In rent-seeking contests, players are seldom identical to one another. In this chapter, we examine the rent-seeking literature that explores the effects of specific forms of asymmetry between contestants. We consider Tullock's rent-seeking contests involving two players who differ in strength...

This paper presents a general rent-seeking model in which participants decide on entry before choosing their levels of efforts. The conventional wisdom in the rent-seeking literature suggests that the rent dissipation increases with the number of potential participants and with their...

This paper studies markets plagued with asymmetric information on the quality of traded goods. In Akerlof's setting, sellers are better informed than buyers. In contrast, we examine cases where buyers are better informed than sellers. This creates an inverse adverse selection problem: The market...

Between 182 BC and 18 BC, Roman lawmakers enacted a series of sumptuary laws regulating banquets (including the number of guests and the consumption of specific foods). Enforcement was hardly successful and these regulations had to be reiterated over time. Traditional explanations based on...

Understanding the origins of formal and informal institutions of cooperation and regulation and their long-lasting impact on market exchange and technological investment is one of the most pressing questions in law, economics and history. Accordingly, despite the different angles considered by...

In this paper, we study the effects and desirability of legal rules that allow the sharing of an accident loss between a non-negligent injurer and his non-negligent victim. In order to identify the virtues and limits of loss-sharing rules, we begin by considering the effect of a loss-sharing...

There is a remarkable tendency in modern legal systems to increasingly use carrots. This trend is not limited to legal systems but can also be observed in, for instance, parenting styles, social control mechanisms, and even law schools' teaching methods. Yet, at first glance, sticks appear to be...

The analysis of tort law is one of the most well-developed applications of economic methodology in the study of law. In this essay, we provide an overview of the economic approach to tort law, analyzing the effects of liability rules on care incentives. We catalogue a variety of possible tort...

We show that formalizing private property rights has a positive effect on the propensity to respect the property of others, a social preference with important implications for growth and economic development. Our identification strategy is based on a unique feature of a recent large-scale...

The presence of multiple sellers in the provision of (nonsubstitutable) complementary goods leads to outcomes that are worse than those generated by a monopoly (with a vertically integrated production of complements), a problem known in the economic literature as complementary oligopoly and...