Environmental decisions made by individuals, civil society and the state involve questions of economic efficiency, environmental effectiveness, equity and political legitimacy. These four criteria are constitutive of economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainable development, which...

During the last three decades the ascent of behavioral economics clearly helped to bring down artificial disciplinary boundaries between psychology and economics. Noting that behavioral economics seems still under the spell of the rational choice tradition and, indirectly, of behaviorism we...

Vorwort: Nach der Jahrestagung der VÖÖ zum Thema „Ökologische Ökonomie: eine neue Wissenschaft?“, die vom 6. bis 8. Mai 2004 in gewohnter Umgebung in Heidelberg stattfand, waren wir uns im Vorstand sehr schnell einig, daß die durchweg spannenden und zum Weiterdenken anregenden Beiträge...

Gesellschaftstheoretiker wie der Soziologe Niklas Luhmann machen darauf aufmerksam, dass es in der modernen Gesellschaft zu systematischen Diskrepanzen zwischen Semantik und Sozialstruktur kommt. Solche Diskrepanzen – also Fälle, in denen Sozialstruktur und Semantik nicht zueinander passen...

The paper shows that Legal Cost Insurance (LCI) is a device to enhance potential litigants? bargaining position rather than to re-allocate risk. Being insured decreases the cost an insured party has to bear if settlement negotiations fail and the case goes to trial. This shifts the threat...

The paper provides a comprehensive survey of the economics behind the fight against hard core cartels. Differentiating between four subsequent stages - characterisation, welfare effects, enforcement and evaluation - the paper pays particular attention to cartel detection methods, the derivation...

A simple auction-theoretic framework is used to examine symmetric litigation environments where the legal ownership of a disputed asset is unknown to the court. The court observes only the quality of the case presented by each party, and awards the asset to the party presenting the best case....