Economic efficiency in law and economics / Richard O. Zerbe, Jr.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 298-320) and index.

1. History of the concept of economic efficiency
2. The foundation: a new measure for economic efficiency
3. The nature of economic efficiency
4. The nature of inefficiency
5. Rights and the relationship of law to efficiency
6. The problem of missing values in normative law and economic analysis
7. The failure of market failure
8. Of distributive justice and economic efficiency: an integrated theory of the common law
9. The efficiency of the common law: an economic analysis of dueling, cannibalism, the gold rush, racism, and antitrust law
10. A recapitulation.

In this book, Richard Zerbe introduces a new way to think about the concept of economic efficiency that is both consistent with its historical derivation and more useful than concepts currently used. He establishes an expanded version of Kaldor-Hicks efficiency as an axiomatic system that both answers critics of efficiency and allows an expanded range for efficiency analysis. In doing this he shows that most proponents and critics of the application of economic efficiency in normative analysis have made important mistakes. He applies the new analysis to a number of hard and fascinating cases, including the economics of duelling, cannibalism and rape. He develops a new theory of common law efficiency and indicates the circumstances under which the common law will be inefficient.