Here are the latest announcements from SSRN:

Announcing 4 New Sponsored LSN Subject Matter eJournals

We are pleased to announce four new Legal Scholarship Network (LSN) Sponsored Subject Matter eJournals under Law, Brain & Behavior Journals. Law & Evolution, Law & Neuroscience, Law & Prosociality, and Law, Cognition, & Decisionmaking, are sponsored by Indiana University Maurer School of Law and by the UCLA School of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles.

LAW, BRAIN & BEHAVIOR JOURNALS
Law is concerned with organizing and constraining human behavior. As a result, some model of human behavior, implicit or explicit, underlies legal principles and analysis. Papers in LAW, BRAIN & BEHAVIOR employ conceptual and empirical findings from various disciplines, including neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and experimental psychology, to shed light on how we can best understand law and and use it to guide human behavior in desirable directions.

LAW & EVOLUTION
View Papers: http://www.ssrn.com/link/Law-Evolution.html
Subscribe: http://hq.ssrn.com/jourInvite.cfm?link=Law-Evolution

Editor: Jeffrey Evans Stake, Robert A. Lucas Chair of Law, Indiana University Maurer School of Law

Description: This journal distributes working and accepted paper abstracts with a focus on the intersection of law and evolution in a number of domains. First and foremost, evolutionary psychology and biology provide a model of human behavior that can be helpful in understanding legal rules, critiquing them, and suggesting reforms. Second, understanding the evolution of the biological world is important for constructing legal regimes to address a wide variety of issues, from the environment to medicine. Third, ideas can and often do replicate, becoming “memes,” and their evolution has implications for the law, both because many areas of the law deal with ideas and because laws and legal institutions are themselves evolving replicators. This journal accepts working papers, essays, published articles, experimental and research reports, and other scholarly treatments of topics within the intersection of LAW AND EVOLUTION.

LAW & NEUROSCIENCE
View Papers: http://www.ssrn.com/link/Law-Neuroscience.html
Subscribe: http://hq.ssrn.com/jourInvite.cfm?link=Law-Neuroscience

Editor: Oliver Goodenough, Professor, Vermont Law School, Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet & Society

Description: This journal distributes working and accepted paper abstracts with a focus on law and the emerging science of the brain sharing a basic preoccupation: understanding the nature of human thought and action. Law has been had an implicit science of mind; cognitive neuroscience is an explicit version. A sustained academic dialog between these disciplines will lead to advances on each side of the conversation. In particular we desire to increase access to, as well as understanding of, human action. By access we mean an actionable pathway to improving human action. Law will be enriched with better models of thought and behavior and with a tool-kit of applications and interventions for such difficult problems as addiction, mental health, and legal procedure itself. Cognitive science will benefit from the challenge of tackling problems whose solutions could have significant consequences for justice and social welfare. The abstracting journal LAW AND NEUROSCIENCE provides a forum for conducting this exchange. It will accept working papers, essays, published articles, experimental and research reports, and other scholarly treatments of topics at the intersection of law, neuroscience and related disciplines, such as cognitive psychology, economics, and behavioral biology.

LAW & PROSOCIALITY
View Papers: http://www.ssrn.com/link/Law-Prosociality.html
Subscribe: http://hq.ssrn.com/jourInvite.cfm?link=Law-Prosociality

Editor: Lynn Stout, Professor of Law, University of California, Los Angeles – School of Law

Description: This journal distributes working and accepted paper abstracts covering various aspects of the many interactions between law and prosocial behavior. Extensive empirical evidence demonstrates that rather than always maximizing their own material self-interest, people often behave prosocially by sacrificing their own material welfare in order to help, and sometimes in order to harm, other people. For example, people often follow legal rules, obey social norms, and show both trust and trustworthiness, even when external sanctions are weak or absent. Papers in LAW AND PROSOCIALITY use data and evidence gathered from neuroscience, experimental and behavioral economics and psychology, and other life and social sciences to shed light on the empirical phenomenon of prosocial behavior and to examine how prosocial behavior depends on, reinforces, and interacts with law and public policy. Legal scholars, behavioral economists, psychologists, policy experts, and other researchers and scholars are encouraged to submit papers that investigate the empirical phenomenon of prosocial behaviors, including behaviors like trust, altruism, cooperation, and altruistic punishment, and their relation to law and social order.

LAW, COGNITION, & DECISIONMAKING
View Papers: http://www.ssrn.com/link/Law-Cognition-Decisionmaking.html
Subscribe: http://hq.ssrn.com/jourInvite.cfm?link=Law-Cognition-Decisionmaking

Editor: Russell Korobkin, Professor of Law, University of California, Los Angeles – School of Law

Description: This journal distributes working and accepted paper abstracts at the intersection of research on behavioral decisionmaking and law. Evaluations of existing or potential legal policy require an understanding of how law affects behavior, and an understanding of behavior in turn requires insight into how individuals process information and make decisions. Papers in LAW, COGNITION, and DECISIONMAKING use knowledge of how humans process information to render judgments, form preferences, and make choices for the purpose of informing descriptive and normative analysis of law.

Announcing Expansion of ERN Microeconomics Subject Matter eJournal

We are pleased to announce the expansion of Economics Research Network (ERN) Microeconomics: Information, Specific Knowledge, & Uncertainty into the following eJournals:

MICROECONOMICS: ASYMMETRIC & PRIVATE INFORMATION
View Papers: http://www.ssrn.com/link/Micro-Asymmetric-Private.html
Subscribe: http://hq.ssrn.com/jourInvite.cfm?link=Micro-Asymmetric-Private

Description: This journal distributes working and accepted paper abstracts of empirical and theoretical papers on microeconomic aspects of information including the analysis of decisions in transactions where the costs of information transfer result in one party having different information than the other. Included in this topic are studies in which the cost of transferring or creating information lead to information asymmetries in principal-agent problems. The topics in this journal include topics D82, D83, D86 and D87 from Section D8 of the JEL classification system.

MICROECONOMICS: DECISION-MAKING UNDER RISK & UNCERTAINTY
View Papers: http://www.ssrn.com/link/Micro-Decision-Making.html
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Description: This journal distributes working and accepted paper abstracts of empirical and theoretical papers on microeconomic aspects of the analysis of economic actors making decisions facing different levels of risk and uncertainty. Included in this topic are models based on probability, and utility theories. The topics in this journal include topics D81 from Section D8 of the JEL classification system.

MICROECONOMICS: SEARCH; LEARNING; INFORMATION COSTS & SPECIFIC KNOWLEDGE; EXPECTATION & SPECULATION
View Papers: http://www.ssrn.com/link/Micro-Search-Learning.html
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Description: This journal distributes working and accepted paper abstracts of empirical and theoretical papers on microeconomic aspects of the role played by the costs of information transfer, learning, and searching, in decision-making under uncertainty and risk. The analysis of the role played by expectations and speculation in reaching decisions in the context of costly information and uncertainty is also included in this topic. The topics in this journal include topics D83 and D84 from Section D8 of the JEL classification system.

Announcing Paris December 2009 Finance International Meeting AFFI – EUROFIDAI on SSRN

In cooperation with the Paris Finance International Meeting AFFI – EUROFIDAI, the Financial Economics Network (FEN) is pleased to announce the Paris December 2009 Finance International Meeting Online Proceedings. These proceedings are available to all users at no charge and contain abstracts of the meeting’s papers with links to the full text within the SSRN eLibrary.

The annual Paris Finance International Meeting is organized by AFFI (French Finance Association) and EUROFIDAI (European Financial Data Institute), and jointly sponsored by CDC Institute for Economic Research, CNRS, Fondation Banque de France pour la Recherche en Economie Monetaire, Financiere et Bancaire and Ministere de l’Enseignement Superieur et de la Recherche and Pôle universitaire Léonard de Vinci.

The latest research in all areas of finance is included in the meeting. Program chair is Patrice Fontaine.

This abstracting eJournal provides a data warehouse for all abstracts and papers presented at the December 2009 Meeting. Abstracts of the papers will also be published in subject-specific journals within FEN and, where appropriate, in the journals of our sister networks.

View Papers: http://www.ssrn.com/link/Paris-2009-AFFI-EUROFIDAI.html
Subscribe: http://hq.ssrn.com/jourInvite.cfm?link=Paris-2009-AFFI-EUROFIDAI
Conference URL: http://www.en.affi.asso.fr/200-december-2009.htm