The following research topics wll be covered:

a) economic analysis of property law: nuisance law, information asymmetries, strategic behaviour, hold-out and free-riding, commons and anticommons, elements of intellectual property law (with applications from the high-tech world: network and system externalities, economics of information goods, competition for the market;

b) economic analysis of contract law: agency game, economics of long-term contracting, efficient breach and measures of damage compensation, abusive clauses in consumer contracts, remedies and penalty clauses, relational contracts and abuse of economic dependency;

c) economic analysis of tort law and insurance: expected damage and precaution, unilateral and bilateral accidents, contributory and comparative negligence, moral hazard and adverse selection, products liability, regulation and standard setting, consumers protection.

The Course  will also outline the fundamentals of crime law economics and antitrust Law and economics. It will briefly survey recent contributions from institutional to behavioural law and economics.

The “Law and Economics” approach covers a number of topics ranging from the economic analysis of contract law, property law and torts, criminal law, competition law, regulation and corporate governance. Besides, law and economics researchers have recently include in the list the theory of the firm, the theories of institutions and regulation, the evolution of norms and behavior.

The Course will distinguish several methodological approaches to law and economics outlining the main feature of each: (i) Chicago Law and Economics; (ii) New Institutionalism and Transaction Costs Economics; (iii) Public Choice Theory; (iv) Critical Legal Studies; (v) Institutionalism; (vi) Behavioral Law and Economics; (vii) Economics of Institutional Complementarities.

The resulting picture will outline the complexity surrounding current methods and approaches to law and economics and will stress the need to go beyond the Chicago tradition in order to assess the full range of interdependencies between legal rules, economic behaviors and institutional change.Law and Economics of long term contracts have gained attention as a specific area of contract law from the 70s. They represent a frequently used instrument to regulate business to business relationships but they are not foreign to the consumer realm as well, showing also the differences between regulated and not regulated markets and the different institutions that monitor parties’ behaviours.