Ian Ayres

Touting the benefits of detailed statistical analysis, an economist explains how by sorting through mass quantities of easily stored and sorted information, businesses, governments, and consumers can achieve greater insight into human behavior and use it to predict future trends. 75,000 first printing.

Why Thinking-by-numbers is the New Way to be Smart

Super Crunchers

Barry Nalebuff

A book based on extensive research teaches investors how to diversify one's retirement portfolio over time with the aim of reducing risk while improving returns. Cowritten by the best-selling author of SuperCrunchers.

A New, Safe, and Audacious Way to Improve the Performance of Your Retirement Portfolio

Lifecycle Investing

A primer for fresh thinking, for problem-solving with a purpose, for bringing the world a few steps closer to the way it should be. Illustrated with examples from every aspect of life, this book offers techniques which help you take the things we all see, every day, and think about them in a new way.

How to Use Everyday Ingenuity to Solve Problems Big and Small

Why Not?

Bruce Ackerman

A New Paradigm for Campaign Finance

Voting With Dollars

Unconventional Evidence of Race and Gender Discrimination (Studies in Law and Economics)

Pervasive Prejudice?

The part-owner of StickK.com uses research into incentives and punishments to introduce the concept of "commitment contracts," an easy strategy for setting and achieving goals that is already in use by successful companies and individuals across America. Ayres shares engaging, often astounding, real-life stories that show the carrot-and-stick principle in action, from the compulsive sneezer who needed a "stick" (the potential loss of $50 per week to a charity he didn't like) to those who need a carrot with their stick (the New York Times columnist who quit smoking by pledging a friend $5,000 per smoke . . . if she would do the same for him). You'l learn why you might want to hire a "professional nagger" whom you'll do anything to avoid- no, your spouse won't do!- and how you can "hand-tie" your future self to accomplish what you want done now. You'll find out how a New Zealand ad exec successfully "sold his smoking addiction", and why Zappos offered new employees $2,000 to quit cigarettes.

Unlock the Power of Incentives to Get Things Done

Carrots and Sticks

Spurred by the advances in option theory that have been remaking financial and economic scholarship over the past thirty years, a revolution is taking shape in the way legal scholars conceptualize property and the way it is protected by the law. Ian Ayres's Optional Law explores how option theory is overthrowing many accepted wisdoms and producing tangible new tools for courts in deciding cases. Ayres identifies flaws in the current system and shows how option theory can radically expand and improve the ways that lawmakers structure legal entitlements. An option-based system, Ayres shows, gives parties the option to purchase—or the option to sell—the relevant legal entitlement. Choosing to exercise a legal option forces decisionmakers to reveal information about their own valuation of the entitlement. And, as with auctions, entitlements in option-based law naturally flow to those who value them the most. Seeing legal entitlements through this lens suggests a variety of new entitlement structures from which lawmakers might choose. Optional Law provides a theory for determining which structure is likely to be most effective in harnessing parties' private information. Proposing a practical approach to the foundational question of how to allocate and protect legal rights, Optional Law will be applauded by legal scholars and professionals who continue to seek new and better ways of fostering both equitable and efficient legal rules.

The Structure of Legal Entitlements

Optional Law

Fredrick E. Vars

The push for federal gun reform is foundering. Ian Ayres and Fredrick Vars look instead to libertarian ideas that can survive judicial review. Individuals can renounce gun-ownership rights, which prevents suicide. Citizens should be able to petition for confiscation from unlawful possessors. While Congress and the courts argue, lives can be saved.

Fighting Gun Violence While Respecting Gun Rights

Weapon of Choice

John Braithwaite

This book transcends current debate on government regulation by lucidly outlining how regulations can be a fruitful combination of persuasion and sanctions. The regulation of business by the United States government is often ineffective despite being more adversarial in tone than in other nations. The authors draw on both empirical studies of regulation from around the world and modern game theory to illustrate innovative solutions to this problem. Their ideas include an argument for the empowerment of private and public interest groups in the regulatory process and a provocative discussion of how the government can support and encourage industry self-regulation.

Transcending the Deregulation Debate

Responsive Regulation

If you're a woman and you shop for a new car, will you really get the best deal? If you're a man, will you fare better? If you're a black man waiting to receive an organ transplant, will you have to wait longer than a white man? In Pervasive Prejudice? Ian Ayres confronts these questions and more. In a series of important studies he finds overwhelming evidence that in a variety of markets—retail car sales, bail bonding, kidney transplantation, and FCC licensing—blacks and females are consistently at a disadvantage. For example, when Ayres sent out agents of different races and genders posing as potential buyers to more than 200 car dealerships in Chicago, he found that dealers regularly charged blacks and women more than they charged white men. Other tests revealed that it is commonly more difficult for blacks than whites to receive a kidney transplant because of federal regulations. Moreover, Ayres found that minority male defendants are frequently required to post higher bail bonds than their Caucasian counterparts. Traditional economic theory predicts that free markets should drive out discrimination, but Ayres's startling findings challenge that position. Along with empirical research, Ayres offers game—theoretic and other economic methodologies to show how prejudice can enter the bargaining process even when participants are supposedly acting as rational economic agents. He also responds to critics of his previously published studies included here. These studies suggest that race and gender discrimination is neither a thing of the past nor merely limited to the handful of markets that have been the traditional focus of civil rights laws.

Unconventional Evidence of Race and Gender Discrimination

Jennifer Gerarda Brown

Two noted legal experts introduce a series of practical strategies for helping straight men and women advocate for and with the gay community, covering such issues as marriage rights, employment discrimination, gays in the military, exclusion from the Boy Scouts, and religious controversies over homosexuality.

How to Mobilize Heterosexual Support for Gay Rights

Straightforward

Gregory Klass

How can a promise be a lie? Answer: when the promisor never intended to perform the promise. Such incidences of promissory fraud are frequently litigated because they can result in punitive damages awards. And an insincere promisor can even be held criminally liable. Yet courts have provided little guidance about what the scope of liability should be or what proof should be required. This book—the first ever devoted to the analysis of promissory fraud—answers these questions. Filled with examples of insincere promising from the case law as well as from literature and popular culture, the book is an indispensable guide for those who practice or teach contract law. The authors explore what promises say from the perspectives of philosophy, economics, and the law. They identify four chief mistakes that courts make in promissory fraud cases. And they offer a theory for how courts and practitioners should handle promissory fraud cases.

The Law of Misrepresented Intent

Insincere Promises

What can straight people do to support gay rights? How much work or sacrifice must allies take on to do their share? Ian Ayres and Jennifer Brown--law professors, activists, husband and wife--propose practical strategies for helping straight men and women advocate for and with the gay community. Straightforward advances a thesis that is at once simple and groundbreaking: to make real progress at the central flashpoints of controversy--marriage rights, employment discrimination, gays in the military, exclusion from the Boy Scouts, and religious controversies over homosexuality--straight as well as gay people need to speak up and act for equality. Ayres and Brown take aim at both the hearts and minds of the general public, focusing on strategies that can change the incentives and therefore the behavior of the recalcitrant. The book is peppered with stories about real people and the decisions they have faced at home, in church, at work, in school, and in politics. It is also filled with creative legal and economic strategies for influencing public and corporate decision-making. For example, Ayres and Brown propose the development of a "fair employment mark" to help companies advertise inclusive employment policies. They also show how a simple pledge to vacation in states that legalize gay marriage can create powerful incentives for legislatures to amend their marriage laws. Engagingly written and sure to spark debate, Straightforward promises to change the way America thinks about--and participates in--the gay rights movement.

Ian Ayres

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