Institutional Economics Conference

July 10, 2025

Doctrine has been at the center of law and economics. In this tradition, doctrinal rules are interpreted as exercises of state authority that change the incentives for the law’s addressees. This symposium proposes a complementary perspective: It is interested in the effect of doctrine on those who have authority to apply the rules, i.e. on judges and administrators. Arguably, doctrine is effective since the typical legal case is only imperfectly defined. Decision makers have to find a way around legal indeterminacy und factual uncertainty. The symposium relies on psychology to reconstruct the mental process of human decision makers. And it explores the power of large language models to rigorously study the process. This is made possible by the architecture of LLMs. They are so successful precisely because they can handle imperfectly defined problems.

June 05, 2024

If two disciplines share a topic, one would think that they are in regular contact. A buzzing subdiscipline of economics is working on crime, as is – obviously – criminology. Yet exchange between the disciplines is less established and regular than one might have thought. The symposium was meant to explore the cultural, methodological and paradigmatic differences, and to build a bridge between both traditions. All seven papers were empirical. Most of them focused on the determinants of the decision to commit crime. The discussions revealed substantial scope for collaboration. One particularly promising avenue capitalizes on the behavioral tradition in economics.

June 07, 2023

Hardly ever had the topic of the symposium been that timely. Since ChatGPT has gone public, the societal implications of machine learning, and of generative AI in particular, have exploded; so has the potential for applications in legal practice and in legal academia. Researchers from either side, law and computer science, have done a deep dive into the potential, the limitations, the risks, and the future of large datasets, organized with the latest (and more traditional) tools of computational social science.

June 15, 2022

Judges decide about other people's lives, not about their own. Does this imply that judicial decision-making is not an appropriate topic for law and economics? Many have thought otherwise. This symposium chiefly investigates the question through an empirical lens. Do black defendants face higher uncertainty in criminal procedure? Does the political party of the administration who has appointed the judge predict her rulings? Do judges know how to decide a new class of cases, or do they have to learn and gradually converge to a solution? Are judges inclined to favor plaintiff over defendant, or the law of the land over foreign law in cases that cut across jurisdictions? All these tendencies could be considered a bias. Do judges even act strategically? Do they only publish their rulings if they see a chance to change the law? Does the chief justice manipulate the outcome by bending the composition of the bench? Or are the judges essentially follow the law?

June 06, 2019

Causality is a key concept in the law and in the social sciences. Yet the word “causal” does patently not mean the same in both domains. In law, the object of interest is a single event: has one specific action led to one specific outcome? In the social sciences, the object of interest is a regularity: does the absence or presence of a definable impulse engender a definable effect? When the law wonders whether causality has been established, it is engaged in postdiction: given the evidence (that has been proven to the requisite standard): can the judge be sufficiently confident that defendant has acted in a way that impinged upon defendants protected sphere? When a social scientist wonders whether causality could be shown, she is engaged in prediction: if the identical event happened in an otherwise sufficiently comparable context, could one confidently expect that it would lead to the same outcome? The symposium has explored the difference with theoretical and empirical approaches, combining law, economics and philosophy.

June 01, 2018

There is strong resistance against the commercialization of some goods and services. If a person holding public authority sells her decisions, this is regarded as corruption. Most countries are also opposed against selling organs, university admission, or opportunities to clerk with prestigious courts. Yet decisions have to be made, and frequently demand exceeds supply. How can these decisions be made convincingly? Over the last decades, attempts at allocating goods or services without the help of money have become an active area of research in economics, under the label of matching. The legal community has taken fairly little notice of this development. This interface is the topic of the symposium.

June 01, 2017

The empirical legal movement is gaining momentum rapidly. Most contributions consist of applying the best empirical methods from the social sciences to legal issues. But the law is not always best served by applying the tried and tested empirical tools. Ultimately, lawyers argue normatively. It depends on the weight of a normative concern whether intervention that turns out unnecessary is worse than non-intervention that would have been in order. Other legal issues are ill defined in the first place, and then defy attempts at identifying causal effects. The papers from this symposium explore empirical strategies that directly target these and other legal challenges.

June 01, 2016

Legal obligations are not always fulfilled. This is when the obligation matters in court. Which remedy should courts grant? In economic perspective, the prospect of the remedy constitutes a game. By specifying the remedy, the legal order gives the parties incentives for action and investment choices. This also holds for potential tortfeasors, and even for government deciding to take a citizen’s property. The papers contributed to the symposium address these issues both theoretically and empirically.

June 01, 2015

Legal relations quite often have effects that transgress the parties who initially created the relationship. The provider of a trading platform regulates trade in the interest of increasing volume. A seller trades a stolen good. One member of a class sues for all. Defendant is acquitted "for lack of evidence", and attracts social sanctions. The papers presented at the symposium approach the broader topic from these angles.
They are accompanied by papers investigating the power of communication, punishment, and pre-trial discovery. Some papers are theoretical models, others use observational data or experiments.

June 01, 2014

In a consequentialist perspective, the law is a governance tool. It then is an empirical question whether the law actually achieves its assigned goals. Empirical legal scholars address this question in the areas of private, criminal and public law, procedural and international law. The focus is on causal inference, using methods ranging from natural experiments, difference in difference estimation, placebo tests to vignette studies and randomized field experiments.

More information here.