James Angel of Georgetown's Finance Department and Douglas M. McCabe of Georgetown's Management Department have written The Ethics of Payments: Paper, Plastic, or Bitcoin? Here is the abstract: Individuals and businesses make billions of payments every day in various forms. Payers have choices about what forms of payment they will make, and payees also have […]
Author Archives: Jeff Sovern
RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM: CALL FOR PAPERS LEGAL AND ETHICAL ISSUES IN PREDICTIVE DATA ANALYTICS June 19 & 20, 2014 Blacksburg, Va. Abstract Submission Deadline: March 3, 2014 A research colloquium, “Legal and Ethical Issues in Predictive Data Analytics,” hosted by Professor Janine Hiller of Virginia Tech and co-organized by Professor Tonia Hap Murphy of the University […]
Here. An excerpt: In late March, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—the consumer watchdog agency dreamt up by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)—issued new, voluntary guidelines aimed at ensuring car dealerships are not illegally ripping off minorities. Since then, 13 Senate Democrats, including Sens. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) and Mary Landrieu (D-La.); and 22 House Dems, including Reps. […]
by Jeff Sovern I'm finally getting around to reading the CFPB's December 12 report, Arbitration Study: Preliminary Results, about which Brian blogged here. Though the Bureau does not make much of it, perhaps because the natural experiment has some flaws (as natural experiments often do), the CFPB Study sheds some light on the impact of arbitration […]
Oz Shy of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and Rune Stenbacka of the Swedish School of Economics and Business Administration have written Customer Privacy and Competition. Here is the abstract: We analyze how different degrees of privacy protection affect industry profits, consumer welfare and total welfare. Firms earn higher profits under weak privacy protection […]
Scott Baker of Washington University in Saint Louis and Albert H. Choi of Virginia have written Crowding In: How Formal Sanctions Can Facilitate Informal Sanctions. Here's the abstract: This paper examines the interaction between legal and reputational sanctions in the design of an optimal deterrence regime, particularly in a setting where two parties have a […]
The Wall Street Journal has the story here.
So says consumer law professor Creola Johnson of Ohio State in her new book, Is a Law Degree Still Worth the Price?
by Jeff Sovern Those who use our casebook may recall the note about R.J. Reynolds advertising that its Winston cigarettes don't have additives. In the new edition, it's at pages 92-93. The casebook reports that Winston's sales increased by 9% as a a result of the ads, and that the FTC brought a case against Reynolds […]
Here. The article describes the opposition from the industry to the plan–which includes threats not to make mortgage loans in the future in communities that use eminent domain to seize underwater home–and also discusses what happened in 2002 when the industry made good on such threats in response to a different law: In 2002, the […]