This essay, delivered as the Nies Lecture at Marquette Law School, focuses on changes in the doctrinal structure of trademark law over the course of the last century — specifically with respect to the relationship between trademark law's limits and the broader common law of unfair competition....

Abstract We examine how owning a good affects learning and beliefs about its quality. We show that people have more extreme reactions to information about a good that they own compared to the same information about a non-owned good: ownership causes more optimistic beliefs after receiving a...

This study examines if geographical variation in the dominant religion of a firm's location is associated with its ownership structures. We contrast two Christian faiths, Protestantism and Catholicism, which—despite theological similarities—have been associated with contrasting preferences...

In cities across the country, artists, protesters, and businesses are using light projections to turn any building's facade into a billboard without the owner's consent. Examples are legion: “Believe Women” on a New York City Best Buy; a scantily clad male model on the side of an apartment...

Property rights have long been associated with a simple and distinctive technology: exclusion. But technologies can become outdated as conditions change, and exclusion is no exception. Recent decades have featured profound changes that have made exclusion a less useful, less necessary, and more...

In the last two decades, a renewed interest in property rights have challenged the accepted interpretation of property rights as “bundle of rights” over the use of things and have rehabilitated the old classical interpretation of property rights as exclusive (absolute) dominium over things...

This essay presents a new argument for the societal role of government. Traditionally anchored in the classic Hobbesian rationale, government's classic function has been taken to be the provision of security: Government is provided a monopoly in the rule of force in order to ensure protection...

We provide experimental evidence for the existence of “rent stigma,” a preference for owning goods or real estate to renting them. In one experiment, anonymous respondents preferred owning a car or house to renting them even though the transaction was constructed to be identical in each case...

We aim at characterizing which kind of functions could be explained (rationalized) as the best reply of payoff-maximizing agents in contests for a fixed prize. We show that the rationalizability strongly differs between Decisive Contests, where the prize is allocated with certainty, and Possibly...