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The goal of our paper is to demonstrate the potential effects of a tax on paying a ransom on the incentives of stakeholders involved: both the perpetrators (the attackers placing the ransomware) as well as the potential victim. We do think that there is a case for a ransom tax, but we do also realise that it is not easy to make that case, and hence we express this doubt in our title. A tax could stimulate ex ante cybersecurity and also (when price elasticity is not too low) reduce ex post ransom payments. In addition, a tax in combination with a smartly designed subsidy could have benefits.

In digital markets, concentrated Big Data and analytical algorithms enable undertakings to predict each consumer’s willingness to pay with increasing accuracy and offer consumers personalized recommendations and tailored prices accordingly. In this context, concerns have arisen about whether and when AI-enabled price discrimination amounts to an abuse of dominance under competition law and would require a legal response. To address these concerns, this paper will analyze AI-enabled price discrimination from a comparative law and economics perspective. In economics, price discrimination is not always undesirable as it can increase static efficiency, and, on some occasions, it can promote dynamic efficiency and boost consumer welfare. Nevertheless, it may also lead to exclusionary and exploitative effects, especially once Tech Giants abuse their dominant positions in relevant markets. Since the protection of free competition and consumer welfare are objectives of competition law in China and the EU, competition law seems a proper instrument to step into digital markets to address these concerns. Indeed, the EU and China have established mixed regimes of competition law and other rules to tackle unfair and/or anti-competitive AI-enabled price discrimination. As such, AI-enabled price discrimination does not always require a competition law response and it requires competition authorities to make a trade-off between different considerations.

Tying has become a common practice in digital platforms. It may generate both pro-competitive effects and anti-competitive effects, which makes it difficult to distinguish between lawful and unlawful tying practices. The cases of Tencent and Android both involve tying conducts, but interestingly, the cases have different outcomes. This article explores reasons for these different case outcomes from a comparative law and economics perspective. By assessing the facts and legal rulings in Tencent and Android, we find that the different case outcomes result, on the one hand, from the different case facts, and on the other hand, from the different approaches used by the EU Commission and the Chinese Supreme People’s Court. The Court scores better in terms of ensuring legal certainty; nevertheless, it may face difficulties when it has to apply economic analysis. The Commission seemingly uses more economics, but the application is not full-fledged, as it disregards important case facts when assessing competition foreclosure, and employs asymmetric legal tests and evidence standards for anti/pro-competitive effects of tying. From a law and economics perspective, we provide suggestions for China and the EU, taking the recent Anti-Monopoly Guidelines on Platforms in China and the forthcoming Digital Markets Act in the EU into account.

We examined whether jurors who know that a prosecutor has a high conviction rate are more inclined to convict a defendant than jurors who know that the prosecutor has a low conviction rate. Using simulated criminal cases, we conducted two experimental studies with jury-eligible participants. Study 1 (N = 200) tested whether information about prior conviction rates (high or low) affected jurors’ estimations of the probability of guilt in the context of a robbery. Study 2 (N = 205) used another criminal trial context (murder) and another dependent variable (dichotomous guilty/not guilty verdicts). Study 2 also incorporated jury instructions on the reasonable doubt standard and included a control condition in which no information regarding the conviction rate was provided. In both studies, jurors in the high conviction rate treatment were significantly more likely to convict the accused than jurors in the low conviction rate treatment. When jurors are aware of a prosecutor's prior conviction rates, a self-reinforcing cycle may arise in which conviction rates determine conviction rates.

The potential of artificial intelligence (AI) has grown exponentially in recent years, which not only generates value but also creates risks. AI systems are characterised by their complexity, opacity and autonomy in operation. Now and in the foreseeable future, AI systems will be operating in a manner that is not fully autonomous. This signifies that providing appropriate incentives to the human parties involved is still of great importance in reducing AI-related harm. Therefore, liability rules should be adapted in such a way to provide the relevant parties with incentives to efficiently reduce the social costs of potential accidents. Relying on a law and economics approach, we address the theoretical question of what kind of liability rules should be applied to different parties along the value chain related to AI. In addition, we critically analyse the ongoing policy debates in the European Union, discussing the risk that European policymakers will fail to determine efficient liability rules with regard to different stakeholders.

Wherever you are right now, there’s a good chance that an object in your vicinity is connected to the stories told in this book. The phone in your pocket, the chair you’re sitting on, or the shirt you’re wearing - they likely travelled to you on a large container ship, which burned bunker fuel. Alternatively, petroleum-based substances were likely used in their production, which involved the generation of waste oils. We rarely talk about waste oils or bunker fuel, yet they are essential to our modern existence. They are also dangerously intertwined: waste oils are systematically blended into bunker fuel at the cost of our health and that of our planet. These activities violate international and EU law. In the Netherlands, they are criminal offences and unique efforts have been made to fight these crimes. This book draws on never-before used data on both crimes and enforcement to shed light on this murky world. Whether you are professionally or privately engaged in contrasting corporate crime or environmental harm, this book can enhance your perspective and toolset.

‘Green recovery’ is one of the key themes of the stimulus packages implemented around the world in response to the Covid-19-related economic downturn. Recent research points to the potential role of regulation that becomes less stringent during recessions (ie countercyclical regulation) as an instrument to stimulate a quicker recovery. When this argument is put in the context of a green recovery, two key questions arise: should we implement countercyclical environmental regulation? If yes, what environmental instruments are better suited to stimulate the economy in periods of economic downturn? This article addresses these questions by discussing the risks of countercyclical environmental regulation and comparing the countercyclical effects of two critical environmental instruments: carbon taxes and cap-and-trade. The article argues that policymakers should be cautious in implementing countercyclical environmental regulation because the benefits of this practice are uncertain and it entails various risks. The article also challenges the belief common among academics and policymakers that cap-and-trade is inherently more countercyclical than carbon taxes by showing that whether this is true depends on the design of these instruments and other contingent factors.

Statutory dominant firms, different from dominant firms that have gained their market power through competition on the merits, have derived their market position from choices made by the state. From an economic perspective, tying by this kind of firm typically generates significant anti-competitive effects that are likely to outweigh the possible pro-competitive effects. Both in China and the EU, such tying practices have frequently taken place. Nevertheless, the economic findings have not been fully reflected in competition provisions and competition practice in these two jurisdictions. This may lead to error costs and enforcement costs, which is detrimental to consumer welfare. It is thus important for competition authorities and courts to carefully consider the economic findings, while taking into account also the principles of proportionality and legal certainty. To enhance the effectiveness of competition law, this study proposes potential ways of applying a differentiated (stricter) scrutiny of tying by statutory dominant firms to reduce error costs and enforcement costs.

In a world of rising long-term risks and their ensuing syndromes, the mitigation and financing of long-term risks are therefore arguably some of the most critical issues facing society. However, long-term thinking involving future generations draws limited attention in current political and social systems. Private insurance has received increased attention due to its expert role in risk management and its risk transfer mechanisms, and it has played an important role in dealing with some types of long-term risk, such as floods and earthquakes. Increasingly, insurance also contributes to disaster mitigation through regulating the conduct of policyholders by creating incentives for policyholders to counter short-termism and invest in reduction measures regarding long-term risks. In addition, it has been shown that supply-side problems and behavioural anomalies make it difficult to insure against long-term risks. Innovative long-term insurance solutions and a combination of public and private partnerships are proposed to overcome these restrictions.

Insurance can, as has clearly been indicated in the literature, play an important role in dealing with catastrophe risks, not only as a compensation mechanism but also as a mechanism to influence the behaviour of the insured. It is the concept known as ‘insurance as governance’. However, we argue that there are limited possibilities for this role as far as the insurance of pandemics is concerned. The traditional technical tools, such as risk-based pricing, are difficult to apply. In addition, there may, ab initio, be serious problems in insuring pandemics within one of the main conditions of insurability (controlling moral hazard through an effective risk differentiation). One remedy that is traditionally applied, more particularly for natural catastrophes, is mandatory coverage. Furthermore, the capacity problem might potentially be solved through a multilayered approach in which, in addition to insurance and reinsurance, the government could also take up a role as reinsurer of last resort. That would also have the major advantage of stimulating market solution (and potentially providing incentives for the mitigation of damages), which clearly fails in a model where the government simply bails out operators. Finally, one important regulatory intervention is that insurers should be better informed than was apparently the case during the last pandemic about exactly which type of risks are covered and which are not.

For a long period, China's environmental law has been dubbed a ‘paper tiger’ due to the truism that China's environmental legislation is plentiful but not properly enforced. During the past few years, there have been impressive strides made by Chinese policymakers to address the non-compliance and weak enforcement of China's environmental law. As a result, China has bolstered a toolbox approach of environmental law enforcement, which provides law enforcers with a variety of instruments to induce compliance. This article provides a comprehensive and dynamic analysis of the available mix of (public) enforcement instruments and their relative importance under the current enforcement regime of China's environmental law by taking the recent legal and policy developments into account. More particularly, we assess the de facto application of the smart mix of administrative and criminal enforcement tools in China, by conducting a law and economic analysis on the public enforcement data of China's environmental law between 2012 and 2020.

Insurance transfers and spreads risk, including climate change risk. It can provide direct financial protection to those affected by climate change. It has received attention for its regulatory function in influencing policyholder behaviour. This is sometimes called ‘insurance as governance’, a form of private contractual regulation. This article examines the functions and limits of insurance in climate-related compensation and in governing complex climate-related risks by describing the variable performance of such insurance schemes in China. We show that insurance can perform a useful regulatory function in adaptation to climate change. However, we equally make clear that insurance can play this role only if an appropriate regulatory framework is provided. The case of China illustrates how the very lack of such a regulatory framework limits the role that insurers can play in climate change adaptation.

We study a land-titling reform implemented as a randomized control trial to isolate its effects on litigation. The reform consisted of demarcating land parcels, registering existing customary rights, and granting additional legal protection to right holders. Ten years after implementation, the reform doubled the likelihood of households experiencing land-related litigation, but disputes did not escalate into more frequent violent episodes. We suggest that this increase in litigation reflects the complementarity of land titling by registration and by judicial procedures aimed at further clarifying property rights, as the reform registered titles to all parcels but left many titles subject to adverse claims. This raised the demand for complementary litigation aimed at perfecting titles for low-value parcels that, under the customary system, were optimal to keep un-clarified. Consistent with this explanation, we find that the increase in litigation took place among households that plausibly own land of lower value.

The Anti-Monopoly Law (AML) in China allows the responsible authority for merger control to consider not only the competition interest but also other public interest reasons when it reviews a takeover or merger. Where the responsible authority considers that the benefits of a takeover or merger to the public interest outweigh the harms to competition, it may ‘exempt’ the transaction. This ‘public interest exemption’ has never been formally applied since the introduction of the law in 2008. One explanation for this can be found in the ambiguity of the law: there are no legal provisions that clarify the public interest considerations. A second explanation is that China did not establish a separate review procedure for this public interest exemption. In practice, some approval decisions made by the enforcement authority led to confusion, as it was unclear whether the transactions were ‘exempted’ for public interest reasons or for industrial policies. This article reflects on the role of the public interest exemption in China. By drawing lessons from the past and examining the public interest exemption regime in Germany, it aims to provide suggestions for future reforms, against the background of the promulgation of the Amendment to the AML in 2022.

Toegangstickets voor culturele, sport- en andere evenementen worden regelmatig doorverkocht voor prijzen die aanzienlijk hoger zijn dan de oorspronkelijke aankoopprijs. In het Nederlandse parlement is sinds 2008 herhaaldelijk gediscussieerd over de invoering van een wet die deze praktijk aan banden legt. De besluitvorming lijkt steeds vast te lopen op dezelfde argumenten. In België is in 2013 zo’n wet ingevoerd. De argumenten waarop de Nederlandse wetgever vastloopt, zijn door de Belgische wetgever keurig terzijde geschoven. Kan Nederland iets leren van België?

This paper focuses on the regulation of football agents in Europe by providing a comparative law and economics analysis. The paper starts by laying out a theoretical framework where the question is posed as to what reasons could support the need to regulate the activities of football agents. After having established that both information asymmetries and negative externalities could be a serious problem that merit regulation of some kind, the paper asks which type of regulation might be advanced by distinguishing between licensing, certification and conduct regulation. The difference between public and private regulation is equally discussed from an economic perspective. On the back of this theoretical framework, the paper turns to the (private) regulations adopted by the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), explaining the way in which these regulations have evolved and focusing on the most recent changes introduced by the FIFA Regulations on Working with intermediaries (RWI) of 2015, which have been the subject of serious criticism in the literature. We then move to a more detailed discussion of the regulation of the activities of football agents in four selected European countries (Belgium, England, France and Italy), explaining the nature of the regulation (private by a football association or public regulation), the requirements that the agents have to meet and the way in which the system is functioning in practice. As this comparative analysis shows, there exist substantial differences between these European countries as far as the key features of the regulation in question are concerned. The paper equally provides a critical comparison of the four European countries in the light of the theoretical framework and asks whether the differences identified would merit harmonization at the European level. As yet there has been little intervention from the EU in this domain, but there have been increasing calls for such intervention, more particularly from the European Parliament for a regulation of players’ agents. The paper is the first of its kind to provide a critical law and economics analysis in a comparative perspective of the regulation of football agents in Europe.

his chapter analyses the European and Chinese legal regimes dealing with marine oil pollution compensation from a comparative and economic perspective. Historically, EU countries have always been playing an active role in promoting higher standards of compensation as they were often victims of major oil spills. The legal regime in EU countries in compensating marine oil pollution victims is mainly in line with the international conventions, which is based on strict liability with an upper limit on the amount of compensation, plus a compulsory financial guarantee, and a compensation fund. Whereas in China, the compensation regime is only implementing the first layer of the international (and thus EU) regime, which is strict liability, limitation of liability, compulsory insurance. As for the compensation fund, China did not join the international fund as the EU countries do, but it has adopted a domestic fund. The efficiencies and effectiveness of these two regimes are thus analysed in this chapter through the use of economic analysis of law.

In the past four decades that China has devoted to its offshore oil exploration and production, a model of joint development between the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) and foreign operators has been used. Drilling for oil offshore is a challenging task with multiple hazards, as oil spills both from daily operations and from offshore accidents, endangers the marine ecosystem of nearby waters. Unlike traditional damage (i.e., personal injury and property damage) via the environment, tort liabilities resulting from marine ecological damage require a separate regime where relevant rules are scattered in different legal instruments. Some unique features rooted in the Chinese offshore oil industry fundamentally shape the liability distribution and the approaches to ecological remediation. The Bohai Bay Oil Spill in 2011 demonstrated that China was in urgent need of dealing with this issue in practice. This study will describe the applicable legal remedies concerning this type of damage and analyse the existing compensation system. Based on a law and economics approach, some observations are made on the efficiency of the regime to evaluate if the applicable rules are in line with economic starting points when compensating marine ecological damage arising from offshore drilling.

This article provides an analysis of the Directive on representative actions for the protection of the collective interests of consumers of 25 November 2020. The Directive enables qualified entities to bring representative actions on behalf of the consumer. The article uses a Law and Economics approach to stress the advantages of collective actions as a tool to remedy rational apathy and free-rider behaviour. The article therefore in principle welcomes the fact that this Directive will lead to all Member States having some form of collective redress. However, it is rather difficult to fit this Directive into the economic criteria for centralization as there is no obvious danger of cross-border externalities or a race-to-the-bottom. The article is critical of the fact that the Directive only provides for a representative action and does not mention the alternative of a group action (sometimes referred to as a class action). This is especially problematic if there are very few qualified entities that could bring the representative action. Furthermore, the fact that Member States may choose an opt-in procedure instead of an opt-out procedure is critically evaluated. The most problematic aspect of the Directive is the funding of the representative action. Punitive damages and contingency fees are rejected, and the possibility of third-party funding is restricted. It is therefore to be feared that this Directive, notwithstanding the good intentions, may not lead to much application in practice, since the question of how the representative action is to be financed is not resolved in any satisfactory manner.

The precautionary principle is a guiding principle that allows decision makers to adopt precautionary measures even when scientific uncertainties about environmental and health impacts of new technologies or products remain. It is also a debated principle. Proponents of the precautionary principle argue that it provides a framework for improving the quality and reliability of decisions over technology, science, ecological and human health, and leads to improved regulation. Opponents argue that it is incoherent, lacking orientation and that it hinders innovation. The aim of this Chapter is to increase understanding of the perceived tension between the precautionary principle and innovation by examining how the precautionary principle is applied in EU law and by the EU courts. This Chapter is based on the findings of an EU-funded research project entitled REconciling sCience, Innovation and Precaution through the Engagement of Stakeholders (RECIPES).

This study examines to what extent the right to access environmental information - which is enshrined in the Aarhus Convention, the Environmental Information Directive, and national law - can be used by the public to access information related to compliance with EU environmental law with a view to identifying non-compliance. The study looks at the EU Emissions Trading System as an example of EU environmental law and applies a threefold methodology - doctrinal, comparative, and empirical - in order to determine whether information that is necessary to identify non-compliance must be made available upon request. To that end, the study examines the three central concepts of the right to access environmental information – the definition of ‘environmental information’, the definition of ‘public authorities’, and the grounds based on which a request for access to environmental information can be refused. Moreover, the study analyses to what extent information that is relevant for checking compliance with EU environmental law is made available in practice.

The Aarhus Convention is a well-known cornerstone of environmental law on the European continent. Nevertheless, interpretative dilemmas have arisen, particularly in relation to access to justice for environmental nongovernmental organizations (ENGOs). More precisely, while the standing criterion in Article 9(2) of the Convention is formulated in a rather precise and generous way for ENGOs, the standing criterion in Article 9(3) has been deliberately kept vague and makes no reference to ENGOs. In the meantime, some courts, both at the national and European Union (EU) level, have linked the scope ratione personae of Article 9(2) to that of Article 9(3), thus recognizing a presumed and therefore generous standing for ENGOs under both provisions. Because the Aarhus Convention explicitly provides for such an advantageous presumption only under Article 9(2), this article seeks to assess whether these remarkable judicial interpretations nonetheless find a convincing basis in EU law or in the Aarhus Convention respectively.

Legal arrangements rest on behavioural, cognitive, social, and other assumptions regarding their role and function in society and the legal system. The identification and subsequent evaluation of these assumptions is an important task for legal scholarship. In this article, we focus on the identification and categorisation of these assumptions, providing conceptual tools and methodological guidance. We distinguish between assumptions about the value(s), norm(s), or interest(s) underlying a legal arrangement, which can be legal or non-legal, and assumptions about the relationship between the legal arrangement and its underlying value(s), norm(s), or interest(s), which can be logical, causal, or contributory. Regarding the identification, we consider explicit references and inference to the best explanation and theory-driven evaluations as possible methods. Inference to the best explanation, we posit, functions as a manner of reconstructing the theory that the person(s) creating a legal arrangement had in mind regarding the place and function of that legal arrangement in society. Given this, we offer a step-by-step approach to reconstructing this theory in use, drawing from theory-driven evaluations and its sources in the social sciences. These tools and guidelines can contribute to understanding the context and untangling the complexities involved in identifying the assumptions that underlie legal arrangements.

This article discusses the compulsory liability insurance for AI-related harm proposed in the ongoing EU policy debate. We not only explain from the demand side why liability insurance would not be the only financial security needed to deal with the risks created by emerging technologies, but we also clarify from the supply side the obstacles concerning the application of liability insurance in the digital age. This article argues that, even if policymakers are determined to mandate liability insurance for AI-related risks, it must be established in a balanced and evidence-based manner. Compulsory financial security is only indicated when there is a risk that the activity may cause serious damage and could lead to insolvency.

Since 1997, various provisions have been incorporated into Indonesia’s environmental law which relate to corporate criminal liability. Other laws relating to natural resource management have also had provisions on corporate criminal liability inserted into them. These laws are problematic because they often fail to distinguish between corporate criminal liability and corporate officers’ criminal liability, and as do the courts in their interpretation and application of them. Currently in Indonesia, an officer may be held liable for a crime committed by their corporation, even without being at fault or appearing as a defendant in the trial. Indonesia’s environmental law can therefore be said to be applying a rather extreme version of individual vicarious liability in environmental cases, in which a corporate officer is punished merely because of their position as a high-ranking officer of a corporation. This practice seems to be the result of an erroneous interpretation of corporate criminal liability. We argue that the Indonesian interpretation of environmental corporate criminal liability is not only ineffective but also harmful and inconsistent with theories of corporate criminal liability. We also argue that corporate criminal liability should be distinguished from the liability of corporate officers. While corporate criminal liability places criminal liability on the corporation as a legal entity, officers' criminal liability places the criminal liability on the corporate officers as individuals. A corporate officer should only be criminally liable if they can be blamed for an environmental crime committed by the corporation.

The microinsurance market suffers from severe market failures; thus, government interventions are increasingly used to stimulate its functioning. Our article evaluates, from a law and economics perspective, whether these interventions are effective in increasing access to insurance without inducing moral hazard and adverse selection. We then use this framework to evaluate typical types of government interventions in the Chinese microinsurance market (subsidisation, simplification, use of group policy and established distribution channels). Using practical cases, we further identify solutions to remedy the market frictions induced by government interventions. We find that government interventions are only effective under certain conditions: (1) stable and smartly designed subsidies are provided or innovative market practices are subsidised; (2) insurance policies are easy to understand; (3) product distributors are properly trained or licensed; (4) group policies can be renewed.

Should pure economic loss be compensated in China? If so, to what extent? Both questions are left unsolved in the established literature. We contribute to the existing literature by showing that the Chinese courts have developed a relatively conservative attitude towards the compensation of pure economic loss and that the arguments adopted by the courts to deny recovery are neither fair nor reasonable. Using the law and economics analysis, we have recourse to four complementary solutions. First, pure economic loss cases involving socially relevant losses should be compensated. Second, when social losses are not involved, pure economic loss should also be compensated if the third parties are willing to pay or have paid for protection against such a loss. Third, to relieve the excessive pressure imposed by the compensation for such loss, the concepts of causation and the duty of the victim to mitigate damage need to be further clarified in Chinese laws. Fourth, when determining the amount of compensation for pure economic loss, we should carefully balance the trade-off among a variety of factors, including the extent to which the damage could have been foreseen, the nature of the loss, the blameworthiness of the tortfeasor, the size of the plaintiff class, the public policy toward professional standards, the victim’s private loss, the social loss, the courts’ capacities to calculate the loss, and the third parties’ willingness to pay for protection against the loss.

While the EU agencies that have been granted the power to adopt binding decisions are a diverse group, they at least share one feature: in all of them an organisationally separate administrative review body, i.e. a board of appeal, has been established. The review procedures before these boards must be exhausted before private parties can seize the EU courts and the boards therefore all fulfil a similar function: filtering cases before they end up before the courts and providing parties by expert-driven review. Sharing this common function as well as some common features, the boards of appeal of the different agencies remain heterogenous in their set up and functioning. This raises a host of questions from both a theoretic and practical perspective which this volume analyses in depth: how do the boards function, which kind of review do they offer, and how should they be conceptualized in the EU's overall system of legal protection against administrative action? To answer these questions, the volume's first part presents a series of case studies, covering all the EU boards of appeal currently in existence, while a second part looks into the horizontal issues raised by the phenomenon of the boards of appeal.

Many of today’s products and services fall into the category of products and services that are, as such, legal but still unhealthy. Think of smoking as an example. This paper deals with the question of which mix of legal instruments should ideally be used in the light of such products and services. It distinguishes between products and services that predominantly lead to “harm to oneself” or “harm to others”. In the end, most law and economics arguments point in the direction of ex ante safety regulation. However, when there are concerns about the quality of regulation (eg due to lobbying efforts), liability has important added value. In the “harm to others” scenario, safety regulation is even more warranted because the larger number of victims and the increased difficulty to prove the causal link render litigation burdensome. Strict liability has several advantages over negligence and is, therefore, generally preferred. A strong point of negligence, however, is that it enables the court to conduct its own weighing of costs and benefits, which in specific circumstances may be better than that of the regulator or the producer. Furthermore, it enables the judge to consider not only the harm to the user, but also the harm to others in setting the due care standard.

The article provides a comparative framework for articulating assumptions made during the policy design process. That includes the framing of the policy issue in terms of the behavior of addressees, identifying problems that obstruct compliance, and choosing a tool with a distinctive change mechanism. Based on this discussion, a spectrum of six generic policy tools have been provided and illustrated with examples: (1) equipping policy subjects to perform behavior, (2) banning misbehavior, (3) dis/incentivizing addressees to behave in a certain way, (4) informing to raise the awareness about need for compliance, (5) boosting, and (6) nudging towards desired behavior.

Realist evaluation has, over the past two decades, become a widely used approach in evaluation. The cornerstone of realist evaluation is to answer the question: What works, for whom, under what circumstances, and why. This is accomplished by explicating the causal mechanisms that, within a particular context, generate the outcomes of interest. Despite the central role of mechanisms in realist evaluation, systematic knowledge about how the term mechanism is conceptualized and operationalized is limited. The aim of the present chapter is to examine how mechanisms are defined and applied in realist evaluations. Informed by the findings of the review, further conceptual and practical developments for future applications of mechanisms in realist evaluation are considered.

Public funding is believed to play an important role in the development of science and technology. However, whether public funding and, in particular, competitive funding from public agencies actually helps to increase scientific output (i.e. publications) remains a matter of debate. By analysing a dataset of co-publications between China and the EU and a dataset of joint project collaborations in European Framework Programs for Research and Innovation [FP7 and Horizon 2020 (H2020)], we investigate whether different public funding agencies’ competitive assets have different impact on the volume of publication output. Our results support the hypotheses that competitively funded research output varies by funding sources, so that a high level of funding does not necessarily lead to high scientific output. Our results show that FP7/H2020 funded projects do not have a positive contribution to the output of joint publications between China and the EU. Interestingly, cooperation in the form of jointly writing proposals to these EU programmes, especially when they are not granted by the European Commission, can contribute significantly to joint scientific publications in a later stage. This applies in particular to cases where funding from China is involved. Our findings highlight the key role that funding agencies play in influencing research behaviour. Our results indicate that Chinese funding triggers a high number of publications, whereas research funded by the EU does so to a much lower extent, arguably due to the EU’s strong focus on social impact and its funding schemes as tools to promote European integration.

The adoption of 3D printing poses considerable liability risk to digital designers and fabricators. Traditionally, liability insurance is considered a crucial way for parties to shift their risk. However, in the context of 3D printing, uninsurability may serve as an obstacle for risk shifting. The main interest of this article is twofold. On the one hand, it sketches the extent to which risk can be unforeseeable (and thus uninsurable) in the context of 3D printing when legal uncertainties and the existence of adverse selection and moral hazard are considered. On the other hand, by reviewing various instruments, it offers potential solutions for reducing the uninsurability problem. Specific emphasis is given to applying InsurTechs, especially blockchain technology, to improve insurability and to identify the problems that will constrain the promotion of InsurTech in the context of 3D printing.

Green buildings can play a role in helping countries meet their commitments under theParis Agreement on Climate Change. Green building can provide an important contributionto sustainability, for example, by improving energy efficiency, by improving indoorair quality, and by effective waste treatment. In practice, we see that there is an increasinginterest in various forms of green building. However, the existing literature has notidentified the role of law in promoting green building. It is, moreover, striking that greenbuilding has taken off in a rather impressive manner in China. Although generally there arestill huge environmental problems with which China is confronted, for many years alreadyChina has been engaged in green building. This paper wants to examine what explains therelative success of green building in China; What specific legal instruments can be used topromote green building; and what lessons can be drawn more generally from experiencein China? The paper uses the theory of smart regulation (Gunningham/Grabosky) and theeconomic analysis of law to examine the importance of different instruments in promotinggreen building. The paper comes to two key results, being that no single instrumentin itself is optimal to promote green building as a result of which a smart mix needs to bedesigned to promote green building; moreover, for the specific case of China, it is the largegovernment involvement in the economy that has been able to jump-start green building.The Chinese government has, on the one hand, mandated green building in governmentprojects, but on the other hand, also used market-based instruments (like subsidies andpublic procurement) to promote green building.

The investor-state arbitration system (“ISA”) was originally modelled on traditional commercial arbitration and was expected to deliver fast, good, and cheap decisions, especially in comparison to domestic court systems. Yet the ISA system has increasingly been criticized, especially by developing countries. Developing countries claim that the system is not cheap, that decision-making increasingly takes a long time, and that arbitrators are biased in favor of investors (often coming from developed countries in the global North) and against states from the developing South. Several developing states have even withdrawn from the ICSID Convention, which governs the settlement of disputes between investors and states through the institution of the same name. This article provides an economic and an empirical perspective on ISA: It reviews the traditional Law and Economics arguments in favor of and against international commercial arbitration, analyzing to what extent the characteristics of ISA make ISA different than international commercial arbitration. Moreover, the article summarizes the rich empirical literature on the functioning of ISA, and it compares and synthesizes this empirical literature with Law and Economics theories. Based on both Law and Economics and the empirical literature, the article then analyzes existing suggestions for reforming the ISA system.