This paper explores the idea that adopting a law is like investing in a productive asset. Investment involves incurring a present cost in the expectation of future benefits. Legal systems can be regarded as making investment decisions when incurring present lawmaking costs that will generate...

The presence of multiple sellers in the provision of (nonsubstitutable) complementary goods leads to outcomes that are worse than those generated by a monopoly (with a vertically integrated production of complements), a problem known in the economic literature as complementary oligopoly and...

In this paper we study price competition, equilibrium market configurations and entry when firms compete in vertically-di¤erentiated markets producing complementary goods. We consider two complements and start from a configuration where the market for one complement is a duopoly, whereas the...

The presence of multiple sellers in the provision of (nonsubstitutable) complementary goods leads to outcomes that are worse than those generated by a monopoly (with a vertically integrated production of complements), a problem known in the economic literature as complementary oligopoly and...

Economic analysis has long been employed for the study of tort liability. This paper revisits the main contributions to the subject emphasizing the inherent impossibility for tort liability to set perfectly efficient first-best incentives to take precaution for all parties to an accident and the...

In ancient societies, rules of communal responsibility permitted the imposition of retaliatory sanctions on a wrongdoer’s clan. These rules followed the collective ownership structure of early communities. Over time, notions of personal responsibility emerged, terminating the transfer of...