203.432.7101

William K. Townsend Professor of Law

Ian Ayres is a professor at Yale Law School and a specialist in contract law. He has written dozens of articles on a wide range of subjects, including antitrust, contracts, economic damages, corporate contracting, and race discrimination in the marketplace. He writes a new column, with Yale SOM professor Barry Nalebuff, in Forbes Magazine. He is also writing and teaching in the areas of business organization and corporate finance.

Achievements and Awards
Fellow, American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 2006 - present
Insincere Promises: The Law of Misrepresented Intent (with G. Klass, Yale University Press, 2005) Winner of the 2006 Scribes Book Award "for the best work of legal scholarship published during the previous year."
Research in the Public Interest Award from the Center for Public Representation, 1991
Clerk to the Honorable James K. Logan, Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, 1986-87

Selected Books
Lifecyle Investing: A New, Safe, and Audacious Way to Improve the Performance of Your Retirement Portfolio (with B. Nalebuff), Basic Books, 2010

Studies in Contract Law (with R.E. Speidel), Foundation Press, 7th edition, 2008

Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers is the New Way to Be Smart, Bantam, 2007

Straightforward: How to Mobilize Heterosexual Support for Gay Rights (with J. Gerarda Brown), Princeton University Press, 2005

Insincere Promises: The Law of Misrepresented Intent (with G. Klass), Yale University Press, 2005

Optional Law: Real Options in the Structure of Legal Entitlements, University of Chicago Press, 2005

Why Not?: How to Use Everyday Ingenuity to Solve Problems Big and Small (with B. Nalebuff), Harvard Business School Press, 2003

Voting with Dollars: A New Paradigm for Campaign Finance (with B. Ackerman), Yale University Press, 2002

Pervasive Prejudice?: Non-Traditional Evidence of Race and Gender Discrimination, University of Chicago Press, 2001

Selected Book Chapters
"An Agency Perspective on Relational Investing" (with P. Cramton), Relational Investing, Oxford University Press, 1996

Selected Articles
"Mark(et)ing Nondiscrimination: Privatizing ENDS with a Certification Mark" (with J. G. Brown), Michigan Law Review, forthcoming

"A Study of Racially Disparate Outcomes in the Los Angeles Police Department" (with J. Borowsky), ACLU of Southern California, October, 2008

"Menus Matter" University of Chicago Law Review, Vol. 3, No. 73, 2006

"Does Affirmative Action Reduce the Number of Black Lawyers?" (with R. Brooks), Stanford Law Review, Vol. 1807, No. 57, 2005

"To Insure Prejudice: Racial Disparities in Taxicab Tipping" (with Fred Vars and Nasser Zakariya), Yale Law Journal, Vol. 114, No. 1613, 2005

"Shooting Down the More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis" (with J.J. Donohue III), Stanford Law Review, Vol. 55, No. 1193, 2003

"Internalizing Outside Trading" (with S. Choi), Michigan Law Review, Vol. 101, No. 313, 2002

"Limiting Patentees' Market Power Without Reducing Innovation Incentives: The Perverse Benefits of Uncertainty and Non-Injunctive Remedies" (with P. Klemperer), Michigan Law Review, 1999

"The Donation Booth: Mandating Donor Anonymity to Disrupt the Market for Political Influence" (with J. Bulow), Stanford Law Review, 1998

"Measuring the Positive Externalities from Unobservable Victim Precaution: An Empirical Analysis of Lojack" (with S. D. Levitt), Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1998

"Common Knowledge as a Barrier to Negotiation" (with B. Nalebuff), UCLA Law Review, 1997

"Pursuing Deficit Reduction through Diversity: How Affirmative Action at the FCC Increased Auction Competition" (with P. Cramton), Stanford Law Review, Vol. 48, 1996

"Race and Gender Discrimination in Negotiation for the Purchase of a New Car" (with P. Siegelman), American Economic Review, Vol. XX, 1994

"A Market Test for Race Discrimination in Bail Setting" (with J. Waldfogel), 46 Stanford Law Review, 987, 1994

Working Papers
"Evidence from Two Large Field Experiments that Peer Comparison Feedback Can Reduce Residential Energy Usage" (with S.Raseman and A. Shih)

Education
PhD Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1988
JD Yale University, 1986
BA Yale University, 1981