Experimental Study of Law

Colin Camerer () and Eric Talley

Chapter 21 in Handbook of Law and Economics, 2007, vol. 2, pp 1619-1650 from Elsevier

Abstract: This chapter surveys literature on experimental law and economics. Long the domain of legally minded psychologists and criminologists, experimental methods are gaining significant popularity among economists interested in exploring positive and normative aspects of law. Because this literature is relatively new among legally-minded economists, we spend some time in this survey on methodological points, with particular attention to the role of experiments within theoretical and empirical scholarship, the core ingredients of a well done experiment, and common distinctions between experimental economics and other fields that use experimental methods. We then consider a number of areas where experimental evidence is increasingly playing a role in testing the underlying foundational precepts of economic behavior as it applies to law, including bargaining in the shadow of the law, the selection of suits for litigation, and the investigation of jury and judge behavior. Our survey concludes by offering some suggestions about what directions experimental economists might push the methodology in the study of legal rules.

Keywords: Behavioral economics; experimental methods; experimental law and economics; replicability; generalizability; expected utility (EU); rational choice; equilibrium; quantal response equilibrium (QRE); cognitive hierarchy (CH); Coase theorem; endowment effect; self-serving bias; jury; judge; hindsight bias; norms (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: K (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
ISBN: 978-0-444-53120-9
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B7P5W ... 81dc9435c88c2ffb74d1
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:lawchp:2-21

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Handbook of Law and Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().