A significant policy concern about the emerging plaintiff legal funding industry is that loans will undermine settlement. When the plaintiff has private information about damages, we find that the optimal (plaintiff-funder) loan induces all plaintiff types to make the same demand, resulting in...

With contributions from some of the leading scholars in law and economics, this comprehensive book summarizes the state of economic research on litigation, procedure and evidence.

This pioneering Handbook contains specially-commissioned chapters on tort law from leading experts in the field. This volume evaluates issues of vital importance to those seeking to understand and reform the tort law and the litigation process, taking a multi-disciplinary approach, including...

We provide a model showing that the use of confidential settlement as a strategy for a firm facing tort litigation leads to lower average safety of products sold than would occur if the firm were committed to openness. A rational risk-neutral consumer's response in a market, wherein a firm...

We examine the behavior of a firm that produces a product with a privately-observed safety attribute. Costly disclosure and price-signaling of safety are alternative firm strategies. The liability system and production cost determine the firm's full marginal cost. When the firm's full marginal...

We model the settlement and litigation process, allowing for incomplete information about the level of damages on the part of both the defendant and the court, and use the model to examine the effect of making (currently inadmissible) settlement demands admissible as evidence in court should a...

In search models, the property of "recall" has heretofore been treated as exogenous, with a distinction made between models with "no recall" and models with "perfect recall." However, an alternative interpretation is that recall is provided by the firms. Then, "perfect recall" corresponds to...

Strategic variables (such as availability) can be used to increase customers' search costs, thus increasing the price that can be supported in equilibrium. Customers can "purchase" bargaining power by shopping at two firms and then bringing those firms into competition with one another. Knowing...