This paper develops implications of the selection hypothesis of Priest and Klein for the relationship between trial rates and plaintiff win rates. I find strong evidence for the selection hypothesis in estimated relationships between trial rates and plaintiff win rates at trial across case types and judges. I then structurally estimate the model on judge data, yielding estimates of the model's major parameters (the decision standard, the degree of stake asymmetry, and the uncertainty parameter) for each of three major case types, contracts, property rights, and torts.

Women have traditionally participated in intellectual property creation at depressed rates relative to men. Book authorship is now an exception: women now publish more than half of new books. Adding new products can have significant welfare benefits, particularly when product quality is unpredictable. Growth in female-authored books has delivered substantial increases in the female-authored shares of consumption, book awards, and other measures of success, indicating that the additional female-authored books are useful to consumers. The welfare benefit from gender-inclusive innovation is large and accrues to a wide range of consumers.

This paper develops implications of the selection hypothesis of Priest and Klein for the relationship between trial rates and plaintiff win rates. I find strong evidence for the selection hypothesis in estimated relationships between trial rates and plaintiff win rates at trial across case types and judges. I then structurally estimate the model on judge data, yielding estimates of the model's major parameters (the decision standard, the degree of stake asymmetry, and the uncertainty parameter) for each of three major case types, contracts, property rights, and torts.

We explore the consequence of quality unpredictability for the welfare benefit of new products, using recent developments in recorded music as our context. We quantify the effects of new music on welfare using an explicit structural model of demand and entry with potentially unpredictable product quality. On the basis of plausible forecasting models of expected appeal, a tripling of the choice set according to expected quality adds substantially more consumer surplus as the usual long-tail benefits from a tripling of the choice set according to realized quality.

When consumers share similar preferences, additional consumers will bring forth products that confer positive "preference externalities" on others. However, if distinct groups of consumers have substantially different preferences, the groups bring forth products with more appeal to themselves and less appeal to others. We document that in their capacity as daily newspaper consumers, blacks and whites are more likely to buy daily newspapers in markets with larger black and white populations, respectively. Similar results hold for Hispanics and non-Hispanics, but not by education, income, or age. We provide evidence that product positioning underlies our results.