84 research outputs found

    Chicago Man, K-T Man, and the Future of Behavioral Law and Economics

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    Most law is aimed at shaping human behavior, encouraging that which is good for society and discouraging that which is bad.\u27 Nonetheless, for most of the history of our legal system, laws were passed, cases were decided, and academics pontificated about the law based on nothing more than common sense assumptions about how people make decisions. A quarter century or more ago, the law and economics movement replaced these common sense assumptions with a well-considered and expressly stated assumption-that man is a rational maximizer of his expected utilities. Based on this premise, law and economics has dominated interdisciplinary thought in the legal academy for the past thirty years. In the past decade it has become clear, however, that people simply do not make decisions as modeled by traditional law and economics. A mountain of experiments performed in psychology and related disciplines, much of it in the heuristics and biases tradition founded by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, demonstrate that people tend to deviate systematically from rational norms when they make decisions

    Excuse and justification in the law of fair use: Transaction costs have always been part of the story

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    In American copyright law, the doctrine of fair use has long been problematic. Every plausible litmus test that might simplify the fair use inquiry has proven inadequate, and copyright commentators have long sought an algorithm or heuristic to lend predictability and conceptual coherence to the doctrine. Twenty years ago, I published in this Journal an article entitled Fair Use as Market Failure, which suggested that the key to understanding the protean terms of fair use could best be found in the notion of market failure. That 1982 article has been often misapplied, by both courts and commentators. I am pleased to publish in the Fiftieth Anniversary issue of this Journal a clarification of my position on market failure and fair use

    Stock Markets and Business Cycle Comovement in Germany before World War I: Evidence from Spectral Analysis

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    This paper examines the comovement of the stock market and of real activity in Germany before World War I under the effcient market hypothesis. We employ multivariate spectral analysis to compare rivaling national product estimates to stock market behavior in the frequency domain. Close comovement of one series with the stock market enables us to decide between various rivaling business cycle chronologies. We find that business cycle dates obtained from deflated national product series are severely distorted by interference with the implicit price deflator. Among the nominal series, the income estimate of Hoffmann (1965) correlates best with the stock market, while the tax based estimate of Hoffmann and Müller (1959) is too smooth especially before 1890. We find impressive comovement between the stock market and nominal wages, a sub-series of Hoffmann's income estimate. We can show that a substantial part of this nominal wage series is driven by data on real investment activity. Our findings confirm the traditional business cycle chronology for Germany of Burns and Mitchell (1946) and Spiethoff (1955), and lead us to discard later, rivaling business cycle chronologies.Business Cycle Chronology, Imperial Germany, Spectral Analysis, Effcient Market Hypothesis

    Tendencies Versus Boundaries: Levels of Generality in Behavioral Law and Economics

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    When evidence on the truth or falsity of a proposition is ambiguous and open to multiple interpretations, psychologists warn about biased assimilation of the evidence to support pre-existing theories, beliefs, and attitudes. Therefore, when a skeptic about the public policy implications of psychological research examines the complex mix of evidence on human rationality, he may find much to support his skepticism about the use of psychology to reform the law. Likewise, an optimist about the public policy contributions of psychology may find within this same body of evidence much to bolster his optimistic view that psychological research can be used to refashion the law to better predict and regulate human behavior. Two of my previous articles on the subject of behavioral law and economics, or, as I prefer to call the field, legal decision theory, and Robert Prentice\u27s excellent discussion of my articles and of legal decision theory in general may illustrate the biased assimilation phenomenon at work. Indeed, Professor Prentice and I often cite the very same works to support our different perspectives on legal decision theory-with Prentice\u27s article emphasizing how much we know about the quasi-rationality of human judgment and decision making and my articles emphasizing how little we know in light of the complexity of the evidence. Notwithstanding the possible influence of The good news is that a strategy of consciously considering opposing viewpoints and opposite possibilities has been shown somewhat effective in countering biased-assimilation processes

    Principal typings and type inference

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    Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1996.Includes bibliographical references (p. 115-120) and index.by Trevor Jim.Ph.D

    On Girard\u27s Candidats de Reductibilité

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    We attempt to elucidate the conditions required on Girard\u27s candidates of reducibility (in French, candidats de reductibilité ) in order to establish certain properties of various typed lambda calculi, such as strong normalization and Church-Rosser property. We present two generalizations of the candidates of reducibility, an untyped version in the line of Tait and Mitchell, and a typed version which is an adaptation of Girard\u27s original method. As an application of this general result, we give two proofs of strong normalization for the second-order polymorphic lambda calculus under βη-reduction (and thus under β-reduction). We present two sets of conditions for the typed version of the candidates. The first set consists of conditions similar to those used by Stenlund (basically the typed version of Tait\u27s conditions), and the second set consists of Girard\u27s original conditions. We also compare these conditions, and prove that Girard\u27s conditions are stronger than Tait\u27s conditions. We give a new proof of the Church-Rosser theorem for both β-reduction and βη-reduction, using the modified version of Girard\u27s method. We also compare various proofs that have appeared in the literature (see section 11). We conclude by sketching the extension of the above results to Girard\u27s higher-order polymorphic calculus Fω, and in appendix 1, to Fω with product types

    Shareholder Democracy and the Curious Turn Toward Board Primacy

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    Corporate law is consumed with a debate over shareholder democracy. The conventional wisdom counsels that shareholders should have more voice in corporate governance, in order to reduce agency costs and provide democratic legitimacy. A second set of theorists, described as “board primacists,” advocates against greater shareholder democracy and in favor of increased board discretion. These theorists argue that shareholders need to delegate their authority in order to provide the board with the proper authority to manage the enterprise and avoid short-term decision making. In the last few years, the classical economic underpinnings of corporate law have been destabilized by a growing recognition that shareholders are not a homogeneous group of wealth maximizers. This recognition has, among other things, undercut the arguments made in support of the typical corporate structure where shareholders alone possess the right to vote in corporate elections. Board primacy seems well-positioned to retheorize corporate law to adapt to this new reality. In their analyses of the issue, however, board primacy theorists have conflated two very different aspects of group decision processes: the responsiveness of the governance system and the composition of the electorate. This confusion ends up putting many board primacy theorists in the curious position of moving away from the public choice emphasis on preference aggregation toward a more civic republican model of less responsive, more deliberative decision making. By restricting the franchise, board primacists have detached their governance structures from the underlying desires of their constituents without substituting anything in their place. We argue, however, that the breakdown of this particular distinction between shareholders and other constituents could mean that we should investigate treating other constituents more like shareholders, rather than the other way around

    Asimovian Adaptive Agents

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    The goal of this research is to develop agents that are adaptive and predictable and timely. At first blush, these three requirements seem contradictory. For example, adaptation risks introducing undesirable side effects, thereby making agents' behavior less predictable. Furthermore, although formal verification can assist in ensuring behavioral predictability, it is known to be time-consuming. Our solution to the challenge of satisfying all three requirements is the following. Agents have finite-state automaton plans, which are adapted online via evolutionary learning (perturbation) operators. To ensure that critical behavioral constraints are always satisfied, agents' plans are first formally verified. They are then reverified after every adaptation. If reverification concludes that constraints are violated, the plans are repaired. The main objective of this paper is to improve the efficiency of reverification after learning, so that agents have a sufficiently rapid response time. We present two solutions: positive results that certain learning operators are a priori guaranteed to preserve useful classes of behavioral assurance constraints (which implies that no reverification is needed for these operators), and efficient incremental reverification algorithms for those learning operators that have negative a priori results

    Community and Statism: A Conservative Contractarian Critique of Progressive Corporate Law Scholarship

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