IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/jleorg/v20y2004i2p331-352.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Law and Preferences

Author

Listed:
  • Oren Bar-Gill

Abstract

Legal rules do more than provide incentives, they change people. When preferences and norms are endogenously determined via a process of imitation and learning, legal rules, by affecting the market outcome, may affect the dynamics of preference formation. Analyzing the effect of different legal rules should therefore go beyond the analysis of the incentives they provide. It should also include an analysis of their effect on the distribution of preferences and norms of behavior. We illustrate this claim by considering a simple market game in which individuals may have preferences that include fairness concerns. We show that different legal rules change not only the pattern of trade in a market game, but also individuals' fairness concerns. That is, different rules may eventually make individuals care more (or less) about a fair outcome. Specifically, our model suggests that enhanced remedies for breach of contract may reduce equilibrium preferences for fairness. Copyright 2004, Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Oren Bar-Gill, 2004. "Law and Preferences," The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, Oxford University Press, vol. 20(2), pages 331-352, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:jleorg:v:20:y:2004:i:2:p:331-352
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Bierbrauer, Felix & Netzer, Nick, 2016. "Mechanism design and intentions," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 163(C), pages 557-603.
    2. Tirole, Jean & Bénabou, Roland, 2011. "Laws and Norms," CEPR Discussion Papers 8663, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    3. Galbiati, Roberto & Vertova, Pietro, 2014. "How laws affect behavior: Obligations, incentives and cooperative behavior," International Review of Law and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 38(C), pages 48-57.
    4. Klick, Jonathan & Parisi, Francesco, 2008. "Social networks, self-denial, and median preferences: Conformity as an evolutionary strategy," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 37(4), pages 1319-1327, August.
    5. Smith, Ian, 2007. "Property division on divorce with inequity aversion," International Review of Law and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 27(2), pages 111-128.
    6. Riedel, Nadine & Schildberg-Hörisch, Hannah, 2013. "Asymmetric obligations," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 35(C), pages 67-80.
    7. Adriani, Fabrizio & Sonderegger, Silvia, 2015. "Trust, trustworthiness and the consensus effect: An evolutionary approach," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 77(C), pages 102-116.
    8. Shaun Larcom & Luca A. Panzone & Timothy Swanson, 2017. "Follow-the-leader? Measuring the internalisation of law," CIES Research Paper series 50-2017, Centre for International Environmental Studies, The Graduate Institute.
    9. Bonatti, Luigi, 2008. "Cultural relativism and ideological policy makers in a general equilibrium model with for-profit and non-profit enterprises," Research in Economics, Elsevier, vol. 62(1), pages 1-15, March.
    10. Samuel Bowles & Sung-Ha Hwang, 2014. "Optimal Incentives with State-Dependent Preferences," Journal of Public Economic Theory, Association for Public Economic Theory, vol. 16(5), pages 681-705, October.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:jleorg:v:20:y:2004:i:2:p:331-352. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/jleo .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.