This chapter, written for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Law and Economics (Francesco Parisi, ed.) draws a general picture of the differences between carrots and sticks. We discuss incentives effects (in principle, a $100 carrot creates the same incentives as a $100 stick, but there are...

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...

Under American or Dutch law, employees who leave the firm earlier than expected do not have to compensate the employer for lost profits in most cases. This conflicts with the general view in law and economics scholarship that the expectation measure is the superior remedy. We argue that the...

This short chapter, written for The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics and the Law (1998), offers an economic analysis of quasi contracts, in their broad, civil-law definition. All quasi-contractual exchanges can be seen as coerced transactions between private parties, either in the form of...

This working paper contains the introduction and first chapter of a forthcoming book on the relationship between marketing and inequality. I argue that the dramatic rise of income inequality since 1970 has largely been caused by advances in marketing. Marketers have become better at creating and...