We study how much drip pricing (hidden mandatory fees revealed after consumers have begun the buying process) raises prices paid for identical goods and whether an automated shopping assistant mitigates the effect. In a randomized online marketplace experiment (n = 1608) with real purchases of gift cards funded by a $15 endowment, we vary the initial and final presentation of the gift cards' prices across 33 levels and randomly assign participants to an automated assistant that flags a lower‑price identical option and links to it. Relative to transparent pricing, drip pricing increases the average price paid by up to a plateau of about 10% (maximum 13%) for the same gift cards. The assistant reduces the incidence of overpayment by 63% and substantially lowers dollars overpaid, enough to flip the seller's profit-maximizing strategy from drip pricing to transparent pricing. Participants exposed to drip pricing rate the platform as less trustworthy, even though it is the third-party seller that determines the fees. The digital assistant partially exacerbates this perception. Our findings inform policy responses to drip pricing and the value proposition of AI shopping tools.

Meritocracy is self-defeating. The ideals that animate meritocracy—a principled commitment to fairness and a prudent concern for the general welfare—are worthy; and meritocratic critiques of the various aristocracies that meritocracy displaced are apt. But while meritocracy initially succeeded at correcting aristocratic unfairness and imprudence, its mature form undermines the ideals that it purports to serve. Today, meritocracy sustains unfair dynastic privilege and distorts economic and social life to elevate elite over shared interests. Mature meritocracies promote a distinctively meritocratic style of economic inequality and impose associated social and political maladies. Moreover, meritocratic inequality is an inexorable consequence of meritocracy’s successes and so cannot be overcome by ridding society of vestigial aristocratic elements or by other attempts to perfect meritocracy’s implementation. Rather, repairing meritocratic inequality and its attendant maladies requires a rejection of meritocracy itself.

Importance:Altruism-putting the patient first-is a fundamental component of physician professionalism. Evidence is lacking about the relationship between physician altruism, care quality, and spending. Objective:To determine whether there is a relationship between physician altruism, measures of quality, and spending, hypothesizing that altruistic physicians have better results. Design, Setting, and Participants:This cross-sectional study that used a validated economic experiment to measure altruism was carried out between October 2018 and November 2019 using a nationwide sample of US primary care physicians and cardiologists. Altruism data were linked to 2019 Medicare claims and multivariable regressions were used to examine the relationship between altruism and quality and spending measures. Overall, 250 physicians in 43 medical practices that varied in size, location, and ownership, and 7626 Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries attributed to the physicians were included. The analysis was conducted from April 2022 to August 2024. Exposure:Physicians completed a widely used modified dictator-game style web-based experiment; based on their responses, they were categorized as more or less altruistic. Main Measures:Potentially preventable hospital admissions, potentially preventable emergency department visits, and Medicare spending. Results:In all, 1599 beneficiaries (21%) were attributed to the 45 physicians (18%) categorized as altruistic and 6027 patients were attributed to the 205 physicians not categorized as altruistic. Adjusting for patient, physician, and practice characteristics, patients of altruistic physicians had a lower likelihood of any potentially preventable admission (odds ratio [OR], 0.60; 95% CI, 0.38-0.97; P = .03) and any potentially preventable emergency department visit (OR, 0.64; CI, 0.43-0.94; P = .02). Adjusted spending was 9.26% lower (95% CI, -16.24% to -2.27%; P = .01). Conclusions and Relevance:This cross-sectional study found that Medicare patients treated by altruistic physicians had fewer potentially preventable hospitalizations and emergency department visits and lower spending. Policymakers and leaders of hospitals, medical practices, and medical schools may want to consider creating incentives, organizational structures, and cultures that may increase, or at least do not decrease, physician altruism. Further research should seek to identify these and other modifiable factors, such as physician selection and training, that may shape physician altruism. Research could also analyze the relationship between altruism and quality and spending in additional medical practices, specialties, and countries, and use additional measures of quality and of patient experience.

AbstractNew Private Law Theory: A Pluralist Approach is a new kind of book. Nevertheless, the book does have forebearers, as innovation is itself an old practice. The best way to understand the book, therefore, is to look farther afield, to a prior effort to produce a new kind of legal book—the first casebook ever published. Christopher Columbus Langdell’s Selection of Cases on the Law of Contracts landed in circumstances that could hardly have been more different from the ones that A Pluralist Approach now engages. But these shallow differences should not be allowed to disguise a shared ambition, which these pages hope to lay bare. Uncovering the book’s deeper ambition will make it possible to assess its prospects for success.

Behavioral law and economics (“BLE”)—arising from the insight that people make recognizable, systematic mistakes—has revolutionized policymaking. For example, in governments around the world, including the US, teams of experts seek to harness these insights, promising to do things like increase retirement savings. But there is a problem: economic experts do not look or think like the rest of the population. Their demographics and policy views are deeply unrepresentative. This would be less troubling if the experts were merely helping people pursue the behavior that the people themselves would undertake, as was the case in traditional law and economics. However, the whole point of behavioral economics is that such behavior is often not in people’s interest. Rather, in making judgments about the right policy, BLE has erected a new, shaky structure, based on ad hoc and often unstated normative assumptions. The result risks merely enacting the policy preferences (or biases) of unrepresentative experts and thereby distorting policymaking. We propose a new approach—democratic BLE—in which behavioral economists, rather than dictating what the right policy or action is, instead inform representative samples of ordinary people about the evidence, including specifically about their own behavioral biases, and let them decide for themselves. Those decisions, rather than experts’ opinions alone, then inform policymakers. Our approach harnesses the insights of behavioral economics, but in a way that lets the people themselves, rather than the behavioral expert, be the arbiter of the good life.

This is an edited transcript of a conversation held to introduce the Symposium that this special issue now publishes. The editing aims to promote clarity without abandoning the informal, free-flowing, and speculative quality of the original conversation. The published re-creation also seeks to preserve the full set of observations made in the original conversation rather than to filter or shape them to accommodate all the authors' views. We aspire, throughout our remarks, to raise questions and identify possibilities for further research rather than to report confident conclusions.

Physicians' professional ethics require that they put patients' interests ahead of their own and that they should allocate limited medical resources efficiently. Understanding physicians' extent of adherence to these principles requires understanding the social preferences that lie behind them. These social preferences may be divided into two qualitatively different trade-offs: the trade-off between self and other (altruism) and the trade-off between reducing differences in payoffs (equality) and increasing total payoffs (efficiency). We experimentally measure social preferences among a nationwide sample of practicing physicians in the United States. Our design allows us to distinguish empirically between altruism and equality-efficiency orientation and to accurately measure both trade-offs at the level of the individual subject. We further compare the experimentally measured social preferences of physicians with those of a representative sample of Americans, an "elite" subsample of Americans, and a nationwide sample of medical students. We find that physicians' altruism stands out. Although most physicians place a greater weight on self than on other, the share of physicians who place a greater weight on other than on self is twice as large as for all other samples-32% as compared with 15 to 17%. Subjects in the general population are the closest to physicians in terms of altruism. The higher altruism among physicians compared with the other samples cannot be explained by income or age differences. By contrast, physicians' preferences regarding equality-efficiency orientation are not meaningfully different from those of the general sample and elite subsample and are less efficiency oriented than medical students.

At least since Ronald Coase, law and economics has been deeply engaged with transactions costs. These frictions can prevent resources from being efficiently deployed in production and goods from reaching their highest-valuing users. The systematic study of how to reduce or minimize transactions costs has yielded explanations, for example, of the boundary between the firm and the market, the allocation of initial entitlements, and the choice between deploying property rule or liability rule remedies when entitlements are breached. However, the inevitable frictions that attend to human affairs can produce gains as well as losses, and law and economics has almost entirely neglected the study of these transactions benefits. At least three varieties of transactions benefits appear immediately once one starts to look for them. Publicity benefits arise when features of one transaction become known and are valuable to other circumstances and perhaps to the legal system at large. One reason to oppose settlement and arbitration, for example, is that even if these forms of dispute resolution involve lower transactions costs than adjudication, they also fail to generate adjudication’s valuable transactions benefits. Legitimacy benefits arise when the frictions involved in legal arrangements transform the beliefs and desires of those who experience them in ways that sustain the authority that the arrangements have over the parties within them. Accounts from social psychology of the authority of adjudication and, more broadly, the role that procedure plays in producing legitimacy emphasize this variety of transaction benefit. Finally, solidarity benefits arise when legal frictions constitute intrinsically valuable relationships among the parties who produce them. Adjudication’s transformative powers and contractual collaboration illustrate this variety of transactions benefit. The three species of transactions benefit pose both opportunities and challenges for law and economics. Publicity benefits and perhaps also legitimacy benefits are well captured by traditional economic models, which might treat them as positive externalities. Law and economics can therefore recognize publicity benefits without changing any of its deep substantive or methodological commitments; and recognizing these transactions

Promises and contracts establish relations among the persons who engage them, and these relations lie at the center of persons' moral and legal experience of one another. But the most prominent accounts of these practices nevertheless remain firmly individualistic, seeking to explain the obligations that such agreements involve in terms of one or another service that they render to the parties to them taken severally. This Article articulates a new theory of the philosophical foundations of promise and contract that reclaims for practical philosophy the relations among persons that promises and contracts create and that the dominant, individualistic accounts obscure. The Article proposes that promises and contracts establish relations of recognition and respect-and indeed a kind of community-among those who participate in them and explains the morality of promise and contract in terms of the value of this relation. Although the Article takes up promise quite generally, and proposes new solutions to familiar philosophical problems concerning the will's place among the grounds of promissory obligation, the Article emphasizes the particular case of contract, which it addresses in much greater detail. The Article argues that contract participates in the ideal of respectful community even though contracts typically arise among self-interested parties who aim to appropriate as much of the value that the contracts create as they can. The Article finds the peculiarly contractual variety of community directly in the form of the contract relation rather than in any substantive ends that the parties to contracts pursue. It presents a detailed account of the characteristic intentions that this form of community, which it calls collaboration, involves. The Article also emphasizes that contractual collaboration is no mere academic conceit but instead arises in actual legal practice. In particular, it considers two familiar doctrinal puzzles presented by the law of contracts-involving the consideration doctrine and the expectation remedy-in light of the collaborative values that it finds in the contract relation. It argues that the collaborative theory of contract underwrites a more satisfactory account of these doctrines than has so far been available. Finally, the Article concludes by suggesting that the collaborative ideal makes it possible to return contract, understood as a distinctive category of legal obligation, to the center of our legal system and to connect contract to broader principles that lie at the foundations of modern, pluralist, economic and political institutions. In addition to the legal theory of contract, the Article therefore also contributes to the political theory of the market and indeed of liberalism.Throughout the analysis, the Article applies a philosophical methodology that avoids casuistry, favoring an effort to elaborate the moral meanings of existing legal institutions and practices, and thus to reveal the moral relationships that are immanent in the law. This approach promises to connect moral philosophy to legal doctrine in a way that casuistic analysis cannot.

Much contemporary discussion of “the market” assumes that markets have a true nature or immanent logic. In fact, however, markets arise and operate through law, so that no particular market structure is inevitable and every market order is the result of a complex set of legal and political choices. This introductory Essay organizes the Articles that comprise this Issue of Law and Contemporary Problems, in the light of the legal construction of markets and offers an intellectual roadmap for a legally informed study of the market. Drawing on the insight that markets are plural and open to variable design, we reflect on both the options and constraints faced by law’s architects. We discuss certain risks in market design, including the familiar dangers of unjust distribution and excessive commodification, and the less familiar danger that markets might prove self-undermining. In order to understand the risks and rewards of market orderings and to take on the responsibility of market design, we close by identifying three ideal-typical visions of markets – as efficient, democratic, and liberal – and summarizing the values that these ideal-types deploy to addresses these challenges.

This chapter presents a functionalist account, as well as a formalist account, of contract law. Functionalism and formalism proceed from distinct (roughly speaking, teleological and deontological) theories of value, and they take different phenomena (roughly speaking, outcomes and doctrines) as their explananda. But functionalist and formalist accounts of contract law more nearly complement than compete with each other. Often, the two accounts reach congruent conclusions from distinctive directions—they agree, one might say, but for different reasons. Another way to put this result is that functionalist and formalist accounts are theoretically dissimilar but operationally similar. A functionalist approach is teleological: it specifies the goal(s) the law should attempt to achieve and specifies the means the law deploys to achieve those goals and, normatively, evaluates the means/ends fit. A formalist approach elaborates an interpretation of the norms and relations that are immanent in the law. The focus on immanence reflects the formalist's belief that the values law instantiates cannot be specified without making essential reference to the fact that they are instantiated in law—that is, in a system of rules claiming distinctively legal authority.

When is a normative question a question of law rather than a question of fact? The short answer, based on common law and constitutional rulings, is: it depends. For example, if the question concerns the fairness of contractual terms, it is a question of law. If it concerns the reasonableness of dangerous risk-taking in a negligence suit, it is a question of fact. If it concerns the obscenity of speech, it was a question of fact prior to the Supreme Court’s seminal cases on free speech during the 1970s, but is now treated as law-like. This variance in the case law cannot be explained by traditional accounts of the law/fact distinction and has fueled recent skepticism about the possibility of gleaning a coherent principle from judicial

The familiar saying “money is power” carries two meanings: one is common in the United States today; the other less so. The common meaning asserts that money buys power and therefore that economic inequality tends towards, or causes, political inequality. According to this idea, the rich can use their income and wealth to pay lobbyists and influence legislation, to subsidize political campaigns and influence elections, and even to buy publicity and influence public opinion. In the limit case, the rich deploy these and other related methods to monopolize political power. Political scientists increasingly document that the limit case is not just possible, but becoming actual. The uncommon meaning asserts, directly, that money is power, and therefore that no contingent causes are required to connect economic and political inequality. This idea begins by reflecting on the nature of money.1 Imagine, the idea proposes, that a society distributes goods and services using an array of vouchers that name specific items (as when wartime rationing boards issued coupons for “one pound of butter,” for example, or “one pint of milk”) and requires anyone who wishes to have one of these items to give over an appropriate coupon, sending government agents to deploy force against those who attempt to get an item without one. The vouchers, in this system, are not properly understood as things at all. Rather, they administer an accounting system that keeps track of and controls people, specifically regarding what things people may have or use. The vouchers, that is, constitute relations of constraint. Moreover, money is simply an abstract and generalized version of this voucher system: A $20 bill is just a voucher that permits its bearer to consume any disjunction of conjunctions of goods and services that cost less than $20. Money, therefore, is no more a thing that the vouchers would be. Rather—again, just like the vouchers—money is an accounting system that constitutes relations of constraint. Money, in other words, is power. To deny this is to fall into commodity fetishism, in the classic sense of misconstruing relations of constraint as things. The common and uncommon understandings of the connection between economic and political inequality carry very different ideological valences. In this sense, also, the first view falls inside, and the second outside, the normal range of contemporary U.S.-American political discourse.

Chapter 2 considers the debate over efficient breach theory. It suggests that the dispute between the supporters and critics of efficient breach theory rests on a false premise: efficient breaches exist. Rather, if contract terms are efficient, then breaches cannot be because a breach is the failure to comply with a contract term. Courts suppose that sophisticated parties write efficient terms so the relevant question is interpretive: what contract did the parties write? Thus, if the contract required the promisor to trade a specified item (Contract A), then the failure to deliver the item would be a breach; but if the contract required the promisor either to trade the item or to transfer to the promisee his expectation (Contract B), then the failure to trade the item would not be a breach. But the failure either to trade or to transfer would be. And neither breach would be efficient.

Professors Jessica Bulman-Pozen and David Pozen (BP&P) strikingly identify and intriguingly elaborate a new category of political dissent, uncivil obedience, which they propose serves as a complement to the betterknown political category civil disobedience.1 Civil disobedience familiarly involves law-breaking that aims not at impunity but rather legal reform and thus arises in the context of respect for the legal system as a whole.2 Uncivil obedience, by contrast, pursues change through hypercompliance with the law and may (although it need not) reflect disregard for the law.3 Uncivil obedience thus involves, as BP&P say, “subversive law-following.”4 BP&P suggest that uncivil obedience poses a principled challenge to the present U.S. political order that equals the principled challenge posed by civil disobedience a half century ago, and they predict that uncivil obedience will in coming years acquire a practical prominence to match its theoretical interest.5

We studied the distributional preferences of an elite cadre of Yale Law School students, a group that will assume positions of power in U.S. society. Our experimental design allows us to test whether redistributive decisions are consistent with utility maximization and to decompose underlying preferences into two qualitatively different tradeoffs: fair-mindedness versus self-interest, and equality versus efficiency. Yale Law School subjects are more consistent than subjects drawn from the American Life Panel, a diverse sample of Americans. Relative to the American Life Panel, Yale Law School subjects are also less fair-minded and substantially more efficiency-focused. We further show that our measure of equality-efficiency tradeoffs predicts Yale Law School students' career choices: Equality-minded subjects are more likely to be employed at nonprofit organizations.