Building encroachments

Property law usually reacts to encroachments with ejectment. Building encroachments differ, as restoring landowner’s property claims implies the reversal of often large costs sustained by the builder. The authority faces thus the following dilemma: either it stands by the landowner and faces the social costs of undoing significant investments, or it defends the investment of the builder at the cost of neglecting landowner’s claims. To address building encroachments, national property laws have deployed interestingly different remedies that range from a property rule in favor of the landowner to a property rule in favor of the builder with a variety of liability rules in between. The paper models the builder-owner conflict after the theory of optional law (Ayres, 2005), it frames different national solutions into a common analytical setting and it evaluates the different laws in their relative allocative and distributive outcomes. Moreover the paper offers support to the idea that property law may implement put-option types of remedies.building encroachments, adverse possession, comparative law and economics, property, land law, optional law, property rules, liability rules

Better that X guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer

The principle that it is better to let some guilty individuals be set free than to mistakenly convict an innocent person is generally shared by legal scholars, judges and lawmakers of modern societies. The paper shows why this common trait of criminal procedure is also efficient. It extends the standard Polinsky and Shavell (2007) model of deterrence and shows that when the costs of convictions are positive, and guilty individuals are more likely to be convicted than innocent individuals it is always efficient to minimize the number of wrongful convictions, while a more than minimal amount of wrongful acquittals may be optimal.Type I errors, Type II errors, evidence, optimal underdeterrence, Blackstone Pareto distribution, optimal screening

Judicial Errors and Crime Deterrence: Theory and Experimental Evidence

The standard economic theory of crime deterrence predicts that the conviction of an innocent (type-I error) is as detrimental to deterrence as the acquittal of a guilty individual (type-II error). In this paper, we qualify this result theoretically, showing that in the presence of risk aversion, loss-aversion, or differential sensitivity to procedural fairness, type-I errors can have a larger effect on deterrence than type-II errors. We test these predictions with an experiment where participants make a decision on whether to steal from other individuals, being subject to different probabilities of judicial errors. The results indicate that both types of judicial errors have a large and significant impact on deterrence, but these effects are not symmetric. An increase in the probability of type-I errors has a larger negative impact on deterrence than an equivalent increase in the probability of type-II errors. This asymmetry is largely explained by risk aversion and, to a lesser extent, type-I error aversion.Judicial errors, criminal procedure, procedural fairness, experimental economics, law and economics, crime, deterrence

How Unjust! An Experimental Investigation of Supervisors' Evaluation Errors and Agents' Incentives

In our simple model the supervisor: i) cannot observe the agent's effort; ii) aims at inducing the agent to exert high effort; but iii) can only offer rewards based on performance. Since performance is only stochastically related to effort, evaluation errors may occur. In particular, deserving agents that have exerted high effort may not be rewarded (Type I errors) and undeserving agents that have exerted low effort may be rewarded (Type II errors). We show that, although the model predicts both errors to be equally detrimental to performance, this prediction fails with a lab experiment. In fact, failing to reward deserving agents is significantly more detrimental than rewarding undeserving agents. We discuss our result in the light of some economic and managerial theories of behavior. Our result may have interesting implications for strategic human resource management and personnel economics and may also contribute to the debate about incentives and organizational performance.agency theory, organizational justice, compensation, type I and type II errors, real effort

IP Law and Antitrust Law Complementarity when Property Rights are Incomplete

This paper explores the interface between two important institutional pillars of market exchange – Intellectual Property (IP) law and Antitrust law – in light of a theory of property rights incompleteness. This theory interprets property as an incomplete bundle of both defined and undefined rights over actual and potential uses of given resources and defines externalities as joint claims over rival production uses of undefined entitlements, irrespective of whether the object of property rights has a tangible or intangible nature. The paper argues that traditional distinctions between physical property and IP based on attributes of tangibility, rivalry and excludability are misleading and bases on the substantial homogeneity of property rights and IPRs an argument supporting the complementarity between IP law and Antitrust law. Far from being an unjustified ex-post limitation to existing property rights, likely to undermine ex-ante incentives, Antitrust intervention represents one of the means by which incompletely specified property rights (both intellectual and tangible) might be redefined over time as externalities emerge.

The Brady Rule May Hurt the Innocent

Mandatory disclosure of evidence (the so-called Brady rule) is considered to be among the most important bulwarks against prosecutorial misconduct. While protecting the generality of defendants in the criminal process, we show that under certain reasonable assumptions this procedural mechanism may hurt innocent defendants by inducing prosecutors to adjust their behavior to their detriment. The main rationale for our thesis is that, if forced to reveal exculpatory information, the prosecutor might not look for that information in the first place, and in turn this could harm the innocent under certain reasonable conditions. We extensively discuss our results in the context of the economic literature on criminal procedure

Wrongful Convictions Do Lower Deterrence

The conventional result of the theory of the public enforcement of law is that wrongful convictions of innocents are detrimental to deterrence. This proposition has been challenged recently. In some cases, wrongful convictions do not jeopardize deterrence, because they influence equally the innocent and the guilty. Therefore deterrence does not change. We show that, in general, wrongful convictions do lower deterrence. We prove that wrongful convictions do not jeopardize deterrence only in very limited circumstances or under unlikely assumptions

Chapter Economic and Social Aspects of the Trade of Luxury Goods between Africa and Europe: Ostrich Feather

In Europe, in the Middle Ages, ostrich feathers were used for the decoration of military headgear, as a representation of the high lineage of the possessor and his military virtues. They were imported from the coasts of West Africa, from Egypt and Syria into Italian and Spanish ports and from there exported to England and continental Europe. Venice, at the end of the fourteenth century, began to color feathers and soon the new fashion was spread throughout Europe. During the fifteenth century, even women began to use ostrich feathers on their hats or in their fans. When European ships reached America, Central Africa and the islands of the Indian Ocean, a huge amount of exotic bird feathers became available and ostrich feather fad spread through the population

Regole di tutela e sanzioni: il caso della patente a punti

Economic theory does not seem to have a valid explanation of the emergence and success of demerit point based driving licenses across many countries. In fact, the theory of optimal deterrence would imply, in such circumstances, a system based on monetary sanctions. Some extensions of the standard theory have been explored, however they do not seem to size both the nature of the sanctioning mechanism applied and the goals of the lawmaker. In this paper we try to frame the demerit point mechanism within the conceptual co-ordinates of the property rules and liability rules as stylised by Calabresi and Melamed (1972). We enlighten how circulation laws address the problem of the protection of different entitlements, of both public and private, monetary and non monetary nature, which, moreover, are protected through a plurality of rules of protection. The demerit point mechanism has been simply added to this portfolio of tools and has been specifically deployed for the pursuit of the entitlement of the "health of all those involved in circulation". Moreover, we show how such a mechanism addresses the incoherence of punishing the violation of an inalienable entitlement, such as the "right of health", with a sanction which is more consistent with a property rule. Some results might be generalised. An in-depth analysis of the plurality of entitlements protected by a certain law may entail the need of a plurality of rules of protection. Moreover, the deterrence effect of a specific rule may crucially depend on the consistency between the nature of the entitlement and the rule of protection applied.

Lenient performance evaluations cause less damage than severe ones

Both hurt employee performance, but severity errors impact the perception of organisational justice, write Lucia Marchegiani, Tommaso Reggiani and Matteo Rizzoll