Most apparent differences between US and continental law lose their relevance once one looks beneath the doctrinal surface and checks how doctrine plays itself out in concrete cases. One of the few exceptions is standards of proof. Not only distinguishes US law between "preponderance of the...

We analyse the Swedish general elections that took place in spring and autumn 1887. Our aim is to discover which groups of voters were responsible for the severe losses that the supporters of free trade suffered in the second of these contests, and that allowed the protectionists to gain the...

We study whether a firm that produces and sells access to an excludable public good should face a self-financing requirement, or, alternatively, receive subsidies that help to cover the cost of public-goods provision. The main result is that the desirability of a self-financing requirement is...

The market for copyrights is characterised by a highly skewed distribution of profits: very few movies, books and songs generate huge profits, whereas the great bulk barely manages to recover production cost. At the moment when the owner of intellectual property grants a licence (“ex ante”),...

Carpenter and Matthews (2009) examine the cooperation norms determining people's punishment behavior in a social-dilemma game. Their findings are striking: absolute norms outperform the relative norms commonly regarded as the determinants of punishment. Using multiple punishment stages and...

We provide a simple proof of the equivalence between ex ante and ex post budget balance constraints in Bayesian mechanism design with independent types when participation decisions are made at the interim stage. The result is given an interpretation in terms of efficient allocation of risk.

Rational choice approaches to customary international law have gained in prominence in recent years. Although becoming increasingly sophisticated, they are not able to explain all phenomena of customary international law. This contribution claims that there are two different types of unwritten...

This paper studies a decentralized, dynamic matching and bargaining market: buyers and sellers are matched into pairs. Traders exit the market at a constant rate, inducing search costs (frictions). All price offers are made by sellers. Despite the fact that sellers have all the bargaining power...

We analyze the effects of ostracism on cooperation in a linear public good experiment. Our results show that introducing ostracism increases contributions. Despite reductions in group size due to ostracism, the net effect on earnings is positive and significant.

This article reports on a field study that has been conducted in the online computer game World of Warcraft. In a basic labor situation a principal gives an upfront wage to an agent (who is unaware that he is participating in an experiment) and asks him to conduct a real-effort task. The unique...