Absent efficiency-cultivating judges, is selective litigation alone enough to drive the common law to efficiency? To address this question, the common law is viewed as an evolving network of precedents. Litigants nominate the most inefficient precedents for re-adjudication and judges modify...

We develop a model of bargaining and litigation in the context of patent licensing (or any contractual setting). Following Priest and Klein (1984)we developed a model that explicitly allows for (1) multiple parties (leading to asymmetry of stakes), (2) binding precedent, and (3) pre-dispute...

Although previous forms of copying have been found to often have benign effects on copyright owners the rise in file-sharing has coincided with a steep decline in the sale of sound recordings. This paper attempts to empirically examine the extent, if any, to which file-sharing has caused the...

The impact of copying, in the form of file-sharing, has become a stormy policy issue. Previous copying technologies have mostly failed to live up to the extravagant predictions of harm that arose with those new technologies although precise measurements of copying's impact was rarely...

This paper is an empirical assessment of the comparative efficiency of governance structures in an environment marked by high uncertainty. We analyze the short-term impact of retail deregulation on the productive efficiency of electric utilities in the United States. We argue that there are...

Two new evolutionary game models are presented where ownership and trade emerge from anarchy as evolutionary stable strategies. In these models, ownership status provides an endogenous asymmetrizing criterion enabling cheaper resolution of property conflicts

Two new evolutionary game models are presented where ownership and trade emerge from anarchy as evolutionary stable strategies. In these models, ownership status provides an endogenous asymmetrizing criterion enabling cheaper resolution of property conflicts

New Internet-based technologies appear to threaten the ability of copyright owners to collect revenues for their intellectual creations, as epitomized by the recent public trials and tribulations experienced by Napster. As a response, new legislation against pirating and new technologies to...

This paper surveys the extant literature on the impact of file-sharing. It begins by examining the theory behind the impact of file-sharing. One novelty from this analysis is the finding that the effect of 'sampling' of copyrighted materials can be expected to have a negative impact on copyright...

This paper investigates the impact of unauthorized downloading of MP3 files on the recording industry. Although the no longer extant Napster was the most famous system used for such downloading, its progeny have continued to allow millions of music listeners to download music (and other) files...