Time-Shifted Rationality and the Law of Law's Leverage: Behavioral Economics Meets Behavioral Biology
Time-Shifted Rationality and the Law of Law's Leverage: Behavioral Economics Meets Behavioral Biology
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时移理性与法律杠杆定律：行为经济学遇上行为生物学
DOI：
10.2139/ssrn.249419
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发表时间：
2001
影响因子：
1.9
通讯作者：
O. Jones
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
O. Jones
最近大量的学术研究通过引用认知心理学和有限理性的概念来探讨看似非理性行为的法律的含义。在这篇文章中，我认为，行为生物学的进步已经在很大程度上超越了现有的有限理性的概念，揭示了它们是误导性的不精确-和植根于过时的假设，不仅是明显错误的，而且错误的方式，对随后的法律的结论有实质性的影响。这是可以补救的。具体来说，我认为行为生物学提供了三种立即可用的东西。首先，行为生物学可以为修正有限理性和形成理解和预测人类许多非理性的坚实理论基础奠定基础。第二，我们可以从行为生物学的基本原理中得出一个原则，我称之为“时移理性”，它可以帮助我们有效地理清目前在有限理性标签下混为一谈的事物。这样做表明，一些表面上的非理性实际上并不是传统的有限理性的产物，而是一种非常不同的现象的产物。作为这种分析的一个结果和副产品，我们有可能以一种新的、更令人满意的、更有用的方式，将一些假定的不合理性与现有的合理性框架协调起来。第三，行为生物学提供了一种新原理的原始材料，我称之为“法律杠杆定律”，它可以帮助我们更好地理解和预测法律对人类行为的影响。具体来说，它可以帮助我们预测各种人类行为对法律的激励变化的相对敏感性。也就是说，它使我们能够预测各种法律相关行为的需求曲线斜率的差异。因此，这种法律杠杆的规律可以为我们提供新的、连贯的和系统的力量，来预测通过法律的手段试图改变行为对社会造成的比较成本。该原则也为解释和预测许多现有和未来的法律的体系结构提供了一个新的、强有力的工具。
A flood of recent scholarship explores legal implications of seemingly irrational behaviors by invoking cognitive psychology and notions of bounded rationality. In this article, I argue that advances in behavioral biology have largely overtaken existing notions of bounded rationality, revealing them to be misleadingly imprecise - and rooted in outdated assumptions that are not only demonstrably wrong, but also wrong in ways that have material implications for subsequent legal conclusions. This can be remedied. Specifically, I argue that behavioral biology offers three things of immediate use. First, behavioral biology can lay a foundation for both revising bounded rationality and fashioning a solid theoretical basis for understanding and predicting many human irrationalities. Second, a principle we may derive from the fundamentals of behavioral biology, which I term "time-shifted rationality," can help us to usefully disentangle things currently lumped together under the label of bounded rationality. Doing so suggests that some seeming irrationalities are not, in fact, the product of conventional bounded rationality but are instead the product of a very different phenomenon. As a consequence and by-product of this analysis, it is possible to reconcile some of the supposed irrationalities with an existing rationality framework in a new, more satisfying, and more useful way. Third, behavioral biology affords the raw material for deriving a new principle, which I term "the law of law's leverage," that can help us to better understand and predict the effects of law on human behavior. Specifically, it can help us to anticipate the comparative sensitivities of various human behaviors to legal changes in incentives. That is, it enables us to anticipate differences in the slopes of demand curves for various law-relevant behaviors. This law of law's leverage therefore can afford us new, coherent, and systematic power in predicting the comparative costs, to society, of attempting to change behaviors through legal means. And the principle also provides a new and powerful tool for explaining and predicting many of the existing and future architectures of legal systems.