Sanctions are often so weak that a money maximizing individual would not be deterred. In this paper I show that they may nonetheless serve a forward looking purpose if sufficiently many individuals are averse against advantageous inequity. Using the Fehr/Schmidt model (QJE 1999) I define three...

To explore damage rules’ deterrent effect, we use a public good experiment to tailor allowable punishment to rules used in actual civil litigation. The experimental treatments are analogous to: (1) damages limited to harm to an individual litigant, (2) damages limited to harm to a group...

This article shows that it may be socially optimal to grant accident victims less than full compensation. In our framework, firms are liable under product liability but also invest in care to prevent consumers switching to competitors. Affecting the partition of consumers by means of care-taking...

In the policy debate, intellectual property is often justified by what seems to be a straightforward argument: if innovators are not protected against others appropriating their ideas, incentives for innovation are suboptimally low. Now in most industries for most potential users, appropriating...

Policymakers all over the world claim: no innovation without protection. For more than a century, critics have objected that the case for intellectual property is far from clear. This paper uses a game theoretic model to organise the debate. It is possible to model innovation as a prisoner's...

The human mind is not a general problem solving machine. Instead of deliberately, consciously and serially processing the available information, men can rely on routines, rules, roles or affect for the purpose. They can bring in technology, experts or groups. For all of these reasons, men have a...

What is the impact of firm entry regulation on sustained entry into self-employment? How does firm entry regulation influence the performance of long-living entrants? In this paper, I address these questions by exploiting a natural experiment in firm entry regulation. After German reunification,...

Originally, behavioral law and economics was an exercise in exploring the implications of key findings from behavioral economics (and psychology) for the analysis and reform of legal institutions. Yet as the new discipline matures, it increasingly replaces foreign evidence by fresh evidence,...

This paper explores potential endowment effects of contractual default rules. For this purpose, we analyze the Hadley liability default clause in a model of bilateral bargaining of lotteries against safe options. The liability default clause determines the right for the safe payoff option. We...

The market for law professors fulfils the conditions for a hog cycle: in the short run, supply cannot be extended or limited; future law professors must be hired soon after they first present themselves, or leave the market; demand is inelastic. Using a comprehensive German dataset, we show that...