An agency conflict arises when consumers rely on middlemen for product recommendations. While consumers want the middlemen to recommend the most suitable product, the middlemen may earn a higher profit if the consumer buys some other product. An important setting where this conflict arises is...

Theories of the size of government focus on either the demand for government or the supply of tax revenues. Demand side theories such as those of Peltzman, Meltzer and Richard, Husted and Kenny, and Lott and Kenny are essentially political theories. They emphasize the role of voters or interest...

Evidence on the deterrent effect of capital punishment is important for many states that are currently reconsidering their position on the issue. We examine the deterrent hypothesis using county-level, post-moratorium panel data and a system of simultaneous equations. The procedure we employ...

Folk economics is the intuitive economics of untrained persons. It is concerned with distribution, and does not allow for or understand incentives. Folk economic notions evolved in our ancestors in circumstances where there was little in the way of specialization, division of labor, capital...

It was originally thought that the structure of the common law would not allow rent seeking. More recently, scholars have realized that there is room for rent seeking, and that attorneys are engaged in exactly this process. This rent seeking has led to a great increase in the scope of U.S. tort...

There is widespread emporiophobia (fear of markets) and this has important policy implications as it leads voters to demand anti-market policies. There are many reasons for this anti-market attitude. However, economists could reduce emporiophobia if we stressed cooperation rather than...

We analyze decision-making in a simple model of the judicial hierarchy. We assume that trial court judges are more concerned with ex post efficiency with respect to the individuals involved in the cases at hand, and less concerned with ex ante efficiency with respect to the precedents...

To change the law, an interest group must choose between lobbying the legislature and litigating for new precedent. Lobbying becomes more likely as the relative benefits from rule change become greater, as the costs of lobbying become smaller and as the voting strength of the interest groups...

Hayek was a firm believer in the effect of evolution on human behavior. This was a real advance since he wrote in a time when most social scientists believed in the “blank slate” ( Pinker, 2002 ) and denied the influence of biology on human actions. Moreover, Hayek got the basic outline of...