The economic analysis of tort law is extended to multi-party accidents with unobservable actions. Due to the requirement of no punitive damages, the problem resembles a team production problem. It is shown that asymmetry in the agents' impact on the stochastic damage function can be exploited to...

This study deals with a specific implication of adverse selection for annuity pricing. Varying the time path of the payoffs over the retirement periods affects the annuity demand and welfare of individuals with low and with high life expectancy in different ways. Therefore they can be separated...

We analyze the role of liability, insurance, and side payments for independent safety controls with unobservable care levels. By independent safety controls we mean that the accident probability depends on the care levels of two parties, and that the effects of the controls on the accident...

The paper compares two liability rules, strict liability and the negligence rule, in terms of loss-prevention investment and social welfare when individuals are risk-averse and policymakers do not have lump-sum transfers at their disposal. If the damage payment made by the injurer to the victim...

It is widely recognized that market failure prevents efficient risk sharing in natural-disaster insurance, leading to several public-private partnership arrangements across the globe. We argue that risk selection by the private partner is potentially an important issue. We illustrate our...

We demonstrate that a bank can offer demand deposits and yet avoid bank runs without deposit insurance if it also offers time deposits that have a low liquidation value. Self-fulfilling runs do not occur, as maturity mismatch is eliminated. To do this, we modify Diamond and Dybvig"s [1983] model...

Traditional insurance theory assumes that the parties involved assign subjective probabilities of losses. Here, we demonstrate that mutually beneficial risk-sharing is possible without the assignment of a probability - it is enough that the sharing parties presume that they are faced with the...

We present a model of recent institutional developments in litigation funding across several European jurisdictions. They combine contingency fees with third party cover for cost in the event of losing the case: we call these "Third Party Contingency" (TPC) contracts. A TPC contract can make...

This paper develops a panic-free bank system in an OLG model. A bank issues both demand deposits and time deposits (or bank stocks) so that the maturity-matching constraint is satisfied. The agents who cannot participate in capital markets put their savings in demand deposits; others favour...

It is well established that incumbent firms may try to deter market entry by pretending to be stronger than they really are. In this article, we show that in some cases an incumbent may prefer the opposite, namely to encourage entry by signaling weakness. If the incumbent cannot deter entry of a...