Contracts between Legal Persons

Contract law and the economics of contract have, for the most part, developed independently of each other. In this essay, we briefly review the notion of a contract from the perspective of lawyer, and then use this framework to organize the economics literature on contract. The title, Contracts between Legal Persons, limits the review to that part of contract law that is generic to any legal person. A legal person is any individual, firm or government agency with the right to enter into binding agreements. Our goal is to discuss the role of the law in enforcing these agreements under the hypothesis that the legal persons have well defined goals and objectives.contract law, law and economics, contract breach, contract theory, incomplete contracts

Contracts between Legal Persons

Contract law and the economics of contract have, for the most part, developed independently of each other. In this essay, we briefly review the notion of a contract from the perspective of lawyer, and then use this framework to organize the economics literature on contract. The review thus provides an overview of the literature for economists who are interested in exploring the economic implications of contract law. The title, Contracts between Legal Persons, limits the review to that part of contract law that is generic to any legal person. A legal person is any individual, firm or government agency with the right to enter into binding agreements. Our goal is to discuss the role of the law in enforcing these agreements under the hypothesis that the legal persons have well defined goals and objectives.

Vehicle Scheduling and Control in Personal Rapid Transit Systems.

Program in Urban Transportation, Center for Urban and Regional Affairs, University of Minnesota

Community Policing: Broken Windows, Community Building, and Satisfaction with the Police

The concept of community policing dominates the law enforcement profession today. One would be hard pressed to find an advertisement for a police chief’s position that does not require a thorough understanding of this method of policing. Like the Kansas City preventive patrol experiment and the Rand report on the criminal investigation process, the call for community policing has led to dramatic changes in the way that police carry out their responsibilities. In spite of its popularity, there have been a number of challenges to community policing from social scientists who are particularly concerned about the ‘broken windows’ model of policing. These challenges have not been received well by the law enforcement community, which argues that sociologists are wedded to the idea that crime is caused by the structural features of capitalist society, including economic injustice, racism, and poverty. The purpose of this article is to bridge the gap between these two positions. Yes, there is a place for community policing, and, yes, social problems do contribute to crime. The article starts by reviewing the development of community policing in the United States. An analysis of the theoretical constructs that support community policing then follows. Finally, we argue that there is sound theoretical evidence to support community policing, particularly those programmes that improve citizen satisfaction with the manner in which police carry out their responsibilities

Ernst Freund as Precursor of the Rational Study of Corporate Law

Gindis, David, Ernst Freund as Precursor of the Rational Study of Corporate Law (October 27, 2017). Journal of Institutional Economics, Forthcoming. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2905547, doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2905547The rise of large business corporations in the late 19th century compelled many American observers to admit that the nature of the corporation had yet to be understood. Published in this context, Ernst Freund's little-known The Legal Nature of Corporations (1897) was an original attempt to come to terms with a new legal and economic reality. But it can also be described, to paraphrase Oliver Wendell Holmes, as the earliest example of the rational study of corporate law. The paper shows that Freund had the intuitions of an institutional economist, and engaged in what today would be called comparative institutional analysis. Remarkably, his argument that the corporate form secures property against insider defection and against outsiders anticipated recent work on entity shielding and capital lock-in, and can be read as an early contribution to what today would be called the theory of the firm.Peer reviewe

Repairing Socially Aggregated Ontologies Using Axiom Weakening

Ontologies represent principled, formalised descriptions of agents’ conceptualisations of a domain. For a community of agents, these descriptions may differ among agents. We propose an aggregative view of the integration of ontologies based on Judgement Aggregation (JA). Agents may vote on statements of the ontologies, and we aim at constructing a collective, integrated ontology, that reflects the individual conceptualisations as much as possible. As several results in JA show, many attractive and widely used aggregation procedures are prone to return inconsistent collective ontologies. We propose to solve the possible inconsistencies in the collective ontology by applying suitable weakenings of axioms that cause inconsistencies

Political Radicalization as a Communication Process

Based on data taken from 412 adult education students in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, this research attempts to show that attitudes toward French Canadian Separatism by the sample members can be accounted for by differentiaf communication processes. Results show that attitudes held by sample members are well explained (R2 = .64) by a weighted average of the information they received from interpersonal and media sources. The resultant attitude shows substantial effects on behaviors related to separatism for the same respondents.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/67215/2/10.1177_009365027400100301.pd

The ecology of outdoor rape: The case of Stockholm, Sweden

The objective of this article is to report the results of an ecological study into the geography of rape in Stockholm, Sweden, using small area data. In order to test the importance of factors indicating opportunity, accessibility and anonymity to the understanding of the geography of rape, a two-stage modelling approach is implemented. First, the overall risk factors associated with the occurrence of rape are identified using a standard Poisson regression, then a local analysis using profile regression is performed. Findings from the whole-map analysis show that accessibility, opportunity and anonymity are all, to different degrees, important in explaining the overall geography of rape - examples of these risk factors are the presence of subway stations or whether a basområde is close to the city centre. The local analysis reveals two groupings of high risk of rape areas associated with a variety of risk factors: city centre areas with a concentration of alcohol outlets, high residential population turnover and high counts of robbery; and poor suburban areas with schools and large female residential populations where subway stations are located and where people express a high fear of crime. The article concludes by reflecting upon the importance of these results for future research as well as indicating the implications of these results for policy

A Conflict Model for Strategists and Managers

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/67210/2/10.1177_000276427201500604.pd