Many observers suggest that American citizens sue more readily than citizens elsewhere, and that American judges shape society more powerfully than judges elsewhere. We examine the problems involved in exploring these questions quantitatively. The data themselves indicate that American law’s...

Under the doctrine of shareholder primacy, the duty of a corporate director is to act for the benefit of the shareholders. This is not the same as profit maximization. It is only the same if shareholders care about profit and nothing else. The current Hobby Lobby case regarding a corporation’s...

Antitrust scholars have come to accept the basic ideas about exclusive dealing that Bork articulated in The Antitrust Paradox. Indeed, they have even extended his list of reasons why exclusive dealing can promote economic efficiency. Yet they have also taken up his challenge to explain how...

The Klein-Leffler model explains how the benefit of future reputation can induce firms to produce high quality experience goods, either in a monopoly or an industry with competing firms. We show that reputation can be leveraged across products, but only by a firm with a monopoly on at least one...

We show that if and only if a real-valued function f is strictly quasiconcave except possibly for a at interval at its maximum, and furthermore belongs to an explicitly determined regularity class, does there exist a strictly monotonically increasing function g such that g o f is strictly...

Certifiers of quality often report only coarse grades to the public despite having measured quality more finely, e.g., "Pass" or "Certified" instead of "73 out of 100". Why? We show that coarse grades result in more information being provided to the public because the coarseness encourages those...

Under certain circumstance, a relaxation in occupational licensing standards can increase the quality of those who enter the industry. The effect turns on the opportunity costs of preparing for the licensing examination: making the test easier can increase the quality of those passing if it...

Consider a Bertrand model in which each firm may be inactive with a known probability, so the number of active firms is uncertain. This simple model has a mixed-strategy equilibrium in which industry profits are positive and decline with the number of firms, the same features which make the...