Law & Psychology eJournal最新文献

{"title":"Do Bad Things Happen When Works Enter the Public Domain?: Empirical Tests of Copyright Term Extension","authors":"Christopher Buccafusco, P. Heald","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.2130008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.2130008","url":null,"abstract":"According to the current copyright statute, in 2018, copyrighted works of music, film, and literature will begin to transition into the public domain. While this will prove a boon for users and creators, it could be disastrous for the owners of these valuable copyrights. Accordingly, the next few years will witness another round of aggressive lobbying by the film, music, and publishing industries to extend the terms of already-existing works. These industries, and a number of prominent scholars, claim that when works enter the public domain bad things will happen to them. They worry that works in the public domain will be underused, overused, or tarnished in ways that will undermine the works’ cultural and economic value. Although the validity of their assertions turn on empirically testable hypotheses, very little effort has been made to study them. This Article attempts to fill that gap by studying the market for audiobook recordings of bestselling novels. Data from our research, including a novel human subjects experiment, suggest that the claims about the public domain are suspect. Our data indicate that audio books made from public domain bestsellers (1913-22) are significantly more available than those made from copyrighted bestsellers (1923-32). In addition, our experimental protocol suggests that professionally made recordings of public domain and copyrighted books are of similar quality. Finally, while a low quality recording seems to lower a listener's valuation of the underlying work, our data do not suggest any correlation between that valuation and legal status of the underlying work. Accordingly, our  Assistant Professor, Chicago-Kent College of Law; Co-Director, Center on Empirical Studies of Intellectual Property.  Professor of Law, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Professorial Fellow, Centre for Intellectual Property Policy and Management, Bournemouth University (UK). We wish to thank Emily Barney, Steven Benethen, Jessica Bregant, Kacy King, Bin Li, Megan Nolan, Tyler Slack, and Alex Wilgus for their assistance with researching, recording, designing, and analyzing these studies. We are also grateful to the following people for comments on earlier versions of this paper: Richard Watt and participants at the Canterbury University (Christchurch, NZ) Department of Economics Workshop; Suzy Frankel and the University of Wellington (NZ) School of Law colloquium series; participants at the Conference on Empirical Legal Studies; and participants at the annual meeting of the Society for Economic Research on Copyright Issues.","PeriodicalId":191231,"journal":{"name":"Law & Psychology eJournal","volume":"56 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-08-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123412488","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":"Hedonic Trademarks","authors":"Irina D. Manta","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2125252","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2125252","url":null,"abstract":"A number of scholars have recently critiqued the traditional search-costs model of trademark infringement doctrine and have proposed alternatives driven by consumer decision-making theories and contractarian understandings of trademarks. While I agree that the search-costs model is problematic in parts, some of the other suggested frameworks suffer from difficulties of their own. For one, these alternative approaches draw up a dichotomy between “pure�? experiences of trademarked goods as opposed to “altered�? experiences, with the latter representing the mindsets of consumers after trademark owners have influenced them via advertising and other devices in an effort to build up goodwill. This Article posits, however, that this binary setup most reminiscent of the decision between the red pill and the blue pill in the movie The Matrix — with one standing for the “truth�? about trademarked products and the other a “fake reality�? filled with manufactured perceptions about goods — is a false choice. Indeed, in today’s world, many goods and their brands have become inextricably tied with one another and consumers experience the two together. In that sense, it is not necessarily relevant whether consumers prefer Pepsi to Coke when no labels are attached because we may actually be interested in human experience and level of hedonic benefits as a whole, and labels do enter that holistic perception. Hedonic harms to consumers, should they be of sufficient magnitude, could prove significant for doctrines such as dilution and post-sale confusion because intellectual property may become rivalrous and consumers’ experience of the original goods has the potential to suffer even when search costs do not increase. In short, the model presented here tries to resolve the tension between the information transmission conception of trademarks, which seeks to protect consumers from deception, and the misappropriation theory, which focuses on producers’ investments in goodwill. This Article shows how a robust trademark system must account for the possibility that producers serve as providers of hedonic values to consumers. A trademark system that seeks to maximize global hedonic and economic utility would need to include First Amendment-based safe harbors such as criticism and parody. In this context, deeper empirical exploration of hedonic trade-offs is likely to become an important source of information in drawing the contours of trademark law.","PeriodicalId":191231,"journal":{"name":"Law & Psychology eJournal","volume":"18 3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-08-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123450420","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":"Managing Expectations: Beyond Formal Adjudication","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/CBO9781139565479.030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139565479.030","url":null,"abstract":"The international investment system has depended heavily on international arbitration to provide guidance and clarification on the standards contained in international investment agreements. In order to assess the system realistically, this commentary discusses unpacking stakeholder expectations by recognizing where expectations may have been overly optimistic and thinking systematically about the mechanisms through which to capture and manage regulatory discretion. This article evaluates ideas expressed by Anne van Aaken and Bart Legum, which consider different ways to achieve regulatory and commercial balance, and offers a lens for thinking systematically about managing stakeholder expectations in the international investment system. A critical issue for international investment law relates to cognitive psychology and how to manage the expectations of differently situated stakeholders. This commentary explores different methods to managing stakeholder expectations and investment treaty conflict such as education and different doctrinal opportunities such as administrative law’s model of formal and informal rule-making and adjudication. This commentary concludes that an evidence-based nuanced analysis allows consideration of specific dynamics about stakeholder objectives, enabling a more realistic assessment of the international investment regime.","PeriodicalId":191231,"journal":{"name":"Law & Psychology eJournal","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130962995","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":"Defaults and Attention: The Drop Out Effect","authors":"Andrew Caplin, Daniel Martin","doi":"10.3386/W17988","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3386/W17988","url":null,"abstract":"When choice options are complex, policy makers may seek to reduce decision making errors by making a high quality option the default. We show that this positive effect is at risk because such a policy creates incentives for decision makers to \"drop out\" by paying no attention to the decision and accepting the default sight unseen. Using decision time as a proxy for attention, we confirm the importance of this effect in an experimental setting. A key challenge for policy makers is to measure, and if possible mitigate, such drop out behavior in the field.","PeriodicalId":191231,"journal":{"name":"Law & Psychology eJournal","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133804892","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":"Assuring Adequate Deterrence in Tort: A Public Good Experiment","authors":"T. Eisenberg, C. Engel","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2041154","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2041154","url":null,"abstract":"To explore damage rules’ deterrent effect, we use a public good experiment to tailor allowable punishment to rules used in actual civil litigation. The experimental treatments are analogous to: (1) damages limited to harm to an individual litigant, (2) damages limited to harm to a group available in aggregate litigation, such as class actions, and (3) damages allowed beyond actual harm to victims, such as punitive damages. The treatment with damages limited to harm to an individual does not prevent the deterioration in cooperation over time commonly found in public good experiments without punishment or with too low punishment. In the class action damages treatment, cooperation is stable over time. In the damages-beyond-harm treatment, cooperation approaches the optimal level, but concerns of socially unjust punishment arise. In all treatments, a money maximising agent would be expected to completely freeride and make no contribution to the public good. Our results can thus not be explained by an incentive effect. Rather we find that social preferences interact with the severity of sanctions, even if imposing the sanction is not altruistic, but instead financially benefits the sanctioning authority. The results persist in a variation of the three treatments in which the player imposing damages has the option to not retain them for herself but to have them forfeited with no benefit to her. We can therefore rule out that the beneficial effect of sanctions hinges on the participants knowing that the player imposing sanctions cannot intend to enrich herself. The methodology we develop could be used to assess the social welfare benefit of many damages rules, such as treble damages in antitrust cases and caps on damages common in medical malpractice cases and punitive damages cases.","PeriodicalId":191231,"journal":{"name":"Law & Psychology eJournal","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131190589","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":"Instructing Juries on Noneconomic Contract Damages","authors":"David Hoffman, A. Radus","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2022596","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2022596","url":null,"abstract":"Gathering pattern contract jury instructions from every State, we examine jurisdictions' treatment of noneconomic damages. While the conventional account holds that there is a uniform preference against awards of noneconomic damages, we find four different approaches in pattern instructions, with only one state explicitly prohibiting juries from considering noneconomic losses. Lay juries have considerably more freedom to award the promisee's noneconomic damages than the hornbooks would have us believe. We substantiate this claim with an online survey experiment asking respondents about a common contract case, and instructing them using the differing pattern forms. We found that subjects routinely awarded more than the promisee's baseline economic losses. In one of the categories of instruction — in which contract juries are instructed to award a tort-like form of remedy — subjects returned almost two times more in damages than the promisee's mere expectation. The resulting picture of contract remedies is considerably more complex than the conventional wisdom portrays, but significantly more realistic.","PeriodicalId":191231,"journal":{"name":"Law & Psychology eJournal","volume":"76 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129735885","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":"Well-Being Analysis vs. Cost-Benefit Analysis","authors":"John Bronsteen, Christopher Buccafusco, J. Masur","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1989202","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1989202","url":null,"abstract":"Cost-benefit analysis is the primary tool used by policymakers to inform administrative decisionmaking. Yet its methodology of converting preferences (often hypothetical ones) into dollar figures, then using those dollar figures as proxies for quality of life, creates systemic errors so large as to deprive the tool of value. These problems have been lamented by many scholars, and recent calls have gone out from world leaders and prominent economists to find an alternative analytical device that would measure quality of life more directly. This Article proposes well-being analysis (WBA) as that alternative. Relying on data from the field of hedonic psychology that tracks people’s actual experience of life — data that has consistently survived scrutiny by passing the social science tests of reliability and validity — WBA is able to provide the same policy guidance as CBA without CBA’s distortionary conversion of preferences to dollars. We show how WBA can be implemented, and we catalog exhaustively its superiority over CBA. In light of this comparison, we conclude that there is no reason for CBA to continue as the decisionmaking tool of choice for administrative regulation.","PeriodicalId":191231,"journal":{"name":"Law & Psychology eJournal","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-01-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128405744","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":"Belief, Truth, and Positive Organizational Deviance","authors":"G. Parks, Shayne E. Jones, M. Hughey","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1940731","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1940731","url":null,"abstract":"Black Greek-Letter Organizations (BGLOs) are unique institutions. Though few in number, they claim some of this country’s most renowned African American leaders – e.g., Charles Hamilton Houston (architect of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s Brown v. Board strategy), Rosa Parks (mother of the Civil Rights Movement), Earl B. Dickerson (civil rights lawyer and first black University of Chicago Law School graduate), Sadie Alexander (first African American woman to earn a PhD, and first to earn a JD from the University of Pennsylvania), and William Hastie (first African American federal judge). Uniquely, BGLOs’ members tend to remain deeply committed to their organizations over a life-course. Even more, BGLOs tend to initiate large numbers of members into highly functioning alumni chapters. One thing that is most striking about BGLOs, however, is a particularly violent brand of hazing employed to initiate their new members. While there have been reforms within BGLOs to curtail hazing injuries, deaths, and legal wrangling (both civil and criminal), violent hazing within them persists. A host of reasons may explain why law fails to constrain legally consequential behavior within organizations like BGLOs. This article seeks to empirically ascertain (1) what beliefs may undergird BGLO hazing and (2) the extent to which beliefs about the utility of hazing as a means to actualize the essential ingredients of BGLO existence (i.e., commitment to the organization, its ideals, and members) are well-founded. We close by reconciling the tension between these findings and how law attempts to constrain behavior.","PeriodicalId":191231,"journal":{"name":"Law & Psychology eJournal","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-10-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114817968","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 Effect of Community Mental Health Services on Hospitalization Rates in Virginia","authors":"T. Wanchek, E. McGarvey, R. Bonnie","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1766045","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1766045","url":null,"abstract":"OBJECTIVE\u0000This study examined the relationship between the availability of mental health outpatient services provided by 40 publicly funded community service boards (CSBs) and the use of inpatient mental health treatment among Medicaid recipients.\u0000\u0000\u0000METHODS\u0000Three-year data were obtained for Medicaid recipients aged 18-64 from the Medicaid claims database for the Commonwealth of Virginia. Medicaid recipients who had a mental disorder diagnosis and who had received at least one community mental health service were included in the sample. A multivariate regression model was used for the analyses.\u0000\u0000\u0000RESULTS\u0000Of the 11,107 individuals included, 27% had schizophrenia-related disorders and 32% had affective psychoses; 60% were white and 37% were black; and the average age was 40.1±13.1 years. In this sample, greater use of outpatient mental health services, but not greater variety of services available, was correlated with fewer inpatient hospital days for mental health treatment (-1.0±.2 days of hospitalization).\u0000\u0000\u0000CONCLUSIONS\u0000Virginia's CSBs provide a range of outpatient mental health services that are designed to enable individuals to remain in their community. The availability of community-based mental health services was correlated with lower rates of inpatient hospitalization for mental illness. More research, however, is needed to establish causality and to determine which services are most effective at reducing the need for inpatient care.","PeriodicalId":191231,"journal":{"name":"Law & Psychology eJournal","volume":"39 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131044069","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":"Willpower Taxes","authors":"L. Fennell","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1699916","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1699916","url":null,"abstract":"Self-control and related concepts appear regularly in tax discussions, but often they are invoked hazily or blurred together with other aspects of choice over time. Despite the evident relevance of willpower to consumption patterns, wealth accumulation, and, ultimately, well-being, there is no consensus about whether and how heterogeneity along this dimension should factor into tax policy. There is support in the tax literature for such divergent responses as funneling more resources to low-willpower people, penalizing them for their lapses, and limiting their choices. Whether we should follow one of these approaches, or some other approach entirely, requires a careful analysis of willpower’s workings and its connections to well-being. To begin such an analysis, I focus on three categories of costs associated with willpower problems: the failure costs of suboptimal choices, exercise costs stemming from the willpower exertion itself, and erosion costs that relate to changes over time in willpower levels as a result of patterns of exertions and outcomes. With this framework in mind, I consider the effects of existing and proposed tax policy measures on people with different self-control levels. I then consider some alternatives that would address heterogeneity in willpower through a menu of regulatory bundles designed to induce self-sorting.","PeriodicalId":191231,"journal":{"name":"Law & Psychology eJournal","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-10-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131812883","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}