Sharing rules have a filtering effect on violations: they prevent the most harmful violations and let the least harmful ones occur. We show the conditions under which the filtering effect improves social welfare and argue that this may explain why, in most areas of the law, sharing rules are, in...

Although a punishment can be applied only once, the threat to punish can be repeated several times. This is possible because when parties comply, the punishment is not applied and can thus be used to support a new threat. We refer to this feature of sticks as the "multiplication effect." The...

Tort law is generally considered to be an instrument that improves incentives. Yet many people and groups (including firefighters and police officers) enjoy some form of immunity. I show that those who enjoy immunity typically externalize the precaution costs to some degree. I analyze an...

Abstract Introduction to the special issue on the Kauffman Foundation Conference on Intellectual Property and Innovation, held at St. Louis (USA) on April 2-3, 2009. This conference was organized by the Center on Law, Innovation and Economic Growth of the Washington University School of Law, and...