The first objective of this paper is to contribute to the debate regarding the desirability of the sharing of liability for the accident loss. The second objective is to extend the efficiency analysis beyond Shavell (1980, 1987) and Miceli (1997), to search for the second-best liability rules....

Product liability has acquired immense importance in the last 50 years. Various studies show that when consumers are imperfectly informed about the product related risk, the market mechanism will not lead to an efficient outcome and tort liability is required for economic efficiency. Many...

Negligence-based liability has been justified on the grounds of its efficiency properties. However, this approach towards liability assignment has been criticized in several recent writings. In a series of articles, causation-based apportionment of liability has been recommended, as an...

Efficiency property of liability rules when courts make errors in estimation of the harm suffered by the victim is studied. Effects of courts' errors on parties' behaviour regarding the levels of care they take to prevent the accident and their decisions to buy information about courts' errors...

Climate change has serious repercussions on food security, availability, accessibility and utilisation and food system stability. Women farmers currently account for 45–80 per cent of all food production in developing countries depending on the region. When climate change-related...

Some legal scholars have argued that the standard modeling of liability rules is inconsistent with the causation requirement of the law of torts. It has been claimed that under the doctrinal notion of causation liability, an injurer is liable only if he was negligent. Moreover, he is liable for...

A growing body of literature suggests that courts and juries are inclined toward division of liability between two strictly non-negligent or “vigilant” parties. However, standard models of liability rules do not provide for vigilance-based sharing of liability. In this paper, we explore the...

Risky products cause two types of costs for society; the accident costs and the insurance costs. Liability rules allocate these costs between the parties involved. The expansion in the scope of product liability over the past thirty years has increased the cost of third-party liability...

For past three decades or so, the negligence liability has been a major preoccupation of the economic analysis of liability rules. However, recently it has invited severe criticisms on several counts. Several leading legal scholars have championed a comparative causation based allocation of...

Book Review of Kaushik Basu, Pulin B. Nayak, Ranjan Ray (eds.), Markets and Governments, OUP, Delhi, 2003, pp. xvi+268, Rs.595, ISBN 0195657888