Mutually beneficial agreements might fail if the parties fear contractual opportunism. Litigation is supposed to prevent this, but still leaves room for litigational opportunism: Even knowing that the opponent has fulfilled his obligations, a party might bring suit. We show that with positive...

The aim of this paper is to derive conditions under which either dictatorship or the rule of law are the equilibria of a post-constitutional game. It thus contributes to positive constitutional economics, i.e., the research program that is interested in explaining the emergence of constitutions...

We present, for the first time, a model of recent institutional developments in litigation funding across several European jurisdictions. Recognizing the financing constraints that British cost rules may impose on litigants, these new contractual arrangements combine contingency fees with third...

This paper presents a modification of the inspection game: The ?Bayesian Monitoring? model rests on the assumption that judges are interested in enforcing compliant behavior and making correct decisions. They may base their judgements on an informative but imperfect signal which can be generated...

This paper analyzes the impact of FORIS contracts on litigation and settlement decisions using a simple divergent-expectations model. A FORIS contract introduces contingent fee arrangements under the British legal cost allocation rule: the plaintiff pays a percentage of his settlement or trial...

The German law on employees' inventions requires employees to report to their employer any invention made in relation with the work contract. An employer claiming the right to the invention is obliged to pay a compensation to the employee. Up to now, this compensation is a matter of...

Anti-Sharing may solve the sharing problem of teams: the team members promise a fixed payment to the Anti-Sharer. He collects the actual output and pays out its value to them. We prove that the internal Anti-Sharer is unproductive in equilibrium.

Ius Commune describes the spontaneous development of a european contract law by adaptive behavior of contracting parties to competing law systems and their interpretations by jursidiction. The idea of spontaneous law harmonization is appealing, since its result is independent of centraized...

Legal Cost Insurance (LCI) is not only a device to reallocate risk, but also to enhance an insured's position in a settlement negotiation. The paper points out that this function of LCI is especially important in cases that have a negative expected value for potential plaintiffs. Hence LCI is of...

This paper explores the conditions under which compliance with a social contract establishes an equilibrium in a society. It is assumed that society consists of two groups, one of which has a comparative advantage in using violence, whereas the other one has a comparative advantage in producing...