Behavioral Analysis of Law

Abstract

The future of economic analysis of law lies in new and better understandings of decision and choice.' In the last two decades, social scientists have learned a great deal about how people actually make decisions.2 Much of this work calls for qualifications of rational choice models.3 Those models are often wrong in the simple sense that they yield inaccurate predictions. Cognitive errors and motivational distortions may press behavior far from the anticipated directions; normative accounts of rational choice should not be confused with descriptive accounts.4 But it does not follow that people's behavior is unpredictable, systematically irrational, random, rule-free, or elusive to social scientists. On the contrary, the qualifications can be described, used, and sometimes even modeled. Those qualifications, and the resulting understandings of decision and choice,5