Amicus Brief submitted to the California Supreme Court in De La Torre v CashCall Inc., 5 Cal.5th 966 (Cal. 2018): The Ninth Circuit has asked this Court whether the interest rate on consumer loans of $2,500 or more can render the loans unconscionable under section 22302 of the California...

The aim of this work is to show how it is possible to identify market failures other than those traditionally identified by lawyers and law and economics scholars to justify the mandatory provisions of contracts between professionals and consumers and the equally mandatory provisions governing...

Public goods are dealt with in two literatures that neglect each other. Mechanism design advises a social planner that expects individuals to misrepresent their valuations. Experiments study the provision of the good when preferences might be non-standard. We introduce the problem of the...

Today marriage-based entitlements are considered part and parcel of marriage itself. This was not always the case. Mining hundreds of handwritten administrative records, executive branch reports, and federal statutes, this Article traces the origins of public marriage-based entitlements to an...

Explaining the evolution and maintenance of cooperation among unrelated individuals is one of the fundamental problems in biology and the social sciences. Recent experimental evidence suggests that altruistic punishment is an important mechanism to maintain cooperation among humans. In this...

This paper studies the application of the notion of secure implementation (Cason, Saijo, Sjöström, and Yamato, 2006; Saijo, Sjöström, and Yamato, 2007) to the problem of allocating indivisible objects with monetary transfers. We propose a new domain-richness condition, termed as minimal...

This paper examines the questions of who participates in the provision of a public good through the voluntary participation of agents in the presence of strong complementarity between a public good and a private good. We show that the greater the initial endowment of the private good that agents...

We propose the minimum approval mechanism (MAM) for a standard linear public good environment with two players. Players simultaneously and privately choose their contributions to the public good in the first stage. In the second stage, they simultaneously decide whether to approve the other's...

We consider a two group contest over a group specific public good where each member of a group has a different benefit from the good. Our model can be interpreted in two ways: Each of the players has a non-linear investment cost in the contest, or alternatively, the returns to effort are...

We consider a two group contest over a group specific public good comparing two situations: (i) when all players act independently; and (ii) when the players of each group cooperate. This comparison leads us to the conclusion that it is possible for one group to contribute more (and have a...