The expectation interest remedy requires the promisor to transfer a sum equal to the promisee's expected gain from performance if the promisor reallocates her resources to another use. The theory of efficient breach justifies the remedy because the promisor will either perform, when the...

We defend contract law’s preference to protect the expectation with a liability rule against prominent doctrinal and moral critics who argue that a promisee should have a right to specific performance or to a restitutionary remedy. These critics argue that liability rule protection limited to...

Promises and contracts establish relations among the persons who engage them, and these relations lie at the center of persons' moral and legal experience of one another. But in spite of the obviously communal character of promise and contract, the most prominent accounts of these practices...

Contract theorists approach value pluralism in three ways: (a) Capitulation: the theorist shows how a single value – e.g., efficiency or community – explains a rule or an area and implies normative recommendations; (b) Leveraging: the theorist shows how multiple values that theorists find...

We report a laboratory experiment that enables us to distinguish preferences for altruism (concerning tradeoffs between own payoffs and the payoffs of others) from social preferences (concerning tradeoffs between the payoffs of others). By using graphical representations of three-person Dictator...

This paper reports a rigorous experimental test of Pareto-damaging behaviors. We introduce a new graphical representation of dictator games with step-shaped sets of feasible payoffs to persons self and other on which strongly Pareto efficient allocations involve substantial inequality. The...

Behavioral economics—arising from the insight that people make recognizable, systematic mistakes—has revolutionized policymaking. For example, in governments around the world, including the US, teams of experts have recently arisen to harness these insights, promising to do things like...

The law of contracts, at least in its orthodox expression, concerns voluntary, or chosen, legal obligations. When Brody accepts Susan’s offer to sell him a canoe for a set price, the parties’ choices alter their legal rights and duties. Their success at changing the legal landscape depends...