- Bill Goodman, Monthly Labor Review, June 2002 'Zerbe's new book is high-powered and potentially important.'
Economic Efficiency in Law and Economics
FROM THE PUBLISHER
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 efficency as an axiomatic system that performs the following tasks: the new approach obviates certain technical and ethical criticisms that have been made of economic efficiency; it answers critics of efficiency; it allows an expanded range for efficiency analysis; it establishes the conditions under which economists can reasonably say that some state of the world is inefficient. He then applies the new analysis to a number of hard and fascinating cases. He develops a new theory of common law efficiency and indicates the circumstances under which the common law will be inefficient.