Lawyers' Contingent Fee (CF) rates are rather uniform, often one-third of the recovery. Arguably, this uniformity is a type of anti-competitive price-fixing, which results in clients paying supra-competitive fees. This paper challenges this argument. It shows that uniform CF rates provide...

Legal economists and other theoreticians continuously debate the pros and cons of specific performance as a remedy for breach of contract; and comparative-law scholars debate the extent to which legal systems actually diverge on this issue. Very few studies have used qualitative methods,...

Building on Kahneman and Tversky's Prospect Theory, this paper presents a series of experiments designed to reveal people's preferences regarding attorneys' fees. Contrary to common economic wisdom, it demonstrates that loss aversion (rather than risk aversion or incentivizing the lawyer to win...

The law often lays down mandatory rules, from which the parties may deviate in favor of one party but not the other. Examples include the invalidation of high liquidated damages and the unenforceability of excessive non-compete clauses in employment contracts. In these cases, the law may...

The basic rule in civil litigation is that the plaintiff carries the burden of proof and the general standard of proof is preponderance of the evidence. The plaintiff prevails if she establishes her case with a probability exceeding 0.5. Drawing on insights from behavioral economics and new...

The market for legal services, and particularly lawyers' Contingent Fee (CF) arrangements, have been extensively studied from legal, economic and sociological standpoints, but curiously not from a behavioral perspective. Building on Kahneman and Tversky's Prospect Theory, this paper presents a...

This chapter, forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of Behavioral Economics and the Law, critically reviews the behavioral literature on judicial decisionmaking. Among other things, it presents general theories of judicial decisionmaking, such as the story model and coherence-based reasoning. It...

תקציר בעברית: רשימה זו סוקרת באורח ביקורתי את ההישגים של הניתוח ההתנהגותי (ביהביוראלי) של החלטות שיפוטיות ואת האתגרים הניצבים בפני המחקר בתחום זה. בין היתר, הרשימה...

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...