Economic analysis has had a powerful influence on legal theory and policymaking. Based on the premise that people are rational maximizers of their own utility, economic analysis has a fairly successful record in correctly predicting human behavior in all spheres of life. This success is...

Welfare economics—the normative branch of economics—is a consequentialist moral theory. Unlike deontological morality, at least in its basic form it attributes no intrinsic value to prohibitions on active or intentional harming of other people, lying, or promise breaking, and does not allow...

This is a draft entry for the Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy. It provides a bird's-eye view of behavioral economics, its impact on legal theory and policy, its implications, and the critique leveled against it

In our book, Law, Economics, and Morality (OUP, 2010), we proposed to combine economic methodology and deontological morality through explicit incorporation of moral constraints into economic models. We argued that the normative flaws of economic analysis can be rectified without relinquishing...

This is the first chapter of a forthcoming book. It provides a systematic, up-to-date overview of the psychological phenomenon of loss aversion (LA), including a brief historical account, description of Prospect Theory and its critique, empirical evidence of LA, and the role of emotions in LA....

In the past few decades, economic analysis of law has been challenged by a growing body of experimental and empirical studies that attest to prevalent and systematic deviations from the assumptions of economic rationality. While the findings on bounded rationality and heuristics and biases were...

Why is tort law much more developed than unjust enrichment law? Is there a reason for the very different legal treatment of governmental takings and governmental givings? Why are contract remedies structured around the four ‘interests’ and why is the disgorgement interest only marginally...

This is a chapter of our book titled Law, Economics, and Morality (OUP, 2010), in which we propose to integrate threshold deontological constraints (and options) with cost-benefit analysis, thus combining economic methodology with moderate (threshold) deontological morality. This chapter...

Prospect theory posits that people perceive outcomes as gains or losses in relation to some reference point. People are generally loss averse: the disutility generated by a loss is greater than the utility produced by a commensurate gain. Chapter 6 of the book argues that loss aversion can...