University of Chicago Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series最新文献

{"title":"Risk as a Proxy for Race","authors":"B. Harcourt","doi":"10.1525/FSR.2015.27.4.237","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/FSR.2015.27.4.237","url":null,"abstract":"Today, an increasing chorus argues that risk-assessment instruments are a politically feasible way to resolve our problem of mass incarceration and reduce prison populations. In this essay, I argue against this progressive argument for prediction: using risk-assessment tools to decrease prison populations would unquestionably aggravate the already intolerable racial imbalance in our prison populations and will not address the real source of mass incarceration, namely the admissions process. Risk has collapsed into prior criminal history, and prior criminal history has become a proxy for race. This means that using risk-assessment tools, even for progressive ends, is going to significantly aggravate the already unacceptable racial disparities in our criminal justice system. Instead of turning to prediction, we need to address prison admissions. Recent evidence suggests that our carceral excess was not so much fueled by the length of sentences, as it was by the front end: new admissions. The real solution to mass incarceration, then, is not to cut short prison terms though prediction, but to reduce admissions to prison.","PeriodicalId":161847,"journal":{"name":"University of Chicago Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-09-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131045356","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Razors-and-Blades Myth(s)","authors":"Randal C. Picker","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.1676444","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.1676444","url":null,"abstract":"The razors-and-blades story offers a foundational understanding of a key area of economics and strategy: Invest in an installed base by selling the razor handles at low prices or even giving them away, then sell the razor blades at high prices to justify the prior investment. Large chunks of modern technological life - from VCRs and DVD players to video game systems like the Xbox and now ebook readers - seem to operate subject to the same dynamics of razors and blades.At least on the paper, the competitive dynamics of this situation are straightforward and well understood. If you actually give away the handle to create the installed base, you need to recapture those loses in the blade sales. And if you are selling blades above cost, you need to be able to tie the blades to your handle or you should expect entry in the blades business to compete on the base that you have installed.That is at least the theory. The actual facts of the dawn of the disposable razor blades market are quite confounding. Gillette’s 1904 patents gave it the power to block entry into the installed base of handles that it would create. While other firms could and did enter the multi-blade market with their own handles and blades, no one could produce Gillette handles or blades during the life of the patents.From 1904-1921, Gillette could have played razors-and-blades - low-price or free handles and expensive blades - but it did not do so. Gillette set a high price for its handle - high as measured by the price of competing razors and the prices of other contemporaneous goods - and fought to maintain those high prices during the life of the patents. For whatever it is worth, the firm understood to have invented razors-and-blades as a business strategy did not play that strategy at the point that it was best situated to do so.It was at the point of the expiration of the 1904 patents that Gillette started to play something like razors-and-blades, though the actual facts are much more interesting than that. Before the expiration of the 1904 patents, the multi-blade market was segmented, with Gillette occupying the high end with razor sets listing at $5.00 and other brands such as Ever-Ready and Gem Junior occupying the low-end with sets listing at $1.00.Given Gillette’s high handle prices, it had to fear entry in handles, but it had a solution to that entry: it dropped its handle prices to match those of its multi-blade competitors. And Gillette simultaneously introduced a new patented razor handle sold at its traditional high price point. Gillette was now selling a product line, with the old-style Gillette priced to compete at the low-end and the new Gillette occupying the high end. Gillette foreclosed low-end entry by doing it itself and yet it also offered an upgrade path with the new handle.But what of the blades? Gillette’s pricing strategy for blades showed a remarkable stickiness, indeed, sticky doesn’t begin to capture it. By 1909, the Gillette list price for a dozen bl","PeriodicalId":161847,"journal":{"name":"University of Chicago Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series","volume":"41 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-09-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131415345","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Inside the Coasean Firm: Competence as a Random Variable","authors":"R. Epstein","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.1569759","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.1569759","url":null,"abstract":"The work of Ronald Coase is notable for two primary reasons. First, it introduced the notion of transaction costs to explain the formation and maintenance of firms, Second, it advanced our understanding of the critical topic of social costs. Yet, while transaction costs are key to understanding why firms are organized, they do not offer a complete explanation of how they are organized. A richer account of the problem properly stresses that differences in individual levels of competence, as well as individual variations in temperament and taste, explain why, for example, some firms are organized as partnerships and others as straight employment arrangements, with many permutations in between. Understanding differential levels of competence also helps to explain issues in areas from employment discrimination law to capital markets and tort liability.","PeriodicalId":161847,"journal":{"name":"University of Chicago Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123534076","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Accounting for Differences Among Patients in the FDA Approval Process","authors":"A. Malani, Oliver Bembom, M. J. van der Laan","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1492909","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1492909","url":null,"abstract":"The FDA employs an average-patient standard when reviewing drugs: it approves a drug only if the average patient (in clinical trials) does better on the drug than on control. It is common, however, for different patients to respond differently to a drug. Therefore, the average-patient standard can result in approval of a drug with significant negative effects for certain patient subgroups (false positives) and disapproval of drugs with significant positive effects for other patient subgroups (false negatives). Drug companies have a financial incentive to avoid false negatives. After their clinical trials reveal that their drug does not benefit the average patient, they conduct what is called post hoc subgroup analysis to highlight patients that benefit from the drug. The FDA rejects such analysis due to the risk of spurious results. With enough data dredging, a drug company can always find some patients that benefit from their drug. This paper asks whether there workable compromise between the FDA and drug companies. Specifically, we seek a drug approval process that can use post hoc subgroup analysis to eliminate false negatives but does not risk opportunistic behavior and spurious correlation. We recommend that the FDA or some other independent agent conduct subgroup analysis to identify patient subgroups that may benefit from a drug. Moreover, we suggest a number of statistical algorithms that operate as veil of ignorance rules to ensure that the independent agent is not indirectly captured by drug companies. We illustrate our proposal by applying it to the results of a recent clinical trial of a cancer drug (motexafin gadolinium) that was recently rejected by the FDA.","PeriodicalId":161847,"journal":{"name":"University of Chicago Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133456473","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Immigration Law's Organizing Principles","authors":"Adam Cox","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1338886","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1338886","url":null,"abstract":"Immigration law and scholarship are pervasively organized around the principle that rules for selecting immigrants are (and should be) fundamentally different from rules that regulate the lives of immigrants outside the selection context. Both courts and commentators generally conclude that the government should have considerably more leeway to adopt whatever selection rules it sees fit. Consequently, the selection/regulation dichotomy shapes the central debates in immigration law - including debates about the legality and legitimacy of guest worker programs, America's criminal deportation system, and restrictions on immigrant access to public benefits. This Article argues that this central organizing principle is misguided: legal rules cannot be classified as concerning either selection or regulation because every rule concerns both. Every rule that imposes duties on noncitizens imposes both selection pressure, potentially influencing noncitizens' decisions about whether to enter or depart the United States, and regulatory pressure, potentially influencing the way in which noncitizens who choose to stay live their lives. Moreover, even if it were possible to overcome a century of radical disagreement about which rules are \"really\" about selection rather than regulation, there would still be little reason to ascribe constitutional or moral significance to the distinction between the two. As the Article shows, selection and regulation are simply two alternative mechanisms that a state may use to achieve a particular end. There is no a priori reason to prefer one mechanism over the other. These central conclusions have a number of important implications for immigration law and institutional design.","PeriodicalId":161847,"journal":{"name":"University of Chicago Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series","volume":"55 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-02-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128855217","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Attention Felons: Evaluating Project Safe Neighborhoods in Chicago","authors":"A. Papachristos, Tracey L. Meares, J. Fagan","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.860685","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.860685","url":null,"abstract":"This research uses a quasi-experimental design to evaluate the impact of Project Safe Neighborhood (PSN) initiatives on neighborhood level crime rates in Chicago. Four interventions are analyzed: (1) increased federal prosecutions for convicted felons carrying or using guns, (2) the length of sentences associated with federal prosecutions, (3) supply-side firearm policing activities, and (4) social marketing of deterrence and social norms messages through justice-style offender notification meetings. Using an individual growth curve models and propensity scores to adjust for non-random group assignment, our findings suggest that several PSN interventions are associated with greater declines of homicide in the treatment neighborhoods as compared to the control neighborhoods. The largest effect is associated with the offender notification meetings that stress individual deterrence, normative change in offender behavior, and increasing views on legitimacy and procedural justice. Possible competing hypotheses and directions for individual-level analysis are also discussed.","PeriodicalId":161847,"journal":{"name":"University of Chicago Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122128557","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Unconventional Uses of Transaction Costs","authors":"David Gilo, A. Porat","doi":"10.1017/CBO9780511611179.007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511611179.007","url":null,"abstract":"This article discusses the strategic advantages suppliers can derive from the transaction costs they can impose via the terms of their contracts. As the Article demonstrates, such transaction costs could be imposed by the supplier to enable the screening out of unwanted consumers, price discrimination, cartel stabilization, anticompetitive signaling, studying consumer preferences, hiding benefits granted to parties from nonparties, and creating the appearance of a fair contract. The transaction costs could also be self-imposed by the supplier, in order to signal to buyers or to competitors that negotiation of the contract would be very costly. One of the Article's conclusions concerns the legal treatment of standard form contracts. In particular, the law's concern should not be only with harsh boilerplate terms, but also with beneficial boilerplate terms. At times, beneficial boilerplate terms extract surplus from uninformed consumers, exactly as harsh terms do, but by using a different technique. Another conclusion of the Article is that boilerplate language should be carefully reviewed even when no particular terms are hidden in it, neither beneficial nor harsh, because the boilerplate provisions could be used just for the sake of artificially complicating the transaction. The Article also inquires whether the use of beneficial boilerplate terms is desirable from a social perspective, and if not, it asks how the law should discourage it.","PeriodicalId":161847,"journal":{"name":"University of Chicago Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-10-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123870540","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Social Networks Theory of Privacy","authors":"L. Strahilevitz","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.629283","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.629283","url":null,"abstract":"What facts are public and what facts are private? It is the fundamental, first-principles question in privacy law, and a necessary element in the two most important privacy torts, public disclosure of private facts and intrusion upon seclusion. Yet the American courts lack a coherent, consistent methodology for determining whether an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in a particular fact that he has shared with one or more persons. Some courts hold that when an individual discloses a sensitive fact about himself to a handful of co-workers, friends, relatives, or strangers, this disclosure renders the fact in question sufficiently public to deprive him of a tort cause of action when that fact is subsequently widely disseminated or obtained by a third party using improper means. Other courts hold that an individual can share such a fact with dozens, or even hundreds of people, and still retain a cause of action under privacy tort law. So how much disclosure is enough to transform a private fact into a public fact? This paper argues that insights from the literature on social networks and information dissemination can help provide courts with satisfying answers to these central questions in privacy law. The social networks literature has generated theoretical and empirical insights about the probability that information disclosed to one member of a community will ultimately become known by a large segment of the community. Using these insights, courts can gauge whether the plaintiff's previously private information would have been widely disseminated regardless of the defendant's actions in a particular case. If so, the information in question was public, and if not, the tort law ought to deem the information as private. This paper argues that such an approach, which treats the privacy question as an empirical one, is more attractive than any other method of establishing whether the plaintiff had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the information at issue. The literature on social networks and information dissemination has wide applications beyond privacy tort law, but has found its way into little legal scholarship. Legal scholars interested in Fourth Amendment law, trade secrets, patent law, constitutional privacy, defamation, and other fields might find the paper's survey of social networks theory useful and provocative.","PeriodicalId":161847,"journal":{"name":"University of Chicago Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series","volume":"57 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124633838","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Conflict or Credibility: Analyst Conflicts of Interest and the Market for Underwriting Business","authors":"J. Spindler","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.564381","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.564381","url":null,"abstract":"This paper argues that, contrary to conventional wisdom, conflicts of interest among equities research analysts (that is, when investment banks would offer positive analyst research in quid pro quos for underwriting business) were beneficial to the capital markets. First, conflicted analyst research credibly signaled positive inside information that is otherwise too costly to communicate under Securities Act liability, correcting informational asymmetries. Second, conflicted analyst research mitigated agency costs between issuer and underwriter by allowing the underwriter to credibly commit to exerting more effort than the underwriter would prefer. Third, analyst research quid pro quos took the form of a competitive bidding market among underwriters and may have improved competition in the underwriting industry. In light of these conclusions, recent reforms prohibiting analyst conflicts of interest are counterproductive. Preferable modes of regulation include liberalizing Securities Act liability, increasing mandatory disclosure of conflicts, and increasing fraud penalties.","PeriodicalId":161847,"journal":{"name":"University of Chicago Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series","volume":"70 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127629038","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Corporate Tax Avoidance","authors":"D. Weisbach","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.487103","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.487103","url":null,"abstract":"This essay analyzes the problem of corporate tax avoidance. It shows how the marginal efficiency cost of funds and optimal elasticity of taxable income measures can be used to analyze the problem and determine the proper scope of allowable tax planning. It then analyzes the optimal form of tax laws addressing shelters, such as whether the law should use more detailed rules or broad standards.","PeriodicalId":161847,"journal":{"name":"University of Chicago Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series","volume":"152 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127287129","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}