C-K Faculty Blog

UN adopts International Day of Happiness

Mark your calendars for March 20th - the new International Day of Happiness. The United Nations has chosen this date recognize the importance of happiness to people's lives.

According to Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser, President of the UN General Assembly, "I believe that the proclamation of an international day of happiness by the General Assembly to be observed over a year with full participation of the international community as a whole would be a forward looking way of focusing on the value of happiness as a universal goal and aspiration on the lives of all."

Take a look at my writing on the importance of happiness to human life and the law.

"Making Sense" reviewed on Written Description blog

The great folks over at the Written Description blog have posted a review of my article "Making Sense of Intellectual Property" which has just been published in the Cornell Law Review.

Take a look at the write-up and the rest of the blog.

"Well-Being Analysis vs. Cost-Benefit Analysis"

John Bronsteen, Jonathan Masur, and I have just posted our newest happiness-related paper to ssrn. The paper, "Well-Being Analysis vs. Cost-Benefit Analysis," will be published in the Duke Law Journal, and it will form the basis for Duke's annual administrative law symposium. You can download the paper here.

Here's the abstract:

Cost-benefit analysis is the primary tool used by policymakers to inform administrative decisionmaking. Yet its methodology of converting preferences (often hypothetical ones) into dollar figures, then using those dollar figures as proxies for quality of life, creates systemic errors so large as to deprive the tool of value. These problems have been lamented by many scholars, and recent calls have gone out from world leaders and prominent economists to find an alternative analytical device that would measure quality of life more directly. This Article proposes well-being analysis (WBA) as that alternative. Relying on data from the field of hedonic psychology that tracks people’s actual experience of life — data that has consistently survived scrutiny by passing the social science tests of reliability and validity — WBA is able to provide the same policy guidance as CBA without CBA’s distortionary conversion of preferences to dollars. We show how WBA can be implemented, and we catalog exhaustively its superiority over CBA. In light of this comparison, we conclude that there is no reason for CBA to continue as the decisionmaking tool of choice for administrative regulation.

"Valuing Attribution and Publication in Intellectual Property"

Chris Sprigman, Zach Burns, and I have posted new paper on ssrn. It's called "Valuing Attribution and Publication in Intellectual Property." You can download the paper here.

Abstract:

This is the third in a series of articles focusing on the experimental economics of intellectual property. In earlier work, we have experimentally studied the ways in which creators assign monetary value to the things that they create. That research has suggested that creators are subject to a systematic bias that leads them to overvalue their work. This bias, which we have called the 'creativity effect,' potentially results in inefficient markets in IP, because creators may be unwilling to license their works for rational amounts. 
Our prior research, however, like American IP law itself, focused exclusively on the monetary value that creators derive from their work. In this set of experiments, we expand that focus. The same methods used in our previous studies enable us to test the proposition that creators value opportunities for publication and attribution separately from the opportunity for financial remuneration. Although some previous scholarship has provided strong qualitative evidence for the notion that creators value attribution, it has made no effort to quantify that value. The experiments reported in this latest article attempt to do just that. 
The results reported here suggest that creators are willing to significantly reduce the amount of money they demand to license their IP rights in exchange for the opportunity to receive attribution for their work. These findings shed important light on emerging debates over whether and how American IP law should adopt attribution rights. Perhaps counterintuitively, for reasons explained in the article, our results suggest that adding a default right to attribution to American IP law would more likely worsen, rather than improve, inefficiencies in IP licensing markets. For this reason, we believe that the U.S. should hesitate to adopt an attribution right.

Making Sense of IP named "Download of the Week"

My new paper, Making Sense of Intellectual Property Law, has been named "Download of the Week" by Larry Solum's Legal Theory Blog.

As Larry says, download it while it's hot!