Christine Jolls’s research while affiliated with Yale University and other places

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Publications (36)


Debiasing through law and the first amendment
  • Article

June 2015

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32 Reads

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47 Citations

Stanford Law Review

Christine Jolls

Law often compels the disclosure of information in particular—and, increasingly today, in visual—forms. Some judges conclude that such modern disclosure requirements break with the First Amendment interest in ensuring that consumers are “well informed.” This Article brings an empirically dedicated perspective to such judicial analyses and provides a specific delineation—for three existing legally required visual communications—of data and tools that facilitate evidence-based assessment of the degree to which consumer perceptions are factually ac-curate in the presence versus the absence of such legally required visual communications.


Product Warnings, Debiasing, and Free Speech: The Case of Tobacco Regulation

March 2013

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80 Reads

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15 Citations

Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics JITE

The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act of 2009 requires the display of graphic health warnings on cigarette advertising and packaging in the United States. Debates over the permissibility of these new mandated health warnings under the unusually broad Free Speech Clause of the United States Constitution have paid insufficient attention to empirical evidence — to be presented in this article — of the warnings' salutary effects in reducing consumers' factual misperceptions about smoking risks. Although such empirical evidence does not, by itself, settle the First Amendment debate, this evidence warrants more attention in that debate than it has received to date.



Race Effects on Ebay

September 2011

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175 Reads

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55 Citations

SSRN Electronic Journal

We investigate the impact of seller race in a field experiment involving baseball card auctions on eBay. Photographs showed the cards held by either a dark-skinned/African-American hand or a light-skinned/Caucasian hand. Cards held by African-American sellers sold for approximately 20% ($0.90) less than cards held by Caucasian sellers, and the race effect was more pronounced in sales of minority player cards. Our evidence of race differentials is important because the on-line environment is well controlled (with the absence of confounding tester effects) and because the results show that race effects can persist in a thick real-world market such as eBay.



Dworkin’s "Living Well" and the Well-Being Revolution

April 2010

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39 Reads

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1 Citation

Boston University law review. Boston University. School of Law

Philosophers from Aristotle to Mill to Dworkin have considered the relationship between what it means to "live well" in our own lives ("ethics" in Ronald Dworkin' s Justice for Hedgehogs) and how we ought to treat others ("morality"). Far from any notion that morality operates as a dispiriting constraint on "living well," Dworkin - like Aristotle - views ethics and morality as deeply complementary. For Aristotle, the state of eudaimonia, or happiness, is "the best, noblest, and most pleasant thing in the world, and these attributes are not severed as in the inscription at Delos - 'Most noble is that which is justest, and best is health; But most pleasant it is to win what we love.' Dworkin likewise rejects the inscription at Delos, urging instead that the "truth about living well and being good . . .is not only coherent but mutually supporting." Justice for Hedgehogs seeks "to illustrate as well as defend the unity of at least ethical and moral values."


Behavioral Economics and the Law

January 2010

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41 Reads

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11 Citations

Foundations and Trends® in Microeconomics

This monograph describes and assesses the current state of behavioral law and economics. Law and economics had a critical (though underrecognized) early point of contact with behavioral economics through the foundational debate in both fields over the Coase theorem and the endowment effect. In law and economics today, both the endowment effect and other features of behavioral economics feature prominently and have been applied to many important legal questions.


Chapter 17 Employment Law

December 2007

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42 Reads

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4 Citations

Handbook of Law and Economics

Legal rules governing the employer-employee relationship are many and varied. Economic analysis has illuminated both the efficiency and the effects on employee welfare of such rules, as described in this chapter. Topics addressed below include workplace safety mandates, compensation systems for workplace injuries, privacy protection in the workplace, employee fringe benefits mandates, targeted mandates such as medical and family leave, wrongful discharge laws, unemployment insurance systems, minimum wage rules, and rules requiring that employees receive overtime pay. Both economic theory and empirical evidence are considered.


The New Market for Federal Judicial Law Clerks

March 2007

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25 Reads

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62 Citations

The University of Chicago Law Review

I study a budget-constrained, private-valuation, sealed-bid sequential auction with two incompletely-informed, risk-neutral bidders in which the valuations and income may be non-monotonic functions of a bidder's type. Multiple equilibrium symmetric bidding functions may exist that differ in allocation, efficiency and revenue. The sequence of sale affects the competition for a good and therefore also affects revenue and the prices of each good in a systematic way that depends on the relationship among the valuations and incomes of bidders. The sequence of sale may affect prices and revenue even when the number of bidders is large relative to the number of goods. If a particular good, say [alpha], is allocated to a strong bidder independent of the sequence of sale, then auction revenue and the price of good [alpha] are higher when good [alpha] is sold first.


Behavioral Law and Economics

February 2007

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86 Reads

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109 Citations

Behavioral economics has been a growing force in many fields of applied economics, including public economics, labor economics, health economics, and law and economics. This paper describes and assesses the current state of behavioral law and economics. Law and economics had a critical (though underrecognized) early point of contact with behavioral economics through the foundational debate in both fields over the Coase theorem and the endowment effect. In law and economics today, both the endowment effect and other features of behavioral economics feature prominently and have been applied in many important legal domains. The paper concludes with reference to a new emphasis in behavioral law and economics on "debiasing through law" - using existing or proposed legal structures in an attempt to reduce people's departures from the traditional economic assumption of unbounded rationality.


Citations (28)


... People have limited brain power, time, and information-processing capacity, leading to systematic judgment and choice errors. Bounded willpow-er denotes situations where people often make choices that conflict with their long-term interests, while bounded self-interest means that people sometimes care about others (21,25). In the design of climate change and environmental policies, behavioral biases that can influence farmer decisions include loss aversion, the endowment effect, status quo bias (inertia), present bias (myopia or short-sightedness), and social norms (26). ...

Reference:

Behavioral Economics to Tackle Climate Change in Agriculture
A Behavioral Approach to Law and Economics
  • Citing Chapter
  • March 2000

... In reality, consumers often misperceive product risk (e.g. Jolls 1998;Marino 1988;Viscusi 2012), and this behavioral bias affects the performance of liability rules (Baniak and Grajzl 2016;Miceli and Segerson 2013;Miceli, Segerson, and Wang 2015). 1 We find that how the equilibrium wage reacts to allocating a greater share of losses to the firm via liability depends on consumers' product-risk misperception. Intuitively, marginally increasing the wage during firm-union negotiations always reduces employment and the firm's profits independent of the liability rule's loss allocation. ...

Behavioral economic analysis of redistributive legal rules
  • Citing Article
  • January 1998

Stanford Law Review

... This matter involves not just morals but also economics. For example, when employees experience fairness, they tend to reciprocate it by contributing more to their jobs (Jolls, 2002). On the other hand, if they experience inequity, then they reciprocate that (Yang et al., 2016). ...

Fairness, minimum wage law and employee benefits
  • Citing Article
  • April 2002

New York University law review (1950)

... Such labels can be found in various product categories to improve consumers' understanding of quantitative information on, for example, food nutrients (Grunert & Wills, 2007), carbon emissions of cars (European Union, 2010a), or energy efficiency of appliances (European Union, 2010b). Since many consumers automatically associate green with go, yellow with proceed with caution, and red with stop, understanding and interpreting of TL labels often do not require pre-existing knowledge of the quantitative information to which the colors refer (Jolls, 2015;Liu, Wisdom, Roberto, Liu, & Ubel, 2014). Due to the labels' potential to influence consumer behavior predictably, without limiting freedom of choice, and without changing financial incentives, labels can be considered as a subset of nudges (Schubert, 2017;Thaler & Sunstein, 2009). ...

Debiasing through law and the first amendment
  • Citing Article
  • June 2015

Stanford Law Review

... Another strategy to address the overconfidence bias can be "premortem", suggested by Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize winner in economics and psychology (Port, 2019). It is suggested to imagine the success of the investment decision and list the potential reasons for this success. ...

Behavioral Economics and the Law
  • Citing Article
  • January 2010

Foundations and Trends® in Microeconomics

... Pictorial warnings have generally proved to discourage smoking more effectively than text-only messages (see Fong et al., 2009 for an overview of the findings). Specifically within the law and economics literature, Jolls (2013) assessed the effects of the cigarette pack warnings mandated by the US Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act of 2009 on smokers' factual misperceptions about the risks associated with their tobacco consumption. Here, too, combined text-and-image warnings were found to have a stronger impact on the survey respondents' attitudes than text-only warning messages. ...

Product Warnings, Debiasing, and Free Speech: The Case of Tobacco Regulation
  • Citing Article
  • March 2013

Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics JITE

... In Section 1.5.1.2 above we show that tying a firm's costs for DI to DI claims of their own employees increases the cost of hiring higher-disability-risk workers relative to lower-disability-risk workers, which would shift the relative demand curve in the affected sector back, assuming as the previous literature does that disabled and ablebodied workers are substitute inputs (see Jolls (2000)). How this shift in the affected sector impacts the relative employment and wages of higher-disability-risk workers compared to lower-disability-risk workers depends on the elasticities of relative supply and relative demand, if and by how much relative labor supply responds to the provision of accommodations, and whether relative wages are fixed, for example by custom, minimum wage laws, or enforcement of equal-pay and anti-discrimination laws. ...

Accommodation Mandates
  • Citing Article
  • November 2000

Stanford Law Review

... For economists to run their models without a hitch, they need to assume that any dollar that comes into a household budget is equivalent to any other dollar that arrives or that is already there (the fungibility assumption), yet Zelizer has demonstrated how cultural and social factors preclude or modify fungibility. Work by other sociologists, social and cognitive psychologists, and behavioral economists confirm her theoretical premise (Winnett and Lewis, 1995;Thaler, 1999;McGraw et al, 2003;Camerer et al, 2011;Soman and Cheema, 2011;Jolls, 2013), but too often the non-fungibility premise and the social relationships upholding it were presented as special patterns of behavior; moreover, it seemed that cultural codes and related moral concerns remained difficult for economists and psychologists to specify empirically beyond gross detection (for example, a dummy variable or the manipulation of a single topic in an experiment). ...

Behavioral Economics Analysis of Employment Law
  • Citing Article
  • January 2011

... Behavioural economics (see, e.g. Posner, 1997;Jolls et al., 1998) revolves around the economic consequences of the continuous stream of studies providing ever more fine-grained knowledge about human behaviour in general and human decision-making in particular, with a view to adjusting neoclassical economics for these insights found in behavioural sciences. ...

Theories and Tropes: A Reply to Posner and Kelman
  • Citing Article
  • Full-text available
  • May 1998

Stanford Law Review

... The double distortion argument attracted an already robust critical literature. Part of the criticism is aimed at the equivalence thesis (AVRAHAM et al., 2004;BLUMKIN and MARGALIOTH, 2005;LEWINSOHN-ZAMIR, 2006), part turns against the thesis of relative inefficiency (JOLLS, 1998;SANCHIRICO, 2000;BLUMKIN and MARGALIOTH, 2005), and part questions the viability of an arrangement B distributively equivalent to A (DAGAN, 2014, FENNELL andMcADAMS, 2016). This article tests a particular strategy to refute the equivalence thesis. ...

Behavioral Economic Analysis of Redistributive Legal Rules
  • Citing Article
  • November 1998

Vanderbilt Law Review