International Seminars on the New Institutional Economics

If two disciplines share a topic, one would think that they are in regular contact. A buzzing subdiscipline of economics is working on crime, as is – obviously – criminology. Yet exchange between the disciplines is less established and regular than one might have thought... more

Hardly ever had the topic of the symposium been that timely. Since ChatGPT has gone public, the societal implications of machine learning, and of generative AI in particular, have exploded; so has the potential for applications in legal practice and in legal academia. more

Judges decide about other people's lives, not about their own. Does this imply that judicial decision-making is not an appropriate topic for law and economics? Many have thought otherwise. This symposium chiefly investigates the question through an empirical lens. more

There is strong resistance against the commercialization of some goods and services. If a person holding public authority sells her decisions, this is regarded as corruption. Most countries are also opposed against selling organs, university admission, or opportunities to clerk with prestigious courts. Yet decisions have to be made, and frequently demand exceeds supply. How can these decisions be made convincingly? more

There is strong resistance against the commercialization of some goods and services. If a person holding public authority sells her decisions, this is regarded as corruption. Most countries are also opposed against selling organs, university admission, or opportunities to clerk with prestigious courts. more

The empirical legal movement is gaining momentum rapidly. Most contributions consist of applying the best empirical methods from the social sciences to legal issues. But the law is not always best served by applying the tried and tested empirical tools. more

Legal obligations are not always fulfilled. This is when the obligation matters in court. Which remedy should courts grant? In economic perspective, the prospect of the remedy constitutes a game. By specifying the remedy, the legal order gives the parties incentives for action and investment choices. more

Legal relations quite often have effects that transgress the parties who initially created the relationship. The provider of a trading platform regulates trade in the interest of increasing volume. A seller trades a stolen good. more

In a consequentialist perspective, the law is a governance tool. It then is an empirical question whether the law actually achieves its assigned goals. more

If one assumes well-behaved preferences and takes efficiency to be the norm, welfare economics makes clear normative claims. This symposium broadens the view by allowing for alternative definitions of preferences, by redefining the policy problem, by discussing alternative normative goals, and by investigating perceived legitimacy. more

Institutional economics has originated as the application of incentive analysis to institutions. Yet a growing empirical literature has put the profit maximization motive into perspective. A related strand of literature has addressed the cognitive limitations characteristic for individual decision making. more

Contract law is among the most studied topics of law and economics scholarship. While first generation work has mostly been theoretical, this conference focuses on empirical studies, be they based on field or on experimental evidence. more

Economies of scale and scope, different skills, and a host of behavioural factors create an asymmetry between business suppliers and consumer buyers. This conference studies the sources of the asymmetry, as well as the viability of solutions. more

Much like econometrics and cliometrics, jurimetrics uses statistical tools to analyse field data that matters for the law. This could be data originating in the legal system itself, like the incidence of concurring votes. It could be data resulting from an exercise in coding legal documents, like the effectiveness of legal orders in handling standardised cases. Or it could be data on social issues that matter for the interpretation of the law, like the use of shareholder rights. more

Sovereignty is a powerful and a convenient institution. Yet is many contexts, like public international law, international trade or on the Internet, it is not available, or it is substantially weakened. This conference explores the issue from a law and economics perspective. more

In the law and economics tradition, legal rules are interpreted as solutions to incentive problems. These problems are particularly hard to solve if interaction is strategic. Game theory is the tool to analyse them. Consequently, there is a growing literature that uses game theory to analyse legal rules. A related tool has much less travelled into law: mechanism design. The conference explores both. more

Behavioural Law and Economics is gaining momentum rapidly. Yet most of this work is based on evidence that has been borrowed, be it from experimental economics or from psychology. Since, in its disciplinary context of origin, the data has not been generated in light of its implications for law, its fit for questions of legal analysis and design is often less than perfect. The issues explored range from contract law over labour law and antitrust to regulation and procedural law. more

more