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TOTM Lynn Stout, writing in the Harvard Business Review’s blog, claims that hedge funds are uniquely “criminogenic” environments. (Not surprisingly, Frank Pasquale seems reflexively to approve)… . . .
Lynn Stout, writing in the Harvard Business Review’s blog, claims that hedge funds are uniquely “criminogenic” environments. (Not surprisingly, Frank Pasquale seems reflexively to approve)…
Read the full piece here.
TOTM Steven Pearlstein at the Washington Post asks if it’s “Time to loosen Google’s grip.” The article is an analytical mess. Pearlstein is often a decent . . .
Steven Pearlstein at the Washington Post asks if it’s “Time to loosen Google’s grip.” The article is an analytical mess. Pearlstein is often a decent business reporter–I’m not sure what went wrong here, but this is a pretty shoddy piece of antitrust journalism.
TOTM There’s been much teeth-gnashing following yesterday’s ruling by a Virginia judge that the “individual mandate” portion of Obamacare is unconstitutional. Among many other places, see . . .
There’s been much teeth-gnashing following yesterday’s ruling by a Virginia judge that the “individual mandate” portion of Obamacare is unconstitutional. Among many other places, see the ongoing discussion at The Volokh Conspiracy. I have a quick, non-constitutional response.
TOTM Recent coverage of the A&P bankruptcy has alluded to its era of “dominance” in grocery retail, describing it as “the Wal-Mart of its day.” See . . .
Recent coverage of the A&P bankruptcy has alluded to its era of “dominance” in grocery retail, describing it as “the Wal-Mart of its day.” See this earlier post on the unconvincing antitrust case against Wal-Mart. However, what the A&P bankruptcy brings to mind for me is Justice Stewart’s famous dissent in Von’s Grocery. The famous line from Stewart’s powerful dissent objecting to the majority’s analysis, devoid of economic analysis and full of now well known contradictions, is his description of the merger law: “the only consistency is that the government always wins.”
TOTM I have now had a chance to read through the contributions to this event and have a few thoughts to share. I cannot, of course, . . .
I have now had a chance to read through the contributions to this event and have a few thoughts to share. I cannot, of course, reply to everything that has been said here, and in any case, most of what I would say already appears in print. Before getting into specifics let me say one thing up front: take a deep breath! These posts have a lot of emotion. I am not sure why.
TOTM Tiffany Joslyn provides a useful summary of the criminal provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act at the Federalist Society National Federal Initiatives Project. One of the . . .
Tiffany Joslyn provides a useful summary of the criminal provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act at the Federalist Society National Federal Initiatives Project. One of the things Joslyn points out is that the Act includes new criminal consumer protection liability…
TOTM In the brave new world contemplated by the advocates of government policies informed by behavioral law and economics, many more aspects of each individual’s life . . .
In the brave new world contemplated by the advocates of government policies informed by behavioral law and economics, many more aspects of each individual’s life will be regulated, or more stringently regulated, than at present. Within the legal academy, the growth of the behavioral law and economics movement has been dramatic. Surveying all legal publications from 1980 through 1984 reveals that only a single article made mention of the phrase “behavioral economics.” In 2005 through 2009, however, there were 917 such articles. What, we must ask, accounts for the great and increasing attraction of the subject to legal academics?
TOTM The behavioral economics research agenda is an ambitious one for several reasons. The first reason is that behavioral economics requires a theory “true” preferences aside . . .
The behavioral economics research agenda is an ambitious one for several reasons. The first reason is that behavioral economics requires a theory “true” preferences aside from – and in opposition to — the “revealed” preferences of the decision maker. A second reason is that while collecting and documenting individual biases in an ad hoc fashion can generate interesting results, policy relevance requires an integrative theory of errors that can predict the sufficient and necessary conditions under which cognitive biases will hamper the decision-making of economic agents. A third is not unique to behavioral economics but is nonetheless significant: demonstrating that behavioral economics improves predictive power. The core methodological commitment of the behavioral economics enterprise — as with economics generally at least since Friedman (1953) — is an empirical one: predictive power. Indeed, no less than Christine Jolls, Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler have described the behavioralist research program as the economic analysis of law “with a higher R-squared,” that is, “a greater power to explain the observed data.”
TOTM Professors Henderson and Ribstein touch on two theoretical failures of the behavioralist movement which both reveal the prematurity of ‘behaviorally-informed’ regulatory proposals: the behavioralist assumptions . . .
Professors Henderson and Ribstein touch on two theoretical failures of the behavioralist movement which both reveal the prematurity of ‘behaviorally-informed’ regulatory proposals: the behavioralist assumptions that (1) behavioral biases theoretically necessitate, or at least enable, public intervention, and (2) governmental entities can net improve individual outcomes over the status quo of unfettered, if limited, human capabilities. I think both of these observations highlight the shocking dearth of theoretical exploration amongst behavioralists thus far. I want to focus on connecting these assumptions to the connection between behavioral economics and administrative regulation.
