In the US, law and economics is so well established that many law schools have given up on a separate law and economics course. It seems obvious that economic theory matters for the interpretation and the evolution of the law. More recently, the empirical law movement has been gaining momentum...

Privacy law relies on the argument that consent does not entail any relevant impediments for the liberty of the consenting individual. Challenging this argument, we experimentally investigate whether consent to the publication of personal information in cyberspace entails self-coercion on a...

Consider legal uncertainty as uncertainty about the legality of a specific action. In particular, suppose that the threshold of legality is uncertain. I show that this legal uncertainty raises welfare. Legal uncertainty changes deterrence in opposite directions. The probability of conviction...

Eventually, all law is about sovereign intervention. But public law is distinct from private law in that intervention is not only subsidiary. And it is distinct from criminal law in that intervention is undertaken with the intention to govern. This explains that taming sovereign powers features...

To their credit, empirical legal scholars try to live up to the highest methodological standards from the social sciences. But these standards do not always match the legal research question. This paper focuses on normative legal argument based on empirical evidence. Whether there is a normative...

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...

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,...

Mutual disdain is an effective border patrol at the demarcation lines between disciplines. Social scientists tend to react with disdain when they observe how their findings are routinely stripped of all the caveats, assumptions and careful limitations once they travel into law. Likewise, lawyers...

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...

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" or "coordinated...