ALEA 2012 22nd Annual Meeting最新文献

{"title":"Mitigating Hold-Up Through Complementarities and Refunds","authors":"J. Hawkins","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1992052","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1992052","url":null,"abstract":"Many valuable composite goods or property rights exist only by assembling multiple, monopoly-supplied components. Since a monopolist exclusively owns each component, hold-up by the last seller can result. First I design a model to show how sunk cost explains this assembly problem. Then I consider two factors that reduce sunk cost, determining conditions for which each mitigates hold-up. Specifically, I implement varied degrees of complementarities and levels of refundability of the component goods. No known previous research examines the assembly problem in terms of sunk cost or considers refunds, and little research models imperfect complementarities. I show if at least the first component purchased has stand alone value, hold-up is mitigated under any refund level. However, if only the last component purchased has stand alone value, averting hold-up depends on capacity constraints, degree of complementarities, price discrimination, and level of refund. Regardless of the degree of complementarities, full refunds prevent hold-up, while zero and partial refunds do not. Welfare analysis reveals conditions for a first or second mover advantage and when sellers endogenously choose a partial or full refund. This research offers settings when degrees of complementarity and refundability reduce sunk cost, often enough to prevent hold-up. My results also suggest policies to overcome inefficiencies in assembling property rights or component goods, such as legal requirements on full refunds, regulation on the order in which components must be purchased, and price discrimination prohibition.","PeriodicalId":261946,"journal":{"name":"ALEA 2012 22nd Annual Meeting","volume":"77 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-12-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128189405","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":"Restricting Testamentary Freedom: Ex Ante Versus Ex Post Justifications","authors":"Daniel B. Kelly","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1990802","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1990802","url":null,"abstract":"The organizing principle of American succession law — testamentary freedom — gives decedents a nearly unrestricted right to dispose of property. After surveying the justifications for testamentary freedom, I examine the circumstances in which it may be socially beneficial for courts to alter wills, trusts, and other gratuitous transfers at death: imperfect information, negative externalities, and intergenerational equity. These justifications correspond with many existing limitations on the freedom of testation. Yet, disregarding donor intent to maximize the donees’ ex post interests, an increasingly common justification for intervention, is socially undesirable. Doing so ignores important ex ante considerations, including a donor’s happiness, a donor’s incentive to work, save, and invest, and the structure and timing of a donor’s gifts. If donors believe courts may not facilitate their intent, donors may be less happy, accumulate less property, and alter gifts during life. Moreover, because the law often affects donor behavior, ignoring donative intent to benefit particular donees may harm not only the donors but also donees as a class. Thus, the living may themselves benefit if the law allows a certain degree of “dead hand” control.","PeriodicalId":261946,"journal":{"name":"ALEA 2012 22nd Annual Meeting","volume":"40 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130032750","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":"Information and Priority Rules","authors":"M. Hewer","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1979505","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1979505","url":null,"abstract":"Bankruptcy and corporate laws in several countries allow or require courts to subordinate loans by shareholders to corporations. Examples include the equitable subordination and recharacterization doctrines in the US and the German Eigenkapitalersatzrecht. Scholars have not devoted much attention to these rules so far despite their rather unclear economic implications. We propose a model that focuses on the role of information and ex-ante investment incentives. We find that informational asymmetries can justify the requalification: The more priority is given to the uninformed creditor, the better are the results from a welfare perspective.","PeriodicalId":261946,"journal":{"name":"ALEA 2012 22nd Annual Meeting","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-03-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117051182","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":"Lumpy Property","authors":"L. Fennell","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1977646","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1977646","url":null,"abstract":"A bridge that only spans three-quarters of the distance across a chasm is useless, although far from costless. This standard, intuitive example of a lumpy or step good illustrates a point about discontinuities and complementarities that has broad, and mostly unexplored, significance for property law. In this essay, I explain how, why, and when property might be regarded as lumpy, and examine the implications of that lumpiness for doctrine and theory. Viewing property through the lens of lumpiness matters for several reasons. The first is descriptive accuracy. Property law is lumpy as a positive matter, filled with doctrines and approaches that deal with the world in discrete, hard-to-divide chunks. Second, an appreciation of lumpiness can inform optimal entitlement design. In evaluating the chunkiness that is built into property doctrines, we must ask whether and how it corresponds to - or contributes to - underlying discontinuities in the production or consumption of property. A third reason for attending to lumpiness is that many of property law’s most important conflicts can be usefully framed as “lump versus lump.” For example, an exercise of eminent domain may achieve a valuable spatial aggregation by splitting up some other aggregation, such as lengthy temporal attachments to the land, or a cohesive community that shares social capital. Recognizing the work that nonlinearities do in such stories can offer new traction on contested property issues. Lumpiness also informs ongoing theoretical debates that turn out to have a similar “lump versus lump” structure, including the usefulness of the “bundle of sticks” metaphor and the tension between exclusion and social obligation.","PeriodicalId":261946,"journal":{"name":"ALEA 2012 22nd Annual Meeting","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130143690","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":"Price Discrimination in Income Taxation","authors":"B. Alarie","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1986272","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1986272","url":null,"abstract":"Governments throughout the developed world worry incessantly about the implications of sophisticated tax planning for their tax revenues. And yet the same governments routinely stop short of doing all that they can legally do to combat tax avoidance. Why? One response is that a thick conception of the rule of law constrains governments to adopt only certain kinds of responses to tax avoidance. Another response is that inherent structural limitations in tax administrative capacity or features of the political economy environment constrain the available responses to a subset of those that are possible de jure. Even considered jointly, however, the rule of law and political economy explanations do not provide an adequate account of the observed behavior of governments in the context of anti-avoidance. The main inadequacy is that the accounts fail to provide an explanation of the circumstances that will give rise to aggressive measures countering tax avoidance. This paper introduces the “integrated price discrimination” account of income taxation. The integrated price discrimination account provides an original and superior explanation of lax anti-avoidance. An advantage of the integrated price discrimination account is that it better explains the observed practice of most developed countries. Another advantage of the price discrimination account is that it does not require that governments adopt this counter-intuitive approach consciously; it could simply be an unintentional byproduct of decisions taken for different reasons. Several policy implications of the integrated price discrimination account are addressed.","PeriodicalId":261946,"journal":{"name":"ALEA 2012 22nd Annual Meeting","volume":"47 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-01-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132004736","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 Hypothesis of the Natural Rate of Punishment","authors":"J. Sørensen","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1986308","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1986308","url":null,"abstract":"One of the most puzzling questions in economics is the existence of extremely high income differences between rich and poor countries. In neoclassical economics, we choose to start with the first order assumption, that people and institutions are rational, meaning that capital flow from places with low return to higher returns. This doesn’t mean that all countries should be alike, but any differences in income could only reflect a level effect from different institutional set-ups, because of the economic law of diminishing return. There cannot be any dynamic growth effect from differences in institutions. This was one of the main insights from the classical Solow model, which in turn lead to the conclusion that institutions was important, but actually not that important. In this paper I challenge this mainstream view. My hypothesis is that maybe our institutions actually have some “secrets” as Hayek once put it. Maybe small initial changes in those institutions could eventually lead to success or totally disaster, simply because the time preferences in the economy in it selves is not an exogenous variable. My suggestion is that the initial condition for man, is “stealing” from the capital base (which we normally call a “crime”) which in turn is actually a dominant strategy. Institutions securing private property are very fragile, meaning that a certain degree of punishment, breaking these institutions, must be in place, before any growth take-off. From an individual point of view, there seems to be a clear trade-off between generating income from productive work and stealing from the capital base (“from the rich”). It seems therefore logical to think that the punishment from breaking the institutions of private property must somehow reflect the overall accumulation of capital, meaning there could be a abstract or natural level of punishment, securing doing crime becomes relatively “bad business.” But if punishment is lower than the “natural level” crime, crime in itself could deteriorating the capital base, leading to lower income and then give birth to even more crime. This asks the question. If the capital base is lower, shouldn't that generate a higher and higher return of capital at the margin, then simply establish a new equilibrium at a lower income level? I will show that it is possible that the destructive forces from crime is enough to overcome the forces from the Inada condition, then established a negative growth path and the destruction of society.","PeriodicalId":261946,"journal":{"name":"ALEA 2012 22nd Annual Meeting","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-01-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125319120","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":"Duo Cum Faciunt Idem, Non Est Idem - Evidence from Austrian Pain and Suffering Verdicts","authors":"M. Flatscher‐Thöni, A. Leiter, Hannes Winner","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1983895","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1983895","url":null,"abstract":"We analyze the pricing of pain and suffering and, in particular, whether the corresponding compensations are affected by a court’s approach to value such damages. For this purpose, we use data on pain and suffering verdicts in Austria, where courts are generally free to choose between a per diem and a lump sum scheme to assess payments on damages for pain and suffering. We find significant higher payments under the lump sum regime, which are not vanishing even after controlling for individual- and injury-specific characteristics. Our evidence suggests that the observed difference between lump sum and per diem schemes mainly appears if the victims are female and exposed to multiple injuries and, to a lesser extent, to intensive past pain days.","PeriodicalId":261946,"journal":{"name":"ALEA 2012 22nd Annual Meeting","volume":"117 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-01-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132655751","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 Dynamic Model of Doctrinal Choice","authors":"S. Baker, P. Kim","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1983446","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1983446","url":null,"abstract":"This paper develops a repeated game model of the choice of doctrinal form by a higher court. Doctrine can take any point along a continuum from more determinate, rule-like legal commands to more flexible, standard-like directives. In deciding a case, the Supreme Court not only decides on a substantive outcome, but also chooses where on this continuum to set the doctrine. The lower court then applies the legal command to future cases. In doing so, it may wish to take into account new information, but the cost of doing so varies with the form of the legal doctrine. The model shows that in equilibrium doctrine oscillates over time between more rule-like commands and more standard-like commands. What triggers the shift in doctrinal form are the lower court's \"mistakes\" when trying to implement the standard in the way the Supreme Court prefers. The mistakes induce the Supreme Court to cabin the lower court's discretion by issuing more rule-like legal commands for a certain number of periods. Too much constraint, however, produces error costs when the lower court cannot adjust the law appropriately to new circumstances, leading to a shift back to more standard-like doctrine. We derive comparative statics showing how the length of the constraint phase responds to the degree of preference conflict between the courts. Finally, we illustrate the features of the model through a doctrinal case study of the law governing the voluntariness of confessions.","PeriodicalId":261946,"journal":{"name":"ALEA 2012 22nd Annual Meeting","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-10-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116188119","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 Price Effects of a Large Merger of Manufacturers: A Case Study of Maytag-Whirlpool","authors":"Matthew C. Weinberg, O. Ashenfelter, Daniel Hosken","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1974311","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1974311","url":null,"abstract":"Many experts have speculated that U.S. antitrust policy towards horizontal mergers was too lenient over the last decade. We estimate the price effects resulting from the merger of Whirlpool and Maytag to provide new evidence on this debate. The merger substantially increased concentration in four appliance markets: clothes washers and dryers, refrigerators and dishwashers. We compare the change in prices for appliance markets most affected by the merger to markets where concentration changed much less or not at all. We find evidence of modest price increases for dishwashers and relatively large price increases for clothes dryers while refrigerator and clothes washer prices appear largely unchanged as a result of the merger. The combined Whirlpool/Maytag’s market share fell across all four affected categories after the merger. We also find that Whirlpool/Maytag reduced the number of distinct appliance products offered post-acquisition.","PeriodicalId":261946,"journal":{"name":"ALEA 2012 22nd Annual Meeting","volume":"52 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-04-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117120888","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}