Our underlying premise in this article is that a government is likely to bolster its legitimacy when it uses legal decision-making procedures in which the public has confidence. Our findings, which are based on a survey about options for resolving disputes in the land use arena, identify an...

Human behavior is not always consistent with standard rational choice predictions. The much-investigated variety of apparent deviations from rational choice predictions provides a promising arena for the merger of economics and biology. Although little is known about the extent to which other...

Recent work at the intersection of law and behavioral biology has suggested numerous contexts in which legal thinking could benefit by integrating knowledge from behavioral biology. In one of those contexts, behavioral biology may help to provide theoretical foundation for, and potentially...

The endowment effect is the seemingly irrationally tendency to immediately value a possessed item more than the opportunity to acquire the identical item when one does not already possess it. The phenomenon has broad legal implications, as it suggests a drag on trade, occasioned by inconsistent...

The endowment effect is the seemingly irrationally tendency to immediately value a possessed item more than the opportunity to acquire the identical item when one does not already possess it. The phenomenon has broad legal implications, as it suggests a drag on trade, occasioned by inconsistent...

Hundreds of studies demonstrate human cognitive biases that are both inconsistent with “rational” decisionmaking and puzzlingly patterned. One such bias, the “endowment effect” (also known as “reluctance to trade”), occurs when people instantly value an item they have just acquired...

Cooperation has been vital to the evolution of all living things, including single-celled organisms (Velicer, 2005, 2003; Velicer and Stredwick, 2002; Crespi, 2001; Velicer et al., 2000; Boorman and Levitt, 1980), fish (Brosnan et al., 2003; Dugatkin, 1991, 1992, 1997; Milinski, 1987), birds (Brown and Brown, 1996; Faaborg...

Although the study of economic systems, such as free enterprise, is inherently entwined with human societies, studying the evolutionary roots of behaviors involved can tell us a great deal about ourselves. One of the values involved in free enterprise is a sense of fairness. A similar reaction,...

Increasing penalty structures for repeat offenses are ubiquitous in penal codes, despite little empirical or theoretical support. Multi-period models of criminal enforcement based on the standard economic approach of Becker (1968) generally find that the optimal penalty structure is either flat...

Decreasing social sensitivity (i.e., the ability of a person to perceive, understand, and respect the feelings and viewpoints of others), has been shown to facilitate selfish behavior. This is not only true for exogenous changes in social sensitivity, but also for social sensitivity influenced...