This Essay briefly reviews where law and economics has been, and then sets out important problems it now faces. My primary theme is that law and economics faces two culture problems: between scholars who self- identify as being in a field - contracts, torts - and who do not use economics in...

This article is a comparative economic analysis of the disparate doctrines governing the good faith purchase of stolen or misappropriated goods. Good faith purchase questions have occupied the courts and commentators of many nations for millennia. We argue that prior treatments have misconceived...

Market damages - the difference between the market price for goods or services at the time of breach and the contract price - are the best default rule whenever parties trade in thick markets: they induce parties to contract efficiently and to trade if and only if trade is efficient, and they do...

When deciding when to make a purchase, people often compare their outcomes to those that would have occurred had they purchased earlier or later. In this article, we examine how pre- and postpurchase comparisons affect regret and satisfaction, and whether consumers learn to avoid decisions that...

In most of the contract theory literature, contracting costs are assumed either to be high enough to preclude certain forms of contracting, or low enough to permit any contract to be written. Similarly, researchers usually treat renegotiation as either costless or prohibitively costly. This...

Contract law's liquidated damage rules prevent enforcement of contractual damage measures that require the promisor, if it breaches, to transfer to the promisee a sum that exceeds the net gain the promisee expected to make from performance; but these rules permit the promisor to transfer less than...

An increasing trend of economic agents is to form productive associations such as networks, platforms and other hybrids. Subsets of these agents contract with each other to further their network project and these contracts can create benefits for, or impose costs on, agents who are not contract...

The common law developed over centuries a small set of default rules that courts have used to fill gaps in otherwise incomplete contracts between commercial parties. These rules can be applied almost independently of context: the market damages rule, for example, requires a court only to know...