Behavioral Law and Economics: Empirical Methods

Behavioral law and economics: Empirical methods

Originally, behavioral law and economics was an exercise in exploring the implications of key findings from behavioral economics (and psychology) for the analysis and reform of legal institutions. Yet as the new discipline matures, it increasingly replaces foreign evidence by fresh evidence, directly targeted to the legal research question. This chapter surveys the key methods: field evidence, ...

Law and Behavioral Economics

Although the impact of economics on the analysis and practice of law is beyond any reasonable doubt, such impact and influence has been decreasing over time. This may be partly due to the fact that many economists seem to have forgotten the practical goals with which the field of law and economics was endowed. But it may also be due to the fact that researchers in behavioral economics found an ...

Empirical Law and Economics

Rational Choice, Behavioral Economics, and the Law

Jolls, Sunstein, and Thaler wish to use the insights of behavioral economics to improve economic analysis of law, which they believe to be handicapped by its commitment to the assumption that people are rational.1 The editors of the Review have asked me to comment on JST's paper, no doubt because of my identification with rational-choice economics. Since JST complain with some justice that econ...

A Behavioral Approach to Law and Economics

Economic analysis of law usually proceeds under the assumptions of neoclassical economics. But empirical evidence gives much reason to doubt these assumptions; people exhibit bounded rationality, bounded self-interest, and bounded willpower. This article offers a broad vision of how law and economics analysis may be improved by increased attention to insights about actual human behavior. It con...