In the prisoners' dilemma game, the only evolutionary stable strategy is defection, even though nutual cooperation yields a higher payoff. Building on a paper by Robson (1990), we introduce mutants who have the ability to send a (costly) signal, i.e., the "secret handshake," before each round of...

This paper analyses lawyer's choices of law in international sales contracts. It identifies key reasons for opting in or out of the CISG across different jurisdictions. The paper then examines aspects of this choice from economic and psychological perspectives: from the ability to externalize...

This paper proposes a new framework to analyze the behavior of quot;public advocatesquot;, defined as professionals who seek to influence public policy on behalf of the public interest. Using the framework, it describes systemic pressures that lead public advocates to overuse adversarial,...

Why do lawyers in some jurisdictions continue to ‘automatically’ exclude the 1980 UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG) in their choices of law for international sales contracts? Why do lawyers in other jurisdictions approach the decision very differently? Why...

A feasible social state is irreducible if and only if, for any non-trivial partition of individuals into two groups, there exists another feasible social state at which every individual in the first group is equally well-off and someone strictly better-off. Competitive equilibria decentralize...

Despite burgeoning as a field of study, and despite receiving substantial attention outside of academia – now – Justice Sotomayor’s “empathy” kerfuffle as the most prominent example – law and emotions has received little treatment as a unified field. A book-length treatment a decade...

How can we maximize the common good? This is a central organizing question of public policy design, across political parties and ideologies. The answer typically involves the provisioning of public goods such as fresh air, national defense, and knowledge. Public goods are costly to produce but...

This chapter reviews the theory of the voluntary public and private redistribution of wealth elaborated by economic analysis in the last forty years or so. The central object of the theory is altruistic gift-giving, construed as benevolent voluntary redistribution of income or wealth. The theory...

We adapt the method used by Jaynes to derive the equilibria of statistical physics to instead derive equilibria of bounded rational game theory. We analyze the dependence of these equilibria on the parameters of the underlying game, focusing on hysteresis effects. In particular, we show that by...

A social state is irreducible if, and only if for any non-trivial partition of individuals with two groups, there exists another feasible social state at which every individual in the first group is equally well-off and someone strictly better-off. Competitive equilibria decentralize irreducible...