The Selection Hypothesis and the Relationship between Trial and Plaintiff Victory.

This paper develops implications of the selection hypothesis of George L. Priest and Benjamin Klein (1984) for the relationship between trial rates and plaintiff win rates. The author finds strong evidence for the selection hypothesis in estimated relationships between trial rates and plaintiff win rates at trial across case types and judges. He then structurally estimates 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. Copyright 1995 by University of Chicago Press.