Anti-Sharing.

Anti-Sharing may solve the sharing problem of teams: the team members promise a fixed payment to the Anti-Sharer. He collects the actual output and pays out its value to them. We prove that the internal Anti- Sharer is unproductive in equilibrium.

Truth-Revealing Mechanisms for Courts

In trials witnesses often slant their testimony in order to advance their own interests. To obtain truthful testimony, the law relies on cross-examination under threat of prosecution for perjury. We show that perjury law is an imperfect truth-revealing mechanism. More importantly, we develop a perfect truth-revealing mechanism. Under this mechanism the witness is sanctioned if a court eventually finds that the testimony was incorrect; the court need not determine that testimony was dishonest. We explain how truth-revealing mechanisms could combat distortions of observations by factual witnesses and exaggerations by experts, including "junk science."

The Intrinsic Value of Obeying a Law: Economic Analysis of the Internal Viewpoint

Economic theory distinguishes sharply between what a person wants and what he can have. “Preferences” describe what a person wants, and “constraints” describe the limits of what he can have. The collision of preferences and constraints yields the choices that economists study. The meaning of both terms is broad and flexible. Preferences and constraints help to distinguish between the internal and external viewpoints that H. L. A. Hart made famous. The internal viewpoint concerns preferences to perform legal obligations. A person who prefers to obey a law is willing to give up something to perform his legal obligation. The preference is intrinsic, not an instrument for securing something else of value. Conversely, a person who is indifferent to a legal obligation takes a purely instrumental approach towards obedience—he obeys only when doing so secures something else of value. What explains the distribution of preferences among people to obey a law? I will sketch part of the answer that emerges from economic and psychological studies. Finding an answer is important because when laws are reasonably just and many citizens intrinsically prefer to obey them, government is easier, and life is better than when most citizens are indifferent towards obeying the law

Clearings and Thickets

Intellectual property law, which includes patents and copyright law, establishes the ownership of innovations by people. It conveys a bundle of rights to creators as determined by rules. Applied to intellectual property law, the normative question of growth economics is, “Which ownership rules maximize innovation?” In order to increase the pace of innovation, ownership rules should increase venture profits. So the question of this essay is, “Which ownership rules maximize venture profits?".Institutions; property rights; intellectual property rights; law and economics

Efficient Breach

The theory of efficient breach is the best known, and the most controversial, product of nearly half a century of economic analysis of contract law. In its simplest form, which is the one that dominates the legal imagination, the theory argues that expectation damages are good because they allow, even encourage, a party to breach when performance becomes inefficient, thereby increasing social welfare. Many noneconomists assume the theory is well supported by principles of neoclassical economics. Thus critics commonly focus on the theory’s moral failings, or on problems with the neoclassical approach more generally. But today no economic thinker defends the simple theory of efficient breach. Forty years of scholarship has established that even from the streamlined perspective of neoclassical economics, the simple theory simplifies too much. Expectation damages do not sufficiently deter some types of opportunistic breach. When a contract does become inefficient, other remedies can do as good or better a job of allowing parties to avoid performance. If expectation damages do provide efficient performance incentives, they might create inefficient incentives elsewhere in the transaction. And an exclusive focus on incentives ignores other welfare-enhancing functions remedies can serve, such as risk allocation and signaling. Many noneconomic critics of efficient breach criticize a theory that no economist would defend. All this notwithstanding, contract theorists should pay attention to efficient breach. Most importantly, a revised theory of efficient breach demonstrates how remedies that apply at the end of a transaction can affect the terms chosen at its birth. In many transactions the remedy is likely to affect the price, complicating arguments about its fairness. Many parties are likely to prefer efficient remedies, posing a challenge to remedial theories that ignore efficiency altogether. And economic analysis suggest mechanisms lawmakers can use to delegate remedial choice to the parties while still giving weight to socially preferred remedies. Theorists who make principled arguments for one or another remedy should attend to economic analyses of remedial design, including the idea of efficient breach, which cast new light on these distinctive features of contract law

Liability Externalities and the Law: A Comment on Cooter and Porat

Robert Cooter and Ariel Porat have offered a simple model of tort liability with sensible reform proposals. Their focus is in on damage levels, and how those levels can be modified to reflect the socially desirable level of externalization. However, to the extent that there is any gain to be achieved by modifying damage awards, it would be better to secure this gain through other approaches, such as adopting a more careful analysis of factual causation or reducing the likelihood of judicial error