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.

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.

Background Material

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.

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.

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.

Background Material

Legal personality is an elegant invention. One signature by the President of the Republic can oblige 80 million Germans. If the CEO has signed a contract, no shareholder can claim that he had opposed the engagement. Consequently, in economic analysis, corporate actors are sometimes just treated as unitary actors. But from the perspective of interaction partners, including regulators, there are (at least) two significant differences between individual and corporate actors: to a remarkable degree, the internal process of decision making can be observed from outside. Not so rarely, it can even be influenced. Both change the character of strategic interaction profoundly. This is why there is value in opening the black box of the corporate actor, not only for insiders, but also for outsiders.

Individual egoism does not always sum up to the common good. The invisible hand is not always active. If not, the law often steps in. It also, in antitrust, takes action to maintain workable competition as a mechanism for neutralising the detrimental effects of strategic interaction. Finally, the relationship between legal authorities and the citizen is normally strategic in character. Game theory as the conceptual tool for understanding strategic interaction thus has high explanatory power for both legal analysis and institutional design.