The paper studies bargaining games involving players with present-biased preferences. The paper shows that the relative timing of bargaining rewards and bargaining costs will determine whether the players' present-bias will affect bargaining outcomes. In cases where players agree to a bargain in...

Many forms of consumption tax, including recent proposals to impose a tax on the use of carbon, impose disproportionate burdens on the poor. Commentators who propose mitigating this impact with tax rebates for low-income families have overlooked the importance of the timing of consumption for...

This Essay extends to the family law area the behavioral economics empirical literature on procrastination. Numerous studies have found that people who have a long-term preference to take welfare actions routinely procrastinate following through (due to a short-term preference for maximizing...

This Article examines the effect of time-inconsistent preferences on the decision-making process of criminal offenders. It shows that even a relatively small preference for immediate gratification and over-optimism about their future self-control can lead hyperbolic criminals to repeatedly...

This article argues that repeated criminal misconduct, at least in some areas, has the characteristics of a habit or addiction. Curiosity or a transient attraction can lead an offender to commit her first crime. This first infraction will give her a sense of how much she enjoyed it, and whether...

This article develops a model of time-inconsistent criminal misconduct. It shows that people who from a long-term perspective want to be law-abiding may nonetheless engage in repeated misconduct due to the pull of their short-term preferences for immediate gratification. I demonstrate that the...

This article argues that securities lawyers help reduce transactional complexity in initial public offerings by acting as informational intermediaries. The complexity of IPOs is due to three principal factors. First, IPOs involve large number of parties – managers, accountants, underwriters,...

Paying a dividend, repurchasing shares, underpricing an initial public offering, pledging collateral, and borrowing using short-term, instead of long-term debt, are all forms of corporate communications. They are “corporate signals” that tell investors certain things about a company's...