A federal appeals court cleared the way Monday for a financial-news website to publish stock market analysts’ private buy and sell recommendations in near-real time, striking a blow to a century-old legal doctrine that gave media companies control over the time-sensitive news they report.

The 4-year-old litigation, brought by Barclays Capital, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and others, was premised on the so-called “hot news” doctrine the Supreme Court first recognized in 1918, in a lawsuit over the unauthorized and immediate republication of wire service reports. Monday’s ruling could deprive ...

You’re not stupid, but you can be fooled. For millennia, the best salespeople have known how to exploit the vulnerabilities of the human mind. In the burgeoning field of behavioral economics, we’ve begun to give precise names to the mental weaknesses that make us all susceptible to a well-crafted pitch. Drawing on the insights of psychology, behavioral economists have e...