Eyal Zamir
Biographic Data
| ID | 1323251 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Eyal Zamir |
| GIVEN NAMES | Eyal |
| FAMILY NAME | Zamir |
| SIGNATURE | ZAMIR E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Hebrew University of Jerusalem |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2221-2093 |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 24 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 12 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 29 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Is transparency a blessing or a curse? An experimental horse race between accountability and extortionary corruption
If it is disclosed to a citizen which public official handles her case, this creates accountability. If the official abuses her authority, the citizen can report this misconduct to higher authority, which can intervene. But transparency also makes it possible for a citizen to pressure an official to decide in her favor. We model this interaction as a sequential game, and define which behavioral effects are required for either effect to dominate. …
Substituting Invalid Contract Terms
The law often lays down mandatory rules, from which the parties may deviate in favor of one party but not the other. Examples include the invalidation of high-liquidated damages and the unenforceability of excessive noncompete clauses in employment contracts. In these cases, the law may substitute the invalid term with a moderate arrangement, with a punitive arrangement that strongly favors the protected party, or with a minimally tolerable arran…
Giving reasons as a means to enhance compliance with legal norms
The threat of sanctions is often insufficient to ensure compliance with legal norms. Recently, much attention has been given to nudges – choice-preserving measures that take advantage of people’s automatic System 1 thinking – as a means of influencing behaviour without sanctions, but nudges are often ineffective and controversial. This article explores the provision of information about the reasons underlying legal norms, as a means to enhance co…
Normative Aspects of Nudging in the International Sphere
The use of nudges—“low-cost, choice-preserving, behaviorally informed approaches to regulatory problems”—has become quite popular at the national level in the past decade or so. Examples include changing the default concerning employees’ saving for retirement in a bid to encourage such saving; altering the default about consent to posthumous organ donation to increase the supply of organs for transplantation; and informing people about other peop…
Do People Like Mandatory Rules? The Impact of Framing and Phrasing
Market regulation has traditionally focused on disclosure duties, yet mounting evidence questions their effectiveness. The efficacy of nudges is similarly doubted, especially when suppliers counter their effects. Consequently, there is growing interest in mandatory regulation of the content of contracts. Previous studies have examined public opinion about nudges but not about mandatory rules. We explore how the formulation of mandatory rules migh…
Enforced Performance in Common Law Versus Civil Law Systems
Legal systems differ about the availability of specific performance as a remedy for breach of contract. While common law systems deny specific performance in all but exceptional cases, civil law systems generally award enforcement remedies subject to some exceptions. However, there is an ongoing debate about the extent to which the practice of litigants and courts actually reflects the doctrinal divergence. An equally lively debate revolves aroun…
Deontological Morality and Economic Analysis of Law
Welfare economics—the normative branch of economics—is a consequentialist moral theory. Unlike deontological morality, at least in its basic form it attributes no intrinsic value to prohibitions on active or intentional harming of other people, lying, or promise-breaking, and does not allow people to prioritize their own interests over the overall good. The chapter critically examines several methods of incorporating deontological constraints and…
Nudge Goes International
This article introduces the concept of nudge – low-cost behaviourally informed modes of regulation that influence people’s decisions without limiting their choice set – into the behavioural analysis of international law. It sketches out the pathways through which nudges might influence the behaviour of countries, and highlights the normative implications associated with utilizing these regulatory tools in the international arena. That done, the a…
Explaining Self‐Interested Behavior of Public‐Spirited Policy Makers
Public choice theory (PCT) has had a powerful influence on political science and, to a lesser extent, public administration. Based on the premise that public officials are rational maximizers of their own utility, PCT has a quite successful record of correctly predicting governmental decisions and policies. This success is puzzling in light of behavioral findings showing that officials do not necessarily seek to maximize their own utility. Drawin…
It's Now Or Never! Using Deadlines as Nudges
Incorporating behavioral insights into regulation is plausibly the most significant development in regulatory theory and practice in recent years. Behaviorally informed regulation encourages self-benefiting and socially desirable behaviors with little intrusion on autonomy. Drawing on new empirical findings, this article puts forward the hitherto overlooked possibility of employing the deadline effect as a regulatory tool. Deadlines serve as an a…
Rational Choice versus Lawful Choice
»Vielmehr bietet [der Kommentar] auf höchstem Niveau eine substantielle Auseinandersetzung mit den Hintergründen, den Zusammenhängen, der Theorie und der Praxis des Grundgesetzes. Besseres lässt sich von einem Verfassungskommentar nicht sagen.“ Herbert Günther Staaatsanzeiger für das Land Hessen 2018 (50), 1494–1495
Behavioral Economics and Insurance Law
Because choosing insurance requires consumers to assess risks and probabilities, the demand for insurance has proven to be fertile ground for identifying deviations from rational behavior. Consumers often shun the insurance against large losses that they rationally should want (e.g., floods); and they are attracted to insurance against small losses (extended warranties, low deductibles) that no rational individual should purchase. But the welfare…
Behavioral Law and Economics
This chapter deals with empirical methods as applied in behavioral law and economics. It first reflects on the traditional use of a behavioral perspective in legal psychology and criminal law, as well as how behavioral law and economics differs from traditional law and economics. It also emphasizes the importance of scientific empirical evidence to law and economics. The chapter then discusses empirical methods for behavioral legal analysis by us…
Behavioral Law and Economics of Property Law
This chapter critically surveys the behavioral law-and-economics literature on property law. First, it sketches the main features of existing studies and their tendency to excessively focus on certain topics, such as the home. The chapter then discusses various issues with respect to which behavioral analysis has made an impact, such as the characterization of property as a “thing” or as a “bundle of sticks,” compensation for takings of property,…
Behavioral Economics and Plea Bargaining
Numerous documented cognitive biases, including loss aversion, confirmation bias, and overconfidence, seem to work against resolution of criminal cases through plea bargaining, since doing so requires a criminal defendant to accept immediate loss (punishment) and forfeit the possibility of no loss (acquittal) in exchange for a future benefit (reduction of punishment). This chapter considers why plea bargaining is so prevalent in the US criminal j…
Moral Judgment
Legal judgments must be influenced by how people think about good and evil, right and wrong. This chapter reviews some of the history of the psychology of moral judgment, and the methods used to study it. It suggests the use of utilitarianism as a normative model for evaluating judgments, if only because departures from utilitarian judgments could have a cost in terms of outcomes. Common biases, from this perspective, are omission bias (preferenc…
Law’s Loss Aversion
Kahneman and Tversky’s prospect theory is probably the most influential contribution to behavioral economics, and loss aversion is the most important element of this theory: Losses loom larger than gains. This chapter surveys the effect this notion has had on legal theory. It first provides an overview of the vast psychological literature on loss aversion. It then demonstrates the contribution made by studies of loss aversion in several contexts …
The End of Contractarianism?
For a generation, the law of corporations depended on, and sprang from, a notion of economic rationality. This rationality took as its touchstone the efficiency of the marketplace (especially the securities market) and the predictability of the utility-maximizing behavior of the various actors. But behavioralism continues its victorious expansion throughout the law. Though corporate and securities law was perhaps one of the last bastions in the l…
Law and Prosocial Behavior
This chapter examines the relevance of prosocial behavior to law. It begins by tracing the history of the homo economicus model of human behavior, its role in contemporary behavioral law and economics, and why the concept of utility does not solve the problem of the model. It then looks at the emergence of a behavioral economics approach to human behavior that incorporates the empirical reality of prosociality without undermining the predictive p…
Nudges.gov
Behavioral economics is influencing regulatory initiatives in many nations, including the United States and the United Kingdom. The role of behavioral economics is likely to increase in the next generation, especially in light of the growing interest in low-cost, choice-preserving regulatory tools. Choice architecture—including default rules, simplification, norms, and disclosure—can affect outcomes even if material incentives are not involved. F…
The Hindsight Bias and the Law in Hindsight
The hindsight bias is one of the first cognitive biases to be documented by psychologists, and to be studied by legal scholars employing a behavioral perspective. This chapter presents a review of the main findings documenting the prevalence of the hindsight bias in judicial decision-making. Based on this review, it then analyzes the different ways in which legal systems as well as contracting parties deal with the bias, and highlights potential …
Judicial Decision-Making
This chapter critically reviews the behavioral literature on judicial decision-making. Among other things, it presents general theories of judicial decision-making, such as the story model and coherence-based reasoning. It also describes the reflection of a series of well-known cognitive phenomena in judicial decision-making, including the compromise and contrast effects, the effect of legally irrelevant information, the hindsight bias, the omiss…
Alternative Behavioral Law and Economics
This chapter considers the psychological, methodological, and normative paths taken by behavioral law and economics (“BLE”) and alternative paths that BLE might have taken, and might still take. The counterfactual BLE imagined here focuses on performing behavioral analyses of legal problems rather than promoting the heuristics and bias view of judgment and decision-making to compete with law and economics’ rational actor model. This change in foc…
Behavioral Economics and Contract Law
Classical contract law, Chicago economics, and Chicago law-and-economics all assumed that people rationally maximize their utility. However, just as classical contract law was supplanted by modern contract law, so Chicago-style law-and-economics is being supplanted by a school of law-and-economics based on behavioral psychology or behavioral economics. The shift to behavioral law-and-economics, which is still under way, has arrived in three waves…
Behavioral Economics and the Law
This chapter argues that a behavioral law and economics approach to tax is deeply needed for a wider normative analysis of the impacts of law on social welfare. The absence of traditional markets to serve as arbitrage mechanisms in public finance means that suboptimal tax and fiscal systems can arise and persist for long periods of time. Most of the current scholarly applications of behavioral approaches to tax, however, fail to take into account…
Explaining Self‐Interested Behavior of Public‐Spirited Policy Makers
Public choice theory (PCT) has had a powerful influence on political science and, to a lesser extent, public administration. Based on the premise that public officials are rational maximizers of their own utility, PCT has a quite successful record of correctly predicting governmental decisions and policies. This success is puzzling in light of behavioral findings showing that officials do not necessarily seek to maximize their own utility. Drawin…
Private Claims to Property Rights in the Future Israeli-Palestinian Settlement
The Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements, signed by the Government of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and the exchange of letters between the PLO Chairman and Israel’s Prime Minister, both agreed upon in September 1993, have set the stage for a process of reconciliation and the settlement of the long and bitter conflict over Palestine/Eretz Yisrael. The Cairo Agreement on the Gaza Strip and the…
It's Now Or Never! Using Deadlines as Nudges
Incorporating behavioral insights into regulation is plausibly the most significant development in regulatory theory and practice in recent years. Behaviorally informed regulation encourages self-benefiting and socially desirable behaviors with little intrusion on autonomy. Drawing on new empirical findings, this article puts forward the hitherto overlooked possibility of employing the deadline effect as a regulatory tool. Deadlines serve as an a…
Substituting Invalid Contract Terms
The law often lays down mandatory rules, from which the parties may deviate in favor of one party but not the other. Examples include the invalidation of high-liquidated damages and the unenforceability of excessive noncompete clauses in employment contracts. In these cases, the law may substitute the invalid term with a moderate arrangement, with a punitive arrangement that strongly favors the protected party, or with a minimally tolerable arran…
Enforced Performance in Common Law Versus Civil Law Systems
Legal systems differ about the availability of specific performance as a remedy for breach of contract. While common law systems deny specific performance in all but exceptional cases, civil law systems generally award enforcement remedies subject to some exceptions. However, there is an ongoing debate about the extent to which the practice of litigants and courts actually reflects the doctrinal divergence. An equally lively debate revolves aroun…
Nudge Goes International
This article introduces the concept of nudge – low-cost behaviourally informed modes of regulation that influence people’s decisions without limiting their choice set – into the behavioural analysis of international law. It sketches out the pathways through which nudges might influence the behaviour of countries, and highlights the normative implications associated with utilizing these regulatory tools in the international arena. That done, the a…
Private Claims to Property Rights in the Future Israeli-Palestinian Settlement
The Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements, signed by the Government of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and the exchange of letters between the PLO Chairman and Israel’s Prime Minister, both agreed upon in September 1993, have set the stage for a process of reconciliation and the settlement of the long and bitter conflict over Palestine/Eretz Yisrael. The Cairo Agreement on the Gaza Strip and the…
Rational Choice versus Lawful Choice
»Vielmehr bietet [der Kommentar] auf höchstem Niveau eine substantielle Auseinandersetzung mit den Hintergründen, den Zusammenhängen, der Theorie und der Praxis des Grundgesetzes. Besseres lässt sich von einem Verfassungskommentar nicht sagen.“ Herbert Günther Staaatsanzeiger für das Land Hessen 2018 (50), 1494–1495
Behavioral Economics and Insurance Law
Because choosing insurance requires consumers to assess risks and probabilities, the demand for insurance has proven to be fertile ground for identifying deviations from rational behavior. Consumers often shun the insurance against large losses that they rationally should want (e.g., floods); and they are attracted to insurance against small losses (extended warranties, low deductibles) that no rational individual should purchase. But the welfare…
Behavioral Law and Economics
This chapter deals with empirical methods as applied in behavioral law and economics. It first reflects on the traditional use of a behavioral perspective in legal psychology and criminal law, as well as how behavioral law and economics differs from traditional law and economics. It also emphasizes the importance of scientific empirical evidence to law and economics. The chapter then discusses empirical methods for behavioral legal analysis by us…
Behavioral Law and Economics of Property Law
This chapter critically surveys the behavioral law-and-economics literature on property law. First, it sketches the main features of existing studies and their tendency to excessively focus on certain topics, such as the home. The chapter then discusses various issues with respect to which behavioral analysis has made an impact, such as the characterization of property as a “thing” or as a “bundle of sticks,” compensation for takings of property,…
Behavioral Economics and Plea Bargaining
Numerous documented cognitive biases, including loss aversion, confirmation bias, and overconfidence, seem to work against resolution of criminal cases through plea bargaining, since doing so requires a criminal defendant to accept immediate loss (punishment) and forfeit the possibility of no loss (acquittal) in exchange for a future benefit (reduction of punishment). This chapter considers why plea bargaining is so prevalent in the US criminal j…
Moral Judgment
Legal judgments must be influenced by how people think about good and evil, right and wrong. This chapter reviews some of the history of the psychology of moral judgment, and the methods used to study it. It suggests the use of utilitarianism as a normative model for evaluating judgments, if only because departures from utilitarian judgments could have a cost in terms of outcomes. Common biases, from this perspective, are omission bias (preferenc…
Law’s Loss Aversion
Kahneman and Tversky’s prospect theory is probably the most influential contribution to behavioral economics, and loss aversion is the most important element of this theory: Losses loom larger than gains. This chapter surveys the effect this notion has had on legal theory. It first provides an overview of the vast psychological literature on loss aversion. It then demonstrates the contribution made by studies of loss aversion in several contexts …
The End of Contractarianism?
For a generation, the law of corporations depended on, and sprang from, a notion of economic rationality. This rationality took as its touchstone the efficiency of the marketplace (especially the securities market) and the predictability of the utility-maximizing behavior of the various actors. But behavioralism continues its victorious expansion throughout the law. Though corporate and securities law was perhaps one of the last bastions in the l…
Law and Prosocial Behavior
This chapter examines the relevance of prosocial behavior to law. It begins by tracing the history of the homo economicus model of human behavior, its role in contemporary behavioral law and economics, and why the concept of utility does not solve the problem of the model. It then looks at the emergence of a behavioral economics approach to human behavior that incorporates the empirical reality of prosociality without undermining the predictive p…
Nudges.gov
Behavioral economics is influencing regulatory initiatives in many nations, including the United States and the United Kingdom. The role of behavioral economics is likely to increase in the next generation, especially in light of the growing interest in low-cost, choice-preserving regulatory tools. Choice architecture—including default rules, simplification, norms, and disclosure—can affect outcomes even if material incentives are not involved. F…
The Hindsight Bias and the Law in Hindsight
The hindsight bias is one of the first cognitive biases to be documented by psychologists, and to be studied by legal scholars employing a behavioral perspective. This chapter presents a review of the main findings documenting the prevalence of the hindsight bias in judicial decision-making. Based on this review, it then analyzes the different ways in which legal systems as well as contracting parties deal with the bias, and highlights potential …
Judicial Decision-Making
This chapter critically reviews the behavioral literature on judicial decision-making. Among other things, it presents general theories of judicial decision-making, such as the story model and coherence-based reasoning. It also describes the reflection of a series of well-known cognitive phenomena in judicial decision-making, including the compromise and contrast effects, the effect of legally irrelevant information, the hindsight bias, the omiss…
Alternative Behavioral Law and Economics
This chapter considers the psychological, methodological, and normative paths taken by behavioral law and economics (“BLE”) and alternative paths that BLE might have taken, and might still take. The counterfactual BLE imagined here focuses on performing behavioral analyses of legal problems rather than promoting the heuristics and bias view of judgment and decision-making to compete with law and economics’ rational actor model. This change in foc…
Behavioral Economics and Contract Law
Classical contract law, Chicago economics, and Chicago law-and-economics all assumed that people rationally maximize their utility. However, just as classical contract law was supplanted by modern contract law, so Chicago-style law-and-economics is being supplanted by a school of law-and-economics based on behavioral psychology or behavioral economics. The shift to behavioral law-and-economics, which is still under way, has arrived in three waves…
Behavioral Economics and the Law
This chapter argues that a behavioral law and economics approach to tax is deeply needed for a wider normative analysis of the impacts of law on social welfare. The absence of traditional markets to serve as arbitrage mechanisms in public finance means that suboptimal tax and fiscal systems can arise and persist for long periods of time. Most of the current scholarly applications of behavioral approaches to tax, however, fail to take into account…
Human Prosocial Motivation and the Maintenance of Social Order
This chapter presents some insights from basic behavioral research on the role of human prosocial motivation to maintain social order. I argue that social order can be conceptualized as a public goods game. Past attempts to explain social order typically relied on the assumption of selfish and rational agents (“homo economicus”). The last twenty years of research in behavioral and experimental economics have challenged this view. After presenting…
Behavioral Ethics Meets Behavioral Law and Economics
The present chapter maps the literature of ethical decision-making in psychology and management and examines the ways in which it could shape behavioral law and economics. The chapter examines the important paradigms and biases that have been developed in this area. Although there has been a significant advance in the understanding of ethical decision-making, conflicting paradigms attempt to describe how good people are responsible for bad deeds.…
Heuristics and Biases
The field of judgment and decision-making is characterized by three types of “models”: normative, prescriptive, and descriptive. Normative models provide standards for evaluation of judgments and decisions. Descriptive models are psychological accounts of how people either conform or depart from these models systematically (i.e., have biases). Prescriptive models suggest ways of helping people come closer to the normative models. This chapter rev…
The Importance of Behavioral Law
The chapter begins with several general policy examples that demonstrate how the empirical findings of cognitive and social psychology lead to very different predictions of human behavior and different policy options from those of rational choice theory. The chapter then turns to the topic of law and economics so as to contrast how some familiar conclusions of law and economics that were premised on rational choice by contract parties, potential …
Biasing, Debiasing, and the Law
In this chapter, we build on the existing literature on the use of legal strategies for addressing problems of biased judgment and behavior, exploring how heuristics and biases may be exploited to foster efficiency in the presence of other incentive alignment problems. We also introduce two new categories: the hitherto unnoticed counterparts to debiasing and insulating strategies, which we will call “benevolent biasing,” and “cognitive leveraging…
Behavioral Economics and Tort Law
The chapter discusses the contributions of cognitive psychology and behavioral studies to the research of tort law. These contributions, we show, relate to a wide range of issues in torts: from the basic decision to impose tort liability, through the choice between liability rules, to specific rules and remedies. Accordingly, behavioral studies are of particular significance for the analysis of the tort system. The literature review focuses on co…
The Market, the Firm, and Behavioral Antitrust
This Handbook chapter examines the main distinct concerns facing the application of empirical behavioral evidence to antitrust law and economics—also known as “behavioral antitrust.” More than many (though not all) other legal fields, antitrust law is primarily concerned with the conduct of firms in markets rather than in individual behavior per se. Yet much of the empirical evidence that behavioral antitrust draws on concerns individual behavior…
Behavioral Analysis of Criminal Law
After contrasting behavioral criminal law and economics with the retributivist tradition and with traditional criminal law and economics, the chapter illustrates how various behavioral phenomena can be used to predict the effects of criminal law norms and to design criminal law in a way that serves social goals, in particular deterrence. It explores the effects of uncertainty on deterrence; it examines the effects of prospect theory and the diffe…
Environmental Law
Recent years have witnessed the beginning of an important trend in environmental law and policy, namely the endeavor to integrate insights from the behavioral sciences into regulatory design and implementation. This chapter offers an assessment of the behavioralist turn, arguing that traditional precautionary environmental regulation—criticized by behavioralists as reflective of lay cognitive errors in risk perception—may be defended as providing…
Political science (35 works) · Economics (34 works) · Law (33 works) · Law, Economics, and Judicial Systems (27 works) · Law and economics (25 works) · Psychology (24 works) · Microeconomics (21 works) · Positive economics (18 works) · Social Psychology (18 works) · Behavioral economics (16 works)