Are Self-regarding Subjects More Strategic?

To investigate the relationship between the depth of strategic thinking and social preferences we ask subjects in an experiment to perform dictator games and a guessing game. The guessing game measures depth of strategic thinking while dictator games control for social preferences. When performing a comparison within the same degree of strategic reasoning, self-regarding subjects show more strategic sophistication than other subjects.

Beyond the personal–anonymous divide: agency relations in powers of attorney in France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

Powers of attorney are often interpreted as evidence of trust among the parties involved. We build a novel dataset of notarized powers of attorney, capturing a wide variety of agency relationships in four large French commercial cities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to test hypotheses on the relational basis of economic relationships. We find little support for the idea of a radical shift from personal to anonymous relationships during our period. Our results point to more nuanced transformations. The preference for proxies in the same occupation as the principal somewhat declined, while professional proxies emerged and principals used relational chains, especially involving notaries, to find proxies.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/151849/1/ehr12784_am.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/151849/2/ehr12784.pd

Prospects of blockchain in contract and property

Recurrent difficulties are delaying what for the time being are still modest applications of blockchain. This paper identifies what value this new technology adds to the contractual and property processes, exploring its potential and analyzing the main difficulties it is facing. Paying particular attention to the distinction between contract (personal or in personam) rights and property (real or in rem) rights, it first examines the difficulties for trading contract rights through blockchain-based applications, mainly those to complete contracts ex ante without relying on third-party enforcers. Second, it explores the difficulties faced by blockchain to enable trade in property rights

Land Titling and Litigation

We study a land-titling reform implemented as a randomized control trial to isolate its effects on litigation. The reform consisted of demarcating land parcels, registering existing customary rights, and granting additional legal protection to right holders. Ten years after implementation, the reform doubled the likelihood of households experiencing land-related litigation, but disputes did not escalate into more frequent violent episodes. We suggest that this increase in litigation reflects the complementarity of land titling by registration and by judicial procedures aimed at further clarifying property rights, as the reform registered titles to all parcels but left many titles subject to adverse claims. This raised the demand for complementary litigation aimed at perfecting titles for low-value parcels that, under the customary system, were optimal to keep unclarified. Consistent with this explanation, we find that the increase in litigation took place among households that plausibly own land of lower value