Volume 2, Issue 1

This paper examines the effects of exclusive dealing contracts offered by an incumbent distributor. The traditional literature has focused solely on exclusive dealing contracts offered by incumbent manufacturers, which derive multiple equilibria within homogeneous price competition models. In contrast, exclusive dealing contracts offered by distributors generate unique equilibrium, wherein an efficient entrant can be excluded as long as distributors have sufficient bargaining power. We also introduce an entrant in the manufacturing side, and show that the upstream entry may promote exclusion of the efficient entry by an exclusive dealing contract.

Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850) was a French journalist, pamphleteer, politician and political economist. He was at the forefront of the free trade movement in France and wrote a book, The Law, which has become a minor classic in the legal literature and is required reading for some leaders in the American Tea Party movement. This article examines his economic and legal philosophy and discusses its relevance to twenty-first century America. This article is the first to focus primarily on Bastiat’s economic and legal philosophy, which has been ignored by law and economics scholars.

The main purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between the misery index and the crime rate and to determine the motivational and opportunity effects of the misery index in Iran from 1971 to 2008. A parsimony model which corrected multicollinearity and specification problems in the standard crime function was proposed. Unrestricted error correction model (UECM) was employed to do bounds test and to examine the presence of cointegration. Multiple-rank F-test was used as well to examine the causality relationship. The results indicated that there had been long-run relationships between the misery index and economic crimes such as embezzlement, bribery, forgery, and drawing bad cheques. The motivational and opportunity effects were also verified by the model. Also, two-causality relationships existed between crimes like willful murder, indecent commitments, embezzlement, bribery, forgery, stealing and the misery index. Furthermore, the results showed uni-directional causality from the misery index to drawing bad cheques.

While international patent law harmonization has been an issue in progress since the conclusion of the Paris Convention in 1883, it is facing new challenges due to the increasing dependence on patents in the knowledge-based economy and the growing sensitivity to the patent system's social and economic role in society. Inherently, the patent systems should be country-specific, given the industry-specific character of patent law. However, as the problem of fragmented patent laws caused by globalization became serious, the arguments for harmonizing patents laws obtained dominant support in the international community. This paper addresses the necessities for harmonization among countries by the economic model of game theory and highlights the relationship between the degree of economic openness and the harmonization of patent laws. This paper shows that as the world becomes globalized, one country should consider the other country's patent policy in deciding its patent policy and the government has an incentive to harmonize their patent policy with other country's policies.

Drawing a lesson from the story that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act drives away foreign issuers and then their physical exit provokes a change in the U.S. regulation of non-U.S. issuers, this article takes as another case study the phenomenon that Taiwanese firms list shares overseas, to further test how usual law market demand and supply forces (or underlying exit and voice rights) interplay under international jurisdictional competition. Put simply, both cases of the U.S. and Taiwan significantly elaborate that law market forces underlying international jurisdictional competition are similarly at work even on both sides of the Pacific Ocean. Specifically, globalization strengthens the mobility of international production factors, and thus lowers firms’ costs of exiting from a given jurisdiction, which also fuels international jurisdictional competition for mobile firms or capital. Therefore, on the demand side of the international law market, if a regulating jurisdiction ignores business demands and imposes excessive regulation, firms would exit physically or threaten to exit in response. This means that the buyer side of the law market starts to operate and then sparks the seller side. On the international supply side, other jurisdictions as sellers would compete for these exiting firms’ corporate charters, listings and other related economic transactions by providing cost-effective regulatory products, to secure greater benefits to the local economy. Such economic exits send out signals to those in the political marketplace within the regulating jurisdiction, and thus activate interest group competition, or the domestic supply side. In consequence, firms, via these law market forces, exert pressure on the regulatory government to engage in a quest for more legal flexibility, or to liberalize unnecessarily excessive regulation.