Lee Anne Fennell (University of Chicago – Law School) has posted Slices and Lumps: Division and Aggregation in Law and Life on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Human well-being depends on assembling useful lumps and carving out useful slices—from “lumpy goods” like bridges and highways that are valuable only when complete, to resources and assets that become more useful when artfully subdivided. As increasing urbanization and environmental threats raise the stakes for assembling resources and cooperation, emerging forms of unbundling, from jobs to cars to homes to entertainment, have refined the slices in which we produce and consume. Challenges of aggregation and division are ubiquitous, appearing not only in high-profile contexts like eminent domain and the sharing economy, but also in a wide range of collective action and personal decision settings, as well as throughout property, tort, criminal law, and regulatory policy. This book emphasizes configuration’s significance as a unifying concept and as a promising focus of public and private innovation. It examines the difficulties and opportunities that slicing and lumping present in multiple domains, including personal and public finance, work, consumer markets, housing, cities, and the many areas of law and policy that involve thresholds, cliffs, and bundles.
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