In a pair of studies, we examine lay people's judgments about how hypothetical cases involving child custody after divorce should be resolved. The respondents were citizens called to jury service in Pima County, AZ. Study 1 found that both male and female respondents, if they were the judge,...

Nearly all American states use one of two systems for setting the amount of child support that noncustodial parents (NCPs) are required to pay to custodial parents (CPs). In previous work we found that lay judgments of the child support amount the law should require differ in meaningful ways...

The states differ substantially among themselves as to what their guideline systems specify about reducing child support awards as a function of the division of parenting time after divorce. Most adopt a “cliff-model”, whereby no reductions are accorded until the parenting time to the...

In a public-goods game, a variant of the social dilemma, 126 subjects made choices. In an attempt to better represent real-world communication possibilities, two conditions were created. In the subgroup communication condition, subjects were divided into subgroups. Discussion was allowed within...

Legal rules are often understood as setting the appropriate balance between competing claims. One might expect policymakers to identify these competing claims and employ a systematic and comprehensive analysis to assign them relative values, and to generate legal rules that follow from those...

Information was given subjects in the five experimental conditions about how their opponent-to-be in a forthcoming Prisoner's Dilemma game had played and fared in a game played previously. The information implied that the opponent-to-be had (1) played in a mutually cooperative game; (2) behaved...

To understand the issues involved, leading lawyers and economists examine various facets of the child support system from a law and economics perspective. They consider the incentives faced by both custodial and non-custodial parents, and search for policy actions that are more...