Institutions are governance tools. They are useful only if they impact on behaviour: of citizens, and of those administering the legal system. Models of behaviour are therefore crucial for institutional analysis and design. In light of this, this paper draws lessons for institutional analysis...

The title of this chapter is deliberately provocative. Intuitively, many will be inclined to see conscious control of mental process as a good thing. Yet control comes at a high price. The consciously not directly controlled, automatic, parallel processing of information is not only much faster,...

Jury members do not normally have the privilege of a complete, unbiased picture of the case. To make the best of patently incomplete evidence, they cannot but at least partially rely on their intuition. We provide evidence for this claim based on self-report data as well as more subtle measures...

Hardly any antitrust lawyer would deny that antitrust needs solid foundations in economics. Antitrust authorities hire economists, if they do not even haven the position of a chief economist. Antitrust not only capitalises on economic theory, but it is equally sensitive to empirical studies, be...

Cooperation problems are at the heart of many everyday situations. In this paper, we propose a very simple and light-handed mechanism to sustain cooperation and test its performance in a rich laboratory environment. The mechanism moderates cooperation by controlling experiences, more...

In two experiments we studied the effects of behavioral models on routine deviation decisions in observers. Participants repeatedly chose among four card-deck lotteries together with a human model (confederate, Exp. 1) or a non-human model (computer, Exp. 2) that made correct decisions in the...

Customary law has been criticized from very different angles. Rational choice theorists claim that what looks like custom is nothing but self-interest. Positivists doubt that anything beyond consent assumes the force of law. In this paper, we adopt an experimental approach to test these claims....

Legal realists expect prosecutors to be selfish. If they get the defendant convicted, this helps them advance their careers. If the odds of winning on the main charge are low, prosecutors have a second option. They can exploit the ambiguity of legal doctrine and charge the defendant for vaguely...