Contract-Wrapped Property

For nearly two centuries, the law has allowed servitudes that “run with” real property while consistently refusing to permit servitudes attached to personal property. That is, owners of land can establish new, specific requirements for the property that bind all future owners—but owners of chattels cannot. In recent decades, however, firms have increasingly begun relying on contract provisions that purport to bind future owners of chattels. These developments began in the context of software licensing, but they have started to migrate to chattels not encumbered by software. Courts encountering these provisions have mostly missed their significance, focusing instead on questions of contract doctrine, such as whether opening shrink wrap constitutes assent to be bound. Property concepts never enter their analysis. The result of this oversight is that courts have de facto recognized equitable servitudes on chattels—a category that our legal system has long forbidden. Yet because courts are often unfamiliar with property-law principles, and because lawyers have failed to make property-based arguments, individual contracts cases are remodeling the architecture of property rights without anyone realizing it.This Article identifies the unexpected emergence of servitudes on chattels via contract law. It explores the consequences of that development and argues that we should see it as deeply troubling. By unwittingly reestablishing equitable servitudes on chattels—something our legal system rejected long ago for good reason—this change in law threatens to undo longstanding precedent, disrupt settled expectations, and effectively recognize a new form of property. More generally, elevating contract over other private law doctrines disrupts the private law’s equilibrium in which a complementary suite of doctrines developed to promote economic liberty while curtailing opportunistic impulses. While the pathologies that have flourished internally in modern contract doctrine have been well studied by scholars, the way in which contract law is threatening to consume property and other areas of private law has received less attention. Using servitudes on personal property as a window into the larger problem of contract-dominated private law, this Article explores the private law’s role in shaping environmental conservation, autonomy, innovation, and the legitimacy of the law itself. Those values are all in jeopardy as if contract law is allowed to encroach on property and to erode the very concept of ownership

The False Promise of Jurisdiction Stripping

Jurisdiction stripping is seen as a nuclear option. Its logic is simple: by depriving federal courts of jurisdiction over some set of cases, Congress ensures those courts cannot render bad decisions. In theory, it frees up the political branches and the states to act without fear of judicial second-guessing. To its proponents, it offers the ultimate check on unelected and unaccountable judges. To critics, it poses a grave threat to the separation of powers. Both sides agree, though, that jurisdiction stripping is a powerful weapon. On this understanding, politicians, activists, and scholars throughout American history have proposed jurisdiction stripping measures as a way for Congress to reclaim policymaking authority from the courts. The conventional understanding is wrong. Whatever the scope of Congress’s Article III power to limit the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court and other federal courts, jurisdiction stripping is unlikely to succeed as a practical strategy. At least beyond the very short term, Congress cannot use it to effectuate policy in the face of judicial opposition. Its consequences are chaotic and unpredictable, courts have tools they can use to push back on jurisdiction strips if they desire, and the active participation of the judiciary is ultimately necessary for Congress to achieve many of its goals. Jurisdiction stripping will often accomplish nothing and sometimes will even exacerbate the very problems it purports to solve. Jurisdiction stripping can still prove beneficial, but only in subtle and indirect ways. Congress can regulate jurisdiction to manipulate the timing of judicial review—slowing things down or speeding them up—even if it cannot prevent review entirely. Jurisdiction stripping also provides a means for Congress to signal to the public and the judiciary the importance of an issue—and, possibly, to pressure courts to change course. But these effects are contingent, indeterminate, and unreliable. As a tool to influence policy directly, jurisdiction stripping simply is not the power that its proponents hope or its critics fear

States, Firms, and Their Legal Fictions: Attributing Identity and Responsibility to Artificial Entities

This volume offers a new point of entry into questions about how the law conceives of states and firms. Because states and firms are fictitious constructs rather than products of evolutionary biology, the law dictates which acts should be attributed to each entity, and by which actors. Those legal decisions construct firms and states by attributing identity and consequences to them. As the volume shows, these legal decisions are often products of path dependence or conceptual metaphors like “personhood” that have expanded beyond their original uses. Focusing on attribution, the volume considers an array of questions about artificial entities that are usually divided into doctrinal siloes. These include questions about attribution of international legal responsibility to states and state-owned entities, transnational attribution of liabilities to firms, and attribution of identity rights to corporations. Durkee highlights the artificiality of doctrines that construct firms and states, and therefore their susceptibility to change

Implementing RRT* Path Planning with the Crazyflie Drone

Crazyflie drone is a compact and agile platform ideal for advanced autonomous navigation. RRT*, an optimization of the standard RRT, offers efficient path planning in complex environments, enhancing the drone\u27s ability to navigate dynamically around obstacles. This implementation showcases significant potential for applications in areas such as search and rescue, surveillance, and environ-mental monitoring

ERISA Principles

ERISA, the detailed and technical amalgam of labor law, trust law, and tax law, directly governs trillions of dollars spent on retirement savings, health care, and other important benefits for more than 100 million Americans. Despite playing this central role in the US economy and social insurance systems, the complexities of ERISA are often understood by only a few specialists. ERISA Principles elucidates employee benefit law from a policy perspective, concisely explaining how common themes apply across a wide range of benefit plans and factual contexts. The book\u27s non-technical language and cross-cutting conceptual organization reveal latent similarities and rationalize differences between the regulatory treatment of apparently disparate programs, including traditional pensions, 401(k), and health care plans. Important legal developments - whether statutory, judicial, or administrative - are framed and analyzed in an accessible, principles-centric manner, explaining how ERISA functions as a coherent whole

Essays on Customer Relationship Management

The general topic of my dissertation is customer relationship management. Specifically, I use quasi-experimental causal inference methods, randomized field experiments, and machine learning methods to study and measure consumer response to co-branded credit cards and email communications promoting subscriptions. In Chapter 1, “The Impact of Co-branded Credit Card Adoption on Customer Loyalty”, we estimate the treatment effects of adopting a co-branded credit card on spending and loyalty behaviors using a comprehensive longitudinal dataset from a North American airline. Our data set contained detailed records of both airline credit card adopters and non-adopters, including their travel and loyalty program activities over a four-year horizon. We deal with the self-selection of card adopters by (1) using rolling-based matching procedure, (2) conducting difference-in-differences estimation on the matched sample with a two-way fixed effects specification, and (3) dividing treatment effects into three phases of time and argue that the endogenous timing of card adoption will most likely manifest in the short-term effect and is least likely to affect long-term effect. We find statistically significant and economically meaningful effects of card adoption on a multitude of behaviors. Specifically, flight spend was lifted by 42% when considering spend more than 12 months after adoption, demonstrating the persistence of the effect. These flight spend increases were largely driven by more flights purchased rather than higher prices paid per flight, which is indicative of increasing share-of-wallet among adopters. Card adopters also increased award flight redemption to a greater extent than redeeming loyalty program points with airline partners. Finally, card adopters who experienced the highest increase in flight spend, tended to live near hub airports of the airline firm or were already existing members of the loyalty program. In Chapter 2, “An Experimental Investigation of Price vs. Non-Price Messaging in Subscription Programs”, we study how firms can attract and retain customers for subscription services. Subscriptions of digital and physical goods are becoming increasingly popular, and firms often compete heavily on price for customer acquisition. However, the challenge associated with advertised price discounts is substantial, as the featured price discounts highlight price savings and this might create an adverse selection problem with some customers signing up for just the price discount and then churning soon after. We worked with a major retailer that sells pet products, and we launched a four-week field experiment where we randomized price and non-price messaging in email advertising of subscription. We find that the non-price messages perform as well as the price messages in terms of sign-up rates and outperform price messages for reorder rates. This pattern also holds for number of orders, revenue and profit margin. We find that the inferior performance of the price message is primarily due to price attracting lower quality customers. Our findings suggest that one of the most dominant strategies of selling subscriptions is very suboptimal. Firms would be better off with the messages that make non-price motivations more prominent. Further, firms could also use previous purchase history to better target customers who could be a good match for the subscription services. Our results suggest that the price message should be sent to customers who are less familiar with the online channel, customers who are new to subscription, customers who have more regular purchase history, and customers who are less deal-prone. The rest should be sent non-price messages. Customers with no prior engagement with the firm should be targeted with the risk message by default. Finally, those who are most deal-prone and most familiar with online channels should not be sent any messages at all

Origin of value creation: the role of delayed intuition in entrepreneurial problem framing

Highly successful entrepreneurial ventures often result from solving problems that have not been solved before (i.e., entrepreneurial problems). The problem-solving and entrepreneurship literatures indicate that individuals need to develop novel problem frames—uncommon interpretations of observable needs or pain points (i.e., symptoms) signaling the problems—to create solutions that other people would not typically think of and generate unique value that is key to entrepreneurial success. However, developing novel frames of entrepreneurial problems is difficult for two reasons. The symptoms of the problems are ambiguous and unstructured, and the structured information to find the right frame of problems is costly to acquire. Given the high costs associated with structured information, individuals need to rely on intuition—an associative and unconscious form of thinking—in the absence of structured, validated information to diagnose the problem frame. However, intuition is a double-edged sword that rarely results in novel problem frames and tends to exploit readily available, obvious, and well-known frames to quickly categorize and react to the problems. This dissertation draws on Cognitive-Experiential Self-Theory (CEST) to propose a delayed intuition model, in which individuals should delay intuition with rational, analytic thinking. Rational-analytic thinking can encourage individuals to think of alternative problem frames, avoid common biases in problem framing, and prevent intuition from reaching premature conclusions. By doing so, rational-analytic thinking allows intuition to be more informed and aware of alternative frames of problems, increasing the likelihood of forming novel frames of entrepreneurial problems. Evidence from an archival study and a randomized field experiment with samples of entrepreneurs support the value of delaying intuition when generating novel frames of entrepreneurial problems

Examining Immigrant Experiences in Asset Building: Implications for Asset-Based Policies

The economic integration of immigrants has long interested researchers and policymakers, with late but now growing attention on their asset- and wealth-building. Current research on immigrants’ asset building has largely focused on their individual-level characteristics, and not much on opportunities and constraints related to policy arrangements. This dissertation addresses the selection, adaptation, and impacts of immigration, with a goal to expand knowledge about asset-based social welfare policy in light of immigrants’ experiences. This investigation leverages two nationally representative datasets, the New Immigrant Survey and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1997), to understand immigrants’ asset accumulation and intergenerational wealth mobility. Employing a series of advanced statistical models—logistic regression, propensity score analysis, and hierarchical modeling, this dissertation comprises three empirical papers investigating immigrants’ settlement, legal status, financial access, and wealth building, with analyses extending to the second generation. The dissertation consists of three papers. The first paper examines how initial legal status affects lawful permanent residents’ (LPRs) asset building by investigating three types of financial assets—bank account ownership, investment account ownership, and retirement account ownership. The second paper tests the impact of being banked at an earlier stage of immigration on immigrants’ subsequent asset holding, with self-selection bias addressed by using a nationally representative data set. The third paper examines wealth trajectories of children from immigrant and native-born families from their mid-20s to their mid-30s, with a focus on the role parental financial assets play in shaping these trajectories. Overall, the results show that how immigrants fare financially in the United States largely depends on what resources they can access in the United States. Institutional-level support in asset building and quality social networks may help them to achieve better financial outcomes. In addition, the findings reveal that children of immigrants were disadvantaged in wealth growth during their young to mid-adulthood compared to their peers from the native-born families. Together, these three papers turn new ground in extending asset-building research and policy to immigrant population, an important segment of the U.S. economy and society. The findings may inform inclusive asset-building policies, immigrant economic integration programs, and immigrant tailored financial services

Cognitive Explanations Behind the Lack of Public Support for Climate Action

Studies show that the primary barriers to climate action support are cognitive ones, and yet it is not clear how people’s climate perceptions influence their support. Key perceptions’ effects remain either disputed or unidentified in the literature, so there is no established theory explaining the drivers of climate action support. I argue that people’s climate perceptions—including of others’ climate actions, climate change impacts, and climate change severity and timing—have effects that align with conventional assumptions of rational behavior. By running survey experiments and statistical analyses on data from both the US and Europe, I show that perceptions’ effects on support generally follow the rationality assumption, meaning people support climate action only if they think it is in their best interest. These findings are critical for gaining a better understanding of the barriers to climate action support, and thus for identifying strategies that can be used to increase support

JME 4110: Upgraded Refrigeration Door Cycling System

This project focuses on improvements to a door cycling system. Both a fortified rope for the pulley system, ensuring extended operation, and the integration of a support track. This track is designed to bolster the clevis linked to an air piston that facilitates smooth piston rod travel without deflection. With these advancements, our door cycling system attains a new level of reliability, durability and functionality