EFFICIENCY OF EQUILIBRIA UNDER COMPARATIVE CAUSATION

For past three decades or so, the negligence liability has been a major preoccupation of the economic analysis of liability rules. However, recently it has invited severe criticisms on several counts. Several leading legal scholars have championed a comparative causation based allocation of liability. According to these scholars, comparative causation based liability is more equitable than negligence liability. Moreover, some studies show that courts and juries are inclined toward comparative apportioning of liability. Nonetheless, implications of comparative causation based liability especially its eciency properties have remained under-explored. In this paper, we have studied the implications of comparative causation. We have shown that a mix of negligence and comparative causation liabilities can induce vigilant and equitable equitable equilibria, in which parties choose to be vigilant and accident loss is shared between them. However, comparative causation achieves equity at the cost of economic effciency.

The Economics of Legal Harmonization

The global legal landscape is undergoing substantial transformations, adapting to an increasingly global market economy. Differences between legal systems create obstacles to transnational commerce. Countries can reduce these legal differences through non-cooperative and cooperative adaptation processes, fostering networks of trade that link diverse legal traditions. In this article, we study the process of legal adaptation, looking at non-cooperative and cooperative solutions that can alternatively lead to legal transplantation, harmonization and unification. The presence of adaptation and switching costs renders unification extremely difficult. In the general case, cooperative solutions reduce differences to a greater extent than non-cooperative solutions, but rarely lead to complete legal unification. We consider the case of endogenous switching costs and show that when countries have the possibility to reduce their own switching costs to facilitate harmonization, they may actually choose to raise them. This may lead to the paradox that countries engaging in cooperative harmonization end up with less harmonization than those that pursued non-cooperative strategies. This explains why differences are often bridged by private codifications and by the evolving norms of the lex mercatoria.Legal Harmonization, Legal Transplantation, Transnational Contracts, Legal Change,

Comment to "Packing Hyperspheres in High-Dimensional Euclidean Space"

It is shown that the numerical data in cond-mat/0608362 are in very good agreement with the predictions of cond-mat/0601573.Comment: comment to cond-mat/0608362; 3 pages, 1 figur

Glueball plus pion production in hadron collisions

Using a non--relativistic gluon bound--state model for glueballs (G), we compute the subprocess $q\,\bar q\, \to\, G\,\pi$, and we therefrom derive the yield of the overall reaction $p\,\bar p\, \to\, G\,\pi X$, assuming the glueball and the pion to be emitted with their transverse momenta large, opposite and approximately equal. Numerical results are presented in the form of $p_T$ spectra for various glueball candidates and their possible quantum states, assuming those particles to be produced, in the type of reactions here considered, at high--energy $p\,\bar p$ colliders such as the CERN Sp\=pS.Comment: 14 pages + 8 figures, REVTeX 3.0, figures appended as uuencoded, compressed postscript file. To appear in Zeit. Phys.

Critical Off-Equilibrium Dynamics in Glassy Systems

We consider off-equilibrium dynamics at the critical temperature in a class of glassy system. The off-equilibrium correlation and response functions obey a precise scaling form in the aging regime. The structure of the {\it equilibrium} replicated Gibbs free energy fixes the corresponding {\it off-equilibrium} scaling functions implicitly through two functional equations. The details of the model enter these equations only through the ratio $w_2/w_1$ of the cubic coefficients (proper vertexes) of the replicated Gibbs free energy. Therefore the off-equilibrium dynamical exponents are controlled by the very same parameter exponent $\lambda=w_2/w_1$ that determines equilibrium dynamics. We find approximate solutions to the equations and validate the theory by means of analytical computations and numerical simulations.Comment: 19 pages, 7 figure

Experience, Innovation and Productivity - Empirical Evidence from Italy's Slowdown

We investigate the role of workers’ and managerial experience as a determinant of firm innovation and productivity in a sample of Italian manufacturing firms. A high share of temporary – thus un-experienced - workers is associated to low innovation and productivity. The effect of managerial experience measured by age on firm performance depends instead on the type of firm: high age of managers and board members is bad for innovation and productivity growth, while costs and benefits of old managerial age cancel out for non-innovative firms.firm productivity, innovation, managerial experience, temporary jobs