices alter their legal rights and duties. Their success at changing the legal landscape depends...