The thesis that judges could (voluntarily or not) promote efficiency through their decisions has largely been discussed since Posner put it forward in the early 1970s. There nonetheless remains a methodological aspect that has never (to our knowledge) been analyzed and that we address in this...

This paper discusses a two-dimensional jury model. It combines the idea of winning a maximum of votes in a voting game with utility maximization that derives from the winning proposition. The model assumes a first mover, the plaintiff, and a second-mover, the counsel of the defendant. Typically,...

The target of this work is to support the thesis that pharmaceutical companies' testing phase would be treated like any other form of production in a globalization process, that is to say, a specific phase of pharmaceutical R&D could be localized where the cost of clinical evidence is lower....

This article uses economic categories to show how the reorganisation of civil procedure in the case of class action is not merely aimed at providing a more efficient litigation technology, as hierarchies (and company law) might do for other productive activities, but that it also serves to...

Once a preserve of the American legal landscape, the class action device today transcends geographic boundaries. In the past decade, efforts have intensified to establish collective litigation instruments in diverse legal terrains outside the United States - including Europe - often with the...

We analyze the loans that small, newly established firms obtain from the banks by certain relationships based on a set of small, young Italian companies founded during the 1992–2004 period. According to our investigation, the amount of borrowing is determined primarily by the size of the firm,...

Inventors and users of technology often enter into cooperative agreements for sharing their intellectual property in order to implement a standard or to avoid costly litigation. Over the past two decades, U.S. antitrust authorities have viewed pooling arrangements that integrate complementary,...

Until recently (e.g., Lindquist 2007), few studies have examined the factors that might affect aspects of judicial efficiency, including the time it takes a court to decide a case. In our analysis of a sample o f U.S. Courts of Appeals decisions from 1971-1996, we examine a variety of potential...

Theoretical works suggest that granting a supreme court discretion in choosing the cases to be decided on the merits could shift dockets away from traditional case-based adjudication and towards issue-based adjudication. According to this prediction, legislatures can recast supreme courts' roles...