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...

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...

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...

From public lands to beaches and to data, our society is rich with resources purposefully kept in the public domain. Common resources provide profound economic, social, and democratic value to individuals, communities, and society as a whole. These, however, depend on the public’s ability to...

Is it lawful for a professional sports league to punish an executive of a team when that executive isn’t employed by the league and, unlike a player, isn’t a member of a union that collectively bargains with the league? The answer to this question has long been presumed as “yes,” despite...

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...

Canada’s common law of contract has seen years of theory, advocacy, and vaguer musings concretized in the form of a new organizing principle of good faith.This is established in the case of Bhasin v. Hrynew. The meaning of this organizing principle is now up for grabs. If good faith aims to...

Teams are formed because input from different people is needed. Providing incentives to team members, however, can be diffcult. According to received wisdom, declaring all members responsible fails because real responsibility for team output "diffuses". But why? And why and when does formally...

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...