Distinguished by brevity, lucid writing, and well-chosen examples, An Introduction to Law and Economics, now in its Fifth Edition, focuses on a set of core topics that include property, contracts, torts, criminal law, and litigation. Avoiding specialized jargon and mathematics, Polinsky teaches students how to think like an economist and understand legal issues from an economic perspective. New to the Fifth Edition: A streamlining of the products liability chapter A revised discussion of the redistributive effects of legal rules to reflect more recent scholarship on this topic The addition of several other refinements in the text and in new footnotes An updated bibliography Professors and students will benefit from: Solid coverage of relevant economic principles A normative approach that illustrates how to assess legal rules and policies in terms of economic and social goals Clear explanations of concepts

During the last two decades researchers in the field of experimental law and economics have made significant contributions to our knowledge of human behaviour and its interaction with legal and regulatory environments. This collection of previously published papers examines the use of laboratory experiments to test and develop these theories about how people behave, including their responses to legal rules. An important resource for judges, policymakers and scholars alike, the articles presented are drawn from diverse disciplines such as economics, law and psychology. The editors' comprehensive introduction provides expert analysis and insightful discussion of new directions in the field. Also included is an extended bibliography of additional articles to further aid readers' study.

Upon hearing that Ronald Coase had been awarded the Nobel Prize, a fellow economist's first response was to ask with whom Coase had shared the Prize. Whether this response was idiosyncratic or not, I do not know; I expect not. Part of this type of reaction can no doubt be explained by the fact that Coase has often been characterized as an economist who wrote only two significant or influential papers: "The Nature of the Firm" (1937) and "The Problem of Social Cost" (1960). And by typical professional standards of "significant" and "influential" (i. e. , widely read and cited), this perception embodies a great deal of truth, even subsequent to Coase's receipt of the Prize. This is not to say that there have not been other important works - "The Marginal Cost Controversy" (1946) and "The Lighthouse in Economics" (1974) come immediately to mind here - only that in a random sample of, say, one hundred economists, one would likely find few who could list a Coase bibliography beyond the two classic pieces noted above, in spite of Coase's significant publication record. ' The purpose of this collection is to assess the development of, tensions within, and prospects for Coasean Economics - those aspects of economic analysis that have evolved out of Coase's path-breaking work. Two major strands of research can be identified here: law and economics and the New Institutional Economics.

This original and insightful book considers the ways in which public law, which emphasises legality (the Demos), and economics, a science oriented towards the markets (the Agora), intertwine. Throughout, George Dellis argues that the concepts of legality and efficiency should not be perceived separately.

This book considers three relationships: law and economics; economics and game theory; and game theory and law. Economists teach lawyers that economic principles cut across and integrate seemingly different legal subjects such as contracts, torts, and property. Correspondingly, lawyers teach economists that legal rationality is a separate and distinct decision-making process that can be formalized by behavioral rules that are parallel to and comparable with the behavioral rules of economic rationality, that efficiency often must be constrained by legal goals such as equal protection of the laws, due process, and horizontal and distributional equity, and that the general case methodology of economics vs. the hard case methodology of law for determining the truth or falsity of economic theories and theorems sometimes conflict. Economics and Game Theory: Law and economics books focus on economic analysis of judges’ decisions in common law cases and have been mostly limited to contracts, torts, property, criminal law, and suit and settlement. There is usually no discussion of the many areas of law that require cooperative action such as is needed to provide economic infrastructure, control public “bad” type externalities, and make legislation. Game theory provides the bridge between competitive markets and the missing discussion of cooperative action in law and economics. How? Competitive markets are examples (subset) of the Prisoners’ Dilemma, which explains the conflict between individual self-interested behavior and cooperation both in economic markets and in legislative bodies and demonstrates the need for social infrastructure and regulation of pollution and global warming. Game Theory and Law: Lawsuits usually involve litigation between two parties, not the myriad participants in markets, so the assumption of self-interest constrained by markets does not carry over to legal disputes involving one-on-one bargaining in which the law gives one party superior bargaining power. Game theory models predict the effect of different legal institutions, rights, and rules on the outcome of such bargaining. Game theory also has a natural four-model framework which is used in this book to analyze the law and economics of civil obligation, which consists of torts (negligence), contracts, and unjust enrichment.

William Letwin's thorough, carefully argued, and elegantly written work is the only book length study of the Sherman Antitrust Act, a law designed to shape the economic life of a large complex society through maintaining the "correct" level of competition in the economy. This is a superb history and complete analysis of the Act, from its English and American common law antecedents to the events that led to the first revisions of the Act in the form of the Clayton Antitrust and Federal Trade Commission Acts.

Zhang argues that property institutions in preindustrial China and England were a cause of China's lagging development in preindustrial times.