This paper extends the analysis of insurance contracts design to the case of "low probability events", when there is a probability mass on the event "no accident-zero loss". The optimality of the deductible clause is discussed both at the theoretical and empirical levels.

Parties engaged in a litigation generally enter the discovery process with different informations regarding their case and/or an unequal endowment in terms of skill and ability to produce evidence and predict the outcome of a trial. Hence, they have to bear different legal costs to assess the...

There is evidence that asymmetric information does exist between litigants: not in a way supporting Bebchuk (1984)’s assumption that defendants’ degree of fault is private information, but more likely as a result of parties’ predictive capacity about the outcome at trial (Osborne, 1999)....

This paper analyzes the determinants of public law enforcement policies when citizens vote for the timing and level of fi…nes. We consider situations where citizens and politicians disagree on the value of the expected social harm associated with some activities. We fi…nd that citizens vote...

This paper explores the interaction of private precaution and public safety investments when the latter are determined in a political process. We distinguish the scenarios in which the median victim infuences public safety from the one in which the injurer lobbies the public agent, and analyze...

This paper revisits the issue of law enforcement and the design of monetary sanctions when the public law enforcer's incentives depart from those of a benevolent authority, which is the most frequent assumption made in the literature on crime deterrence. We …rst consider the case of an elected...

This paper provides an analysis of two damage rules (Lost Pro…fit versus Unjust Enrichment) introduced in the French Code de la Propriété Intellectuelle in 2007 (Loi du 27 Octobre 2007, Art. L. 615-7). We use a simple sequential game where both the decisions to infringe and to enforce the...

This paper revisits the issue of the unilateral divorce law, taking into account that: 1/ the decisions to engage in marriage and then to divorce or to stay married are fundamentally sequential decisions; 2/ household consumption has a large joint component, generating economies of scale. The...

For contemporary legal theory, law is essentially an interpretative and hermeneutics practice (Ackerman (1991), Horwitz (1992)). A straightforward consequence is that legal disputes between parties are motivated by their divergent interpretations regarding what the law says on their case. This...

L’enseignement qui est habituellement retenu des travaux empiriques réalisés à la suite de La Porta, Lopez-de-Silanes, Shleifer et Vishny (1997), est qu’il convient de promouvoir un haut niveau de protection juridique des créanciers. A l’inverse de cette recommandation, certains pays...