The Rule of Reason, which has come to dominate modern antitrust law, allows defendants the opportunity to justify their conduct by demonstrating “procompetitive” effects. Seizing the opportunity, defendants have begun offering increasingly numerous and creative explanations for their...

How do individuals process non-diagnostic information? According to Bayes’ Theorem, signals which do not carry relevant information about the objective state of the world are treated as if no signal occurred. This paper provides experimental evidence that individuals update their expectations...

We combine the Critical Cost Efficiency Index and the Houtman Maks Index to evaluate the consistency of subjects in a set of choice data from budgets. We show that by simply allowing subjects for one significant mistake (by removing the worst observation), the mean Critical Cost Efficiency Index...

The response to the covid pandemic has varied widely across countries and over time. In this paper, we analyze the determinants of covid restrictions both theoretically and empirically. Consistent with our model’s predictions, we find that the covid protocol is particularly sensitive to the...

In the estimation of the benefits of mortality reduction, a simple approach is to multiply the value of a statistical life (VSL) by the expected reduction in fatalities, thus holding the VSL constant. This procedure approximates benefits for small changes in mortality, but inaccurately...

Private firms often withhold information or contest scientific knowledge when public revelation could lead to costly regulations or liability. This concealment leads to negative externalities and public harm. But what if private firms' superior knowledge and self-interest could be harnessed to...

This paper discusses three alternative assumptions concerning household preferences (altruism, self-interest, and a desire for dynasty building) and shows that these assumptions have very different implications for bequest motives and bequest division. After reviewing some of the literature on...

In this paper, I analyze a variety of evidence for Japan and, where available, for the United States on bequest practices, on the importance and nature of bequest motives, on bequest division, on the willingness of individuals to help others, etc., in order to shed light on which model of...

This chapter is concerned with the distribution of personal wealth, which usually refers to the material assets that can be sold in the marketpace, although on occasion pension rights are also included. We summarise the available evidence on wealth distribution for a number of countries. This...

In this study, we propose a stochastic choice model to identify the motivations of prosocial behavior. We focus on the role of inequity aversion in outcome-based preferences and the shame of acting selfishly in social concerns. We employ an additively perturbed utility model to social...