Journal: International Review of Law and Economics

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Elsevier

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ISSN

0144-8188

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2014 - 201912020 - 20256
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Publications 1 - 7 of 7
  • The Dominance of Skill in Online Poker
    Item type: Journal Article
    Hergueux, Jérôme; Smagghue, Gabriel (2022)
    International Review of Law and Economics
    Does skill dominate luck in online poker? In many countries around the world, the legality of the online poker industry rests on courts’ evaluation of the “skill dominance” criterion. Because it is not precisely defined, however, the skill dominance criterion may be misleading when it comes to the legal qualification of online gambling activities. We argue that this concept might be better framed as “do skilled players dominate the game” than as “does skill dominate game outcomes”. We introduce a novel, comprehensive dataset on online poker play – where we follow 91,439 players over 40 consecutive months (representing over 85 million hands played) – and develop simple tests to show that (i) skill in the game drives individual results, and (ii) players improve their skills with experience and quit playing the game as a function of starting ability. A lower bound estimate suggests that it takes at least 7 months of full-time training for a novice to acquire the basic skills exhibited by the most experienced players in our data. We discuss the broader legal implications of our results, and conclude that the scholarly debate around this industry may move beyond that of its legality to focus instead on issues of regulation.
  • Competition and the two margins of privacy
    Item type: Journal Article
    Bounie, David; Dubus, Antoine; Waelbroeck, Patrick (2025)
    International Review of Law and Economics
    This article analyzes the relationship between privacy protection and market competition. We consider a model where firms collect data to price discriminate consumers in a competitive product market, and we distinguish two margins of privacy. Firms strategically choose the number of consumers on whom they collect data – the extensive margin of privacy – as well as the precision of information – the intensive margin of privacy. We show that policymakers can efficiently protect both margins of privacy and consumer surplus by safeguarding the intensive margin. Indeed, when both strategic variables are strategic complements, restricting the amount of information that firms have on each consumer (the intensive margin) also induces firms to collect data on fewer consumers, thereby protecting the extensive margin of privacy. This softens the intensity of competition but also reduces rent extraction by firms, and total consumer surplus increases. When both variables are strategic substitutes, protecting the intensive margin harms privacy at the extensive margin, but still increases consumer surplus.
  • Fighting free with free: Freemium vs. Piracy
    Item type: Journal Article
    Dubus, Antoine; Halmenschlager, Christine; Waelbroeck, Patrick (2024)
    International Review of Law and Economics
    We analyze the optimal business model of a firm facing piracy. The firm either sells a premium version of its product, or also offers a free version along with the premium version. The firm can in turn impose restrictions on the use of the free version. Consumers can choose between the free and the premium version, but can also get an illegal digital copy. We show that freemium offers can reduce digital piracy by fighting free with free and that firms choose their optimal business model depending on the strength of copyright protection. Therefore, the strength of copyright protection can lead firms to choose a traditional business model rather than the new freemium model, impacting significantly the legal usage of the good.
  • Text classification of ideological direction in judicial opinions
    Item type: Journal Article
    Hausladen, Carina I.; Schubert, Marcel H.; Ash, Elliott (2020)
    International Review of Law and Economics
    This paper draws on machine learning methods for text classification to predict the ideological direction of decisions from the associated text. Using a 5% hand-coded sample of cases from U.S. Circuit Courts, we explore and evaluate a variety of machine classifiers to predict “conservative decision” or “liberal decision” in held-out data. Our best classifier is highly predictive (F1 = .65) and allows us to extrapolate ideological direction to the full sample. We then use these predictions to replicate and extend Landes and Posner’s (2009) analysis of how the party of the nominating president influences circuit judge's votes.
  • Regulatory changes and long-run relationships of the EMU sovereign debt markets: Implications for future policy framework
    Item type: Journal Article
    Akyildirim, Erdinc; Corbet, Shaen; Nguyen, Duc K.; et al. (2020)
    International Review of Law and Economics
  • Breach Remedies Inducing Hybrid Investments
    Item type: Journal Article
    Göller, Daniel; Stremitzer, Alexander (2014)
    International Review of Law and Economics
  • Ethnolinguistic diversity, quality of local public institutions, and firm-level innovation
    Item type: Journal Article
    Focacci, Chiara Natalie; Kovac, Mitja; Spruk, Rok (2023)
    International Review of Law and Economics
    Institutional quality is crucial for innovation and economic growth. In this article, we exploit historical linguistic differences across Slovenian municipalities between the Italian, German, and Slovenian-speaking population prior to World War 1, as a plausible exogenous source of variation in firm-level innovation to estimate the effect of institutional quality on innovation. Employing a set of limited dependent variable and instrumental variable models, we show that greater historical exposure to multilingualism is associated with markedly better quality of government and provision of public goods, more impartial local government administration, and lower prevalence of corruption, which in turn predicts systematically more vibrant economic activity, greater economic complexity, and higher rates of firm-level innovation at the local level. The estimated effects are robust to a variety of specification checks and do not appear to be sensitive to the choice of ethnic and linguistic diversity measures.
Publications 1 - 7 of 7