Dispute resolution without looking into the eye of a ‘judge’ — can this be regarded as the way of the future, or should one rather concentrate on traditional court, arbitration or ADR proceedings?

As shown above, an online mechanism is risky and may have disadvantages vis-à-vis more traditional dispute resolution mechanisms. Therefore, ODR cannot become the only alternative of such proceedings, at least not in the current state of technical development and given the customs of a large number of the participants in e-commerce. Also, the necessary technical standards have their price, in particular where consumers are concerned. The only exceptions are proceedings in which very simple fact or law patterns must be adjudicated such as in the UDRP mechanism.

The Hague Conference on private international law has been negotiating for some time a draft Convention on jurisdiction and the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments in civil and commercial matters. The draft Convention, otherwise known as the Judgments Project, is intended to create common jurisdictional rules for international civil and commercial cases and to provide for the recognition and enforcement of judgments issued by foreign courts under these rules. When discussions began on this Convention, e-commerce was not a consideration as it was not yet a reality. Since then, however, the importance of e-commerce within the context of the Convention has become all too obvious. In recent months, lawyers have gone so far as to tout the Judgments Project as “the most important legal event in the history of cyberspace”. A recent New York Times article even quoted a law school professor as saying that the Convention is “likely to shape the future of international e-commerce”. Some have seised upon the Project as an opportunity to create an international legal framework for the Internet, yet recent negotiations have proved this to be a difficult, if not impossible, task. Interestingly, this is not an isolated occurrence. Other intergovernmental organisations such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) have also had difficulty negotiating international instruments with regard to the Internet, especially relating to the harmonisation of private international law rules. This article discusses the importance of building international co-operation for the development of e-commerce and examines the Internet related problems encountered in the Judgments Project, in an attempt to shed light on why it is so difficult to negotiate such co-operation. This article takes stock of the difficult policy decisions that must be made by States in order to push forward and concludes with some thoughts on how States and intergovernmental organisations might move ahead in obtaining greater international co-operation within regard to the Internet.

We study the determinants of stock market development and the growing migration of capital raising, listing, and trading activity to international exchanges. Economies with better fundamentals – better legal systems, greater macro stability – have larger and more liquid markets. As fundamentals improve, however, the degree of migration to international exchanges also increases. Corporations enjoy lower costs and more liquid shares. Consequently, fully-fledged local stock exchanges become less necessary for many economies. Migration can further lead to such a reduction in domestic activity that would render a local exchange unsustainable. Therefore, the functions and forms of stock exchanges in many economies need rethinking.

An integrated financial market raises the fundamental question of how enterprises should organise themselves in order to succeed in the competition for international capital. There is strong evidence that, in the future, corporate governance, including the possibility of exercising active ownership, will be a parameter in the competitive market for capital.

It seems almost a truism to say that the Internet has changed the world. One can hardly find one area of economic life not strongly influenced by today's flow of information. Important aspects of people's lives have become dependent on a binary language manifested in bits and bytes. Furthermore, this new order is certainly not limited to business or economy. In fact, it applies to the whole issue of globalisation, such as the emerging of new political movements based on networks.

This paper deals with the effects that intermediation has on strategic behaviour in negotiations. To this end, we use the tools of game theory to analyse how different institutional settings can provide specific strategic incentives and thereby condition the outcome of negotiations. We concentrate on some very recent contributions, which have addressed gaps in this literature and stress the economic intuition behind some predicted behaviours.

Our notions of dispute resolution revolve around parties with competing contentions receiving some form of adjudication or resolution through settlement. A more accurate approach involves seeing disputes in a different way. At one extreme, we may have a case litigated before a country's Supreme Court. At the other, there may be the germs of a problem that nobody has articulated as such. This has the ability to become that court case. More likely, though, it will just wither away. An innocent victim may resolve to take his business elsewhere or even to desert an entire sector of commerce. He is no less in dispute than the serious litigant.

A recent survey by David Hirshleifer on investor psychology and asset pricing opens with a short story describing what might have happened to asset-pricing theory, had the founding fathers of modern finance not focused on rationality as the core of their thinking about financial markets, but, instead, followed Adam Smith, Irving Fisher, John Maynard Keynes and Harry Markowitz, who thought that psychology had a large impact on the outcome of financial markets. Had this path of theorizing been taken, today there might have been an influential school at the University of Chicago advocating the Deficient Markets Hypothesis and a Stanford psychologist would have become the inventor of a prominent asset-valuation model, the so-called DAPM (Deranged Anticipation and Perception Model).

It is a trite statement that the global investment markets have been transformed by the internet. The proliferation of on-line share broking services, the migration of investment transactions from proprietary electronic networks to the open architecture of the internet, the use of the internet to by-pass traditional “bricks and mortar” financial intermediaries, the creation of on-line markets for exotic commodities such as bandwidth and new types of derivatives such as credit and weather derivatives, and the electronic “day trader” phenomenon have all been widely publicised.