This paper uses the economic approach to address a recent legal quesiton involving self incrimination: what is the effect of allowing a defendant to waive his right to exclude statements he makes during plea bargaining from evidence at trial if plea bargaining fails? This was the issue in the...

Two central puzzles about social norms are now they are enforced and how they are created or modified. The sanctions for the violation of a norm can be categorized as automatic, guilt, shame, informational, bilateral-costly, and multilateral-costly. Problems in creating and modifying norms are...

Paradoxically, Eric Rasmusen argues that a fall in house prices might actually raise the wealth of homeowners.

Game Theory and the Law is a collection of previously published articles in which ideas from game theory and the economics of asymmetric information are applied to legal issues. Game theory’s method is to simplify a situation by describing it in terms of players, actions, payoffs, after which...