The European Union is exploring a move toward harmonization in the form of a common commercial code (CESL), with some mandatory provisions especially with respect to consumer law, but alsoincorporating a large dose of business-to-business law that would be optional at the enterprise, rather than...

Bargaining is a fundamental characteristic of many markets and legal disputes, but it can be a source of inefficiency. Buyers often waste resources by searching for information about past prices, where a seller already holds that information. A second – and novel – source of social loss is...

Algorithms have found their way into courtrooms, college admission committees, and human resource departments. While defendants and other disappointed parties have challenged the use of algorithms on the basis of due process or similar objections, it should be expected that they will also...

Time is a lawmaking tool, and one that is available to all lawmakers. New law can be applied retroactively or prospectively, and it can be done so with a vengeance; a statute or judicial decision might apply only to events that took place before some past date or only to transactions in the...

This essay is a Review of Piketty's much-reviewed Capital in the Twenty-First Century. It discusses the strengths and weaknesses of Piketty's book, and then turns to discussion public pension plans (generally excluded from piety's data) as well as other publicly supplied goods. In the last Part,...

Some buyers might prefer not to haggle either because they recognize that the seller they face is likely to be a superior bargainer or because it is easier to comparison shop when prices are known and do not require an investment in transaction costs. Sellers, in turn, might appeal to these...

Prediction markets are markets for contracts that yield payments based on the outcome of an uncertain future event, such as a presidential election. Using these markets as forecasting tools could substantially improve decision making in the private and public sectors. We argue that U.S....

Many of the behavioral insights in economics arise out of experiments or examples in which the conventional claims of economics, and rational choice quite generally, are contradicted by observed results. The conventional view – that people and firms maximize utility and profit, and often do so...

Interest groups have played an important if unappreciated role in shaping intellectual property rights. As economies are driven by ideas, rather than manufactured goods, there is likely to be a reconfiguration of the incentives granted and withheld from innovators. The paper argues that prizes...