This chapter considers the psychological, methodological, and normative paths taken by behavioral law and economics ("BLE") and alternative paths that BLE might have taken, and might still take. The counterfactual BLE imagined here stresses the B in BLE, with behavioral approaches to legal problems being the focus rather than advocacy of any particular basic model of human cognition and motivation to compete with L&E’s dominant model. This change in focus would give priority to empirical studies in which particular legal institutions and specific legal tasks are simulated or studied in situ rather than to studies of abstract and general judgment and decision-making problems that may provide more theoretical bang but have less applied payoff in specific legal contexts.

Citation
Gregory Mitchell, Alternative Behavioral Law and Economics, in The Oxford Handbook of Behavioral Economics and the Law, Oxford University Press, 167–191 (2014).
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