The past twenty years have witnessed a surge in behavioral studies of law and law-related issues. These studies have challenged the application of the rational-choice model to legal analysis and introduced a more accurate and empirically grounded model of human behavior. This integration of economics, psychology, and law is breaking exciting new ground in legal theory and the social sciences, shedding a new light on age-old legal questions as well as cutting edge policy issues. The Oxford Handbook of Behavioral Economics and Law brings together leading scholars of law, psychology, and economics to provide an up-to-date and comprehensive analysis of this field of research, including its strengths and limitations as well as a forecast of its future development. Its 29 chapters organized in four parts. The first part provides a general overview of behavioral economics. The second part comprises four chapters introducing and criticizing the contribution of behavioral economics to legal theory. The third part discusses specific behavioral phenomena, their ramifications for legal policymaking, and their reflection in extant law. Finally, the fourth part analyzes the contribution of behavioral economics to fifteen legal spheres ranging from core doctrinal areas such as contracts, torts and property to areas such as taxation and antitrust policy.
Introduction ; I. BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS: AN OVERVIEW ; 1. Heuristics and Biases ; Jonathan Baron ; 2. Human Pro-Social Motivation and the Maintenance of Social Order ; Simon Gachter ; 3. Moral Judgment ; Jonathan Baron ; II. BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS AND THE LAW: AN OVERVIEW AND CRITIQUE ; 4. The Importance of Behavioral Law ; Thomas S. Ulen ; 5. Behavioral Law and Economics: Empirical Methods ; Christoph Engel ; 6. Biasing, Debiasing, and the Law ; Daniel Pi, Francesco Parisi, and Barbara Luppi ; 7. Alternative BLEs ; Gregory Mitchell ; III. BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS AND THE LAW: SPECIFIC BEHAVIORAL PHENOMENA ; 8. Law and Prosocial Behavior ; Lynn A. Stout ; 9. Behavioral Ethics Meets Behavioral Law and Economics ; Yuval Feldman ; 10. Law, Moral Attitudes, and Behavioral Change ; Kenworthey Bilz and Janice Nadler ; 11. Law's Loss Aversion ; Eyal Zamir ; 12. Wrestling with the Endowment Effect, or How to Do Law and Economics without the Coase Theorem ; Russell Korobkin ; 13. Probability Errors: Over-Optimism, Ambiguity Aversion, and the Certainty Effect ; Sean Hannon Williams ; 14. The Hindsight Bias and the Law in Hindsight ; Doron Teichman ; IV. BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS: LEGAL APPLICATIONS ; 15. Behavioral Law and Economics of Property Law: Achievements and Challenges ; Daphna Lewinsohn-Zamir ; 16. The Behavioral Economics of Tort Law ; Yoed Halbersberg and Ehud Guttel ; 17. Behavioral Economics and Contract Law ; Melvin A. Eisenberg ; 18. Consumer Transactions ; Oren Bar-Gill ; 19. Behavioral Economics and Insurance Law: The Importance of Equilibrium Analysis ; Tom Baker and Peter Siegelman ; 20. The End of Contractarianism? Behavioral Economics and the Law of Corporations ; Kent Greenfield ; 21. The Market, the Firm, and Behavioral Antitrust ; Avishalom Tor ; 22. Behavioral Analysis of Criminal Law: A Survey ; Alon Harel ; 23. Behavioral Economics and the Law: Tax ; Edward J. McCaffery ; 24. Litigation and Settlement ; Jennifer K. Robbennolt ; 25. Behavioral Economics and Plea Bargaining ; Russell Covey ; 26. Judicial Decisionmaking: A Behavioral Perspective ; Doron Teichman and Eyal Zamir ; 27. Evidence Law ; Fredrick E. Vars ; 28. Nudges.gov: Behaviorally Informed Regulation ; Cass R. Sunstein ; 29. Environmental Law ; Adrian Kuenzler and Douglas Kysar
