F.E. Guerra-Pujol

• University of Central Florida

Review of Cheryl Misak, Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers (Oxford University Press, 2020).

In this teaching note, I introduce the rules of a bargaining game called So Long Sucker to help university instructors convey strategic concepts and impart good negotiation skills to their students. In addition, to further bridge the gap between negotiation theory and strategic reality, this note explores several commonalities between So Long Sucke...

Should scientists, statisticians, and other researchers be held to the same legal standards as certified public accountants or other actors involved in business or commercial activity? What about research organizations that rely on fraudulent research methods or predatory publishers who publish fraudulent research? This paper explores several possi...

The author reviews Jeremy Adelman's biography of Albert O. Hirschman ("Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman," Princeton University Press, 2013). In particular, the author considers three episodes in Hirschman's life that not only expose the secret life of the scholar but also offer important lessons about law and legal scholarshi...

Of the 78 possible strategic games in two-person game theory, one has acquired the most attention, and the most notoriety, from scholars and laymen alike. The so-called “Prisoner’s Dilemma,” or what we prefer to call the “Parable of the Prisoners,” is not only the most famous formal model of conflict and cooperation in the mathematical theory of ga...

The mathematician and philosopher Kurt Gödel reportedly discovered a deep logical contradiction in the US Constitution. What was it? In this paper, the author revisits the story of Gödel’s discovery and identifies one particular “design defect” in the Constitution that qualifies as a “Gödelian” design defect. In summary, Gödel’s loophole is that th...

What is the legal status of a “bitcoin,” a decentralized peer-to-peer digital currency? Is the use of bitcoins even legal? Should it be? The bitcoin cybercurrency thus poses a puzzle. Unlike centralized and publicly-created metallic or paper currencies, bitcoin is a privately-created, decentralized medium of exchange and thus is not backed by any n...

This paper studies corporate governance of the problem of risk regulation. Specifically, the author analyzes the problem of system-wide risks and the underlying strategic tension between regulated firms and such new regulating agencies as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Financial Stability Oversight Council. In order to shed some l...

The author proposes a market approach to alcohol regulation. In summary, in place of the existing methods of alcohol control — that is, in place of State-run liquor stores and regulation by license — we propose a “Cap and Trade” system of allocating valuable liquor licenses. Under our alternative approach, State alcoholic beverage control agencies...

Is the litigation game as random as a coin toss? In this paper, the author presents the results of his preliminary research regarding the randomness of litigation. Specifically, the author formulates and then test his “random litigation hypothesis”: the conjecture that the litigation game is a random process with just two possible outcomes, like a...

This paper proposes a new approach to the centuries-old question of federalism. In a word, we approach the problem of federalism from a Coasian or property-rights perspective. That is, instead of attempting to draw an arbitrary boundary line between state and federal spheres of power through traditional legal or semantic analysis of the constitutio...

In this paper, the author reviews some real-world examples of costly and protracted wars of attrition and describes the current debate over Puerto Rico's constitutional status as a "legislative war of attrition." In addition, the author presents a two-player as well as an n-player evolutionary war-ofattrition model and discusses this model's possib...

In this paper, the author reviews some real-world examples of costly and protracted wars of attrition and describes the current debate over Puerto Rico’s constitutional status as a “legislative war of attrition.” In addition, the author presents a two-player as well as an n-player evolutionary war-of-attrition model and discusses this model’s possi...

Although there are few applications of game theory in the water governance literature, in this paper the author applies a game-theoretic framework to public-private partnerships in the water industry, with “water industry” defined broadly to include fresh water supply, wastewater treatment, and sanitation and sewarage services. In summary, the pape...

The author explains why ‘aesthetic judgements’ are inevitable in deciding whether a particular work is copyrightable and why the problem of ‘aesthetic judgements’ in copyright cases is a reciprocal one. In essence, one can divide the world into two broad categories: artists and non-artists (i.e., creators and copiers). Copyright protection benefits...

The author applies the game-theoretic concept of the 'truel' (or three-person duel) to the Puerto Rico status debate. In summary, the debate over Puerto Rico's future political status resembles a three-person, sequential, random-order truel in which no single player is able to eliminate the other two players. In addition, the author applies some co...

This paper is about one aspect common to most of the methodologies used in empirical legal research: the search for causation. Although it is commonly stated that the purpose of social science research is to discover what causes what, the author questions this assumption. Building on the work of Ronald Coase and Thomas Schelling, the author present...

Building on the work of historian David Garrow, this paper attempts to measure the true extent of the problem of judicial decrepitude among the members of the U.S. Supreme Court since the high court's inception in 1789. After presenting the relevant data, the author concludes (contra Garrow and others) that the incidence of judicial decrepitude is...

This paper examines a number of empirical patterns, puzzles, and anomalies relating to the problem of domestic violence in Puerto Rico that heretofore have been overlooked in the scholarly literature. The author concludes that domestic violence legislation is the product of 'ideological rent-seeking' among issue-oriented pressure groups and, once e...

Although Coase (1988) is correct to point out the pervasive nature of blackmail in the process of exchange, his feeble attempt to distinguish between "blackmail incidental to a business relationship" and "ordinary blackmail" is off the mark for several reasons. First, the practice of blackmail is just another example of bilateral monopoly, regardle...

Professor Ronald Coase was the first to point out that legal rights--such as the right to pollute or the right to clean air--can in principle be traded, so long as those rights are well-defined and transaction costs are low (Coase, 1959, pp. 26-27). It is this seemingly simple insight--the idea that legal rights, like other goods and services, are...

Game theory, a branch of mathematics, has been applied to a wide variety of fields and problems, including military strategy, evolutionary biology, and the law. In this paper, we shall apply a game-theoretic framework to a subset of contracts in the water industry. These contracts are part of a broader political-economic trend: the creation of hybr...