Evidence from an experiment investigating the "house money effect" in the context of a public goods game is reconsidered. Analysis is performed within the framework of the panel hurdle model, in which subjects are assumed to be one of two types: free-riders, and potential contributors. The...

In a full-information, zero transactions costs world, the degree of protection afforded to an entitlement does not affect the likelihood of efficient trade. In reality, imperfect information is often inevitable. Specifically, a party will usually have incomplete information about fairness norms...

In major legal orders such as UK, the U.S., Germany, and France, bribers and recipients face equally severe criminal sanctions. In contrast, countries like China, Russia, and Japan treat the briber more mildly. Given these differences between symmetric and asymmetric punishment regimes for...

Both in the US and in Europe, antitrust authorities prohibit merger not only if the merged entity, in and of itself, is no longer sufficiently controlled by competition. The authorities also intervene if, post merger, the market structure has changed such that tacit collusion becomes...

By its critics, the rational choice model is routinely accused of being unrealistic. One key objection has it that, for all nontrivial problems, calculating the best response is cognitively way too taxing, given the severe cognitive limitations of the human mind. If one confines the analysis to...

The European Community is about to enlarge its de facto constitution by a fundamental rights charter. It is intended to become legally binding, at least in the long run. If it is, it will profoundly change the political opportunity structure between the Community and its Member States, among the...

Regulation is almost a synonym for public law. Government, relying on its sovereign powers, intervenes into freedom for the sake of social betterment. Reality less and less coincides with this traditional picture. Regulation is increasingly replaced by private or hybrid governance, i.e., by...

Throughout history, people have suffered for the sake of their religion. Religious organisations have been forbidden or governments have tightly controlled them. The constitutional protection of freedom of religion is a necessity. In a religiously pluralistic world, granting the guarantee is...

Antitrust authorities all over the world are concerned if a particularly aggressive competitor, a "maverick", is bought out of the market. Yet there is a lack of theoretical justification. One plausible determinant of acting as a maverick is behavioral: the maverick derives utility from acting...

For a rational choice theorist, the absence of crime is more difficult to explain than its presence. Arguably, the expected value of criminal sanctions, i.e. the product of severity times certainty, is often below the expected benefit. We rely on a standard theory from behavioral economics,...