This report to USAID, in fulfillment of a federal grant, designs a model for the post-Castro resolution of property claims between the U.S. and Cuba. The model designs a bilateral tribunal to process claims by U.S. nationals against Cuba and a special Cuban claims court to process claims by U.S....

In this chapter, I distill some elements of the demand and supply of institutions designed to reduce transaction costs in the ancient world. I some cases, contractual parties could reduce transaction cost by accurately designing contracts. In other cases, the failure of private coordination...

Royalties for intellectual property (IP) are like taxes. Everyone agrees that some limits are necessary. However, no one agrees on the levels at which the limits should be set. One way to overcome disagreement consists in asking if a legal rule or standard should govern the limits of IP...

This article addresses the issue of insurance coverage for commercial enterprises as a consequence of the recent spate of droughts in the southwestern United States. This almost two-decade long drought results from increasing temperatures and climate change. The article posits that damage or...

Not all innovative processes rely on IP exclusive rights to incentivize and protect their content. While strategic considerations on the costs and convenience of IP enforcement generally play an important role, in specific sectors alternative norms and practices have proven more effective than...

This paper examines data property with an eye toward offering definitions that distinguish this type of property interest from that available for conventional intellectual property. The paper also will identify the legal rights vested in data creators as well as data protection rights for...

At Thanksgiving 2018, while visiting his video-artist daughter, the author of this paper re-read Atlas Shrugged for the second time, 44 years after first reading, as described in a paper promulgated on SSRN in late January, 2019. Then a few weeks later, at Christmas 2018, while visiting his...

In the New Property Rights model ownership of assets should be assigned to the most capable agents. While, in a world of incomplete contracts, the application of the model to IPRs provides insights on the nature of their second best allocation, also the opposite direction of causation may arise:...

This article applies Ronald Coase’s analysis from his 1937 article on the Nature of the Firm to analyze the large music publishers’ recent decisions to withdraw “new media” digital rights to publicly perform musical compositions from the performing rights organizations ASCAP and BMI. The...

We formulate and solve the problem of optimal mechanism-design by a principal facing adverse selection and moral hazard from different sources. The parties' decision problem is comprised of a publicly observable collective choice and a partially private social choice. As in agency with pure...