A Behavioral Approach to Law and Economics
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ARTICLES A Behavioral Approach to Law and Economics Christine Jolls,* Cass R. Sunstein,** and Richard Thaler*** Economic analysis of law usually proceeds under the assumptions of neo- classical economics. But empirical evidence gives much reason to doubt these assumptions; people exhibit bounded rationality, bounded self-interest, and bounded willpower. This article offers a broad vision of how law and econom- ics analysis may be improved by increased attention to insights about actual human behavior. It considers specific topics in the economic analysis of law and proposes new models and approaches for addressing these topics. The analysis of the article is organized into three categories: positive, prescriptive, and normative. Positive analysis of law concerns how agents behave in re- sponse to legal rules and how legal rules are shaped. Prescriptive analysis concerns what rules should be adopted to advance specified ends. Normative analysis attempts to assess more broadly the ends of the legal system: Should the system always respect people’s choices? By drawing attention to cognitive and motivational problems of both citizens and government, behavioral law and economics offers answers distinct from those offered by the standard analysis. * Assistant Professor of Law, Harvard Law School. ** Karl N. Llewellyn Distinguished Service Professor of Jurisprudence, University of Chicago. *** Robert P. Gwinn Professor of Economics and Behavioral Science, Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago. We acknowledge the helpful comments of Ian Ayres, Lucian Bebchuk, Colin Camerer, David Charny, Richard Craswell, Jon Elster, Nuno Garoupa, J.B. Heaton, Samuel Issacharoff, Dan Kahan, Louis Kaplow, Lewis Kornhauser, Lawrence Lessig, Steven Levitt, A. Mitchell Polinsky, Eric Pos- ner, Richard Posner, Richard Revesz, Steven Shavell, Jonathan Zittrain, Ari Zweiman, and partici- pants at the American Law and Economics Association Annual Meeting, the Boston University Law School Faculty Workshop, the Columbia University Law and Economics Workshop, work- shops at Harvard Law School on law and economics and on rationality, the NBER Behavioral Law and Economics Conference, the NYU Rational Choice Colloquium, and the University of Chicago Law and Economics Workshop. Todd Murtha and Gil Seinfeld provided outstanding research as- sistance. Nicole Armenta provided helpful material on criminal abstinence programs. This work was finished while Thaler was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sci- ences; he is grateful for the Center’s support. 1471 1472 STANFORD LAW REVIEW [Vol. 50:1471 INTRODUCTION .................................................................................... 1473 I. FOUNDATIONS: WHAT IS “BEHAVIORAL LAW AND ECONOMICS”? ................................................................................ 1476 A. Homo Economicus and Real People ....................................... 1476 1. Bounded rationality .......................................................... 1477 2. Bounded willpower ........................................................... 1479 3. Bounded self-interest ........................................................ 1479 4. Applications ...................................................................... 1480 B. Testable Predictions................................................................ 1481 C. Partial and Ambiguous Successes of Conventional Economics ............................................................................... 1485 D. Parsimony................................................................................ 1487 II. BEHAVIOR OF AGENTS................................................................... 1489 A. The Ultimatum Game .............................................................. 1489 1. The game and its sunk-cost variation ............................... 1489 2. Fairness, acrimony, and scruples..................................... 1493 B. Bargaining Around Court Orders ........................................... 1497 1. Coasian prediction............................................................ 1497 2. Behavioral analysis........................................................... 1497 3. Evidence............................................................................ 1499 C. Failed Negotiations................................................................. 1501 1. Self-serving conceptions of fairness.................................. 1501 2. Evidence............................................................................ 1502 3. The role of lawyers ........................................................... 1504 D. Mandatory Contract Terms..................................................... 1505 1. Wage and price effects...................................................... 1505 2. Behavioral analysis........................................................... 1506 III. THE CONTENT OF LAW .................................................................. 1508 A. Bans on Market Transactions.................................................. 1510 1. Bans on economic transactions ........................................ 1510 2. Other bans ........................................................................ 1515 B. Prior Restraints on Speech...................................................... 1516 C. Anecdote-Driven Environmental Legislation (With Particular Reference to Superfund) ........................................ 1518 1. Estimating the likelihood of uncertain events................... 1518 2. Superfund.......................................................................... 1520 IV. PRESCRIPTIONS .............................................................................. 1522 A. Negligence Determinations and Other Determinations of Fact or Law ............................................................................. 1523 1. Background....................................................................... 1523 May 1998] BEHAVIORAL APPROACH TO LAW & ECONOMICS 1473 2. Prescriptions..................................................................... 1527 3. Other applications ............................................................ 1532 B. Information Disclosure and Government Advertising ............ 1533 1. Background....................................................................... 1533 2. Antiprescription ................................................................ 1534 3. Prescriptions..................................................................... 1536 C. Behavior of Criminals ............................................................. 1538 1. Background....................................................................... 1538 2. Prescriptions..................................................................... 1539 V. NORMATIVE ANALYSIS: ANTI-ANTIPATERNALISM....................... 1541 A. Citizen Error ........................................................................... 1541 B. Behavioral Bureaucrats .......................................................... 1543 CONCLUSION ........................................................................................ 1545 APPENDIX: FRAMEWORK AND SUMMARY OF APPLICATIONS .............. 1548 INTRODUCTION Objections to the rational actor model in law and economics are almost as old as the field itself. Early skeptics about the economic analysis of law were quick to marshal arguments from psychology and other social sciences to undermine its claims.1 But in law, challenges to the rational actor as- sumption by those who sympathize with the basic objectives of economic analysis have been much less common. The absence of sustained and com- prehensive economic analysis of legal rules from a perspective informed by insights about actual human behavior makes for a significant contrast with many other fields of economics, where such “behavioral” analysis has be- come relatively common.2 This is especially odd since law is a domain where behavioral analysis would appear to be particularly promising in light of the fact that nonmarket behavior is frequently involved. Our goal in this article is to advance an approach to the economic analy- sis of law that is informed by a more accurate conception of choice, one that reflects a better understanding of human behavior and its wellsprings. We build on and attempt to generalize earlier work in law outlining behavioral findings by taking the two logical next steps: proposing a systematic frame- work for a behavioral approach to economic analysis of law, and using be- havioral insights to develop specific models and approaches addressing top- 1. See, e.g., Mark Kelman, Consumption Theory, Production Theory, and Ideology in the Coase Theorem, 52 S. CAL. L. REV. 669 (1979); Duncan Kennedy, Cost-Benefit Analysis of Enti- tlement Problems: A Critique, 33 STAN. L. REV. 387 (1981); Arthur Allen Leff, Economic Analysis of Law: Some Realism About Nominalism, 60 VA. L. REV. 451 (1974). 2. See, e.g., volume 112, issue 2 of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, which contains 11 articles related to behavioral economics. 1474 STANFORD LAW REVIEW [Vol. 50:1471 ics of abiding interest in law and economics.3 The analysis of these specific topics is preliminary and often in the nature of a proposal for a research agenda; we touch on a wide range of issues in an effort to show the potential uses of behavioral insights. The unifying idea in our analysis is that behav- ioral economics allows us to model and predict behavior