By Giuseppe Dari-Mattiacci & Florencia Marotta-Wurgler

When a firm offers a warranty on its products, it may turn out that consumers claim it more often or in ways that are different than the firm expected, and that the firm may have to backtrack and remove the warranty from its standard form contract. This apparent failure, we claim, has a positive side. The firm has in fact experimented with the warranty and, as a result, has learned its true costs and can now take a better-informed decision on whether to keep offering or terminate the warranty. In 2018, LL. Bean announced to its customers that it had realized that its famous lifetime warranty was being abused and cost too much to the firm, and hence would be terminated, although it had been in place for a century.

By Patrizia Rinaldi

Although migration is part of human history, the creation of nation-states, with the demarcation of borders, has presented this phenomenon as a watershed between legality and illegality. Despite this, migrants and asylum seekers irregularly use the Mediterranean routes to enter the EU. Within these flows is a specific subgroup of our interest, namely minors without a parent or legal representative. In my recent article “Variable impacts on young migrants and related measures in Spain and Italy. Andalusia and Sicily: a comparative analysis.” I deal with the legislative changes that have taken place over the last two years and how these have affected the condition of young migrants in two Mediterranean countries, Spain and Italy. More specifically, two regions are compared: Andalusia and Sicily.

By Juan Diaz-Granados

The so-called “Sharing Economy” –– or, more accurately, the Platform Operator-User-Provider (‘PUP’) model –– is a phenomenon that represents many challenges from a legal perspective, mainly because it does not fit comfortably within traditional legal relationships. Some categories of legal relationships that would protect weaker parties do not account for the triangular legal structure that supports the model –– composed of three different but interconnected legal relationships between Platform Operators (e.g. Uber), Users (e.g. Uber passengers), and Providers (e.g. Uber drivers). Other categories of legal relationships that preserve the structure usually create power asymmetries between these actors.

By Giuseppe Dari-Mattiacci & Marco Fabbri

The recent Moral Machine Experiment (Awad et al., 2018) has documented wide geographical variation in individual responses to moral dilemmas. Could legal institutions be one of the factors affecting morality? Answering this question is challenging because it is obviously difficult to assess causality.

In a new paper (Dari-Mattiacci & Fabbri, 2023), we exploit a unique case in which a reform of fundamental legal institutions was implemented as a randomized control trial: the Plan Foncier Rural effected in Benin in 2010-2011. With the involvement of the World Bank and the Millennium Challenge Corporation, the Beninese government reformed the traditional system of communal ownership of land towards formal, individual property rights, but it did so only in a subset of villages that were randomly selected out of a pool of twice as many eligible villages.

By Mitja Kovač

From ancient times, legal scholars have been puzzled by the question of the circumstances under which an individual has a duty to disclose valuable information unknown to the person with whom she bargains. Even the great Marcus Tullius Cicero, one of the most prominent ancient lawyers and remarkable thinkers, has dealt with this complicated puzzle and explored whether or not it is honest of the merchant to profit by withholding the information that more ships with the grain will arrive at Rhodes soon, hence not sharing this with the Rhodians. In his classic, eternal writings, he weighs Diogenes’s and Antipater’s reasoning against each other, concluding that the merchant should tell the Rhodians that more ships are on their way to be considered honest.

By Giuseppe Bellantuono

What kind of interdisciplinary scholar do you want to be? There is no single right answer to this question. Interdisciplinary studies are a blossoming field that moves in multiple, and often unexpected, directions. Furthermore, each interdisciplinary dialogue can take on different meanings. Comparative Law and Economics (CLE) studies are a useful example of such trends. In the last thirty years, they have tried to put together the sophisticated theoretical apparatus of economic theory and the deep understanding of institutional contexts supplied by comparative law. Today, CLE does not take on a single meaning, is loosely associated with a host of different works of literature, and involves much more than the dialogue between the two original disciplines.