Noemí Olivera

Quantum Decision Making, Legal Complexity and Social Behavior

The relationship between Law (legal system) and Society can be and has been described in many different ways. Beyond the theoretical discussions, there lays reality, and it shows that decisions on legal policies are not neutral in terms of social impact. The legal system is composed by many instruments, institutes or institutions interacting among themselves—laws and other legal norms, including articles within them. It is clear that instruments, institutes or institutions, augment their number according to the appearance of new forms of relationship. Then, the Law is progressively composed by more and more instruments and there is no reason to expect them to be always working in a synchronized way. For this reason Law can be analyzed using complex systems tools, the ‘Legal Complexity Notion’. Moreover, the idea of law is closely related to those of obedience and enforceability. However, a law is not only obeyed just because it is enforceable, but it is considered to express society’s attitude toward a given situation. In other words, people are not likely to perform the behavior described in the law just because it is there. Leaving aside the area of compulsory rules—such as penal law-, where individuals cannot neglect the existence of such a norm, in the vast area of non-compulsory norms—such as contract law-, there are many laws in most legal systems that rule situations that are seldom chosen by the parties of a given business. In the present contribution; we analyze why individuals opt for some legal instruments which are not of compulsory application or do not choose them. One case is the kind of joint venture agreements—contract entailment among enterprises—businessmen decide to enter. Using the available data and a quantum decision-making model, we are able to describe, for the Argentinean case, why among the available typical joint venture regimes, the Temporary Union of Firms—UTE—is preferred by users rather than the Group of Collaborating Firms—ACE—or the Consortium of Cooperating Firms—CCE.