The Legal Aid Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act (LASPO) came into force in England and Wales in 2013, Part 2 of which brought a number of reforms to the costs and conduct of civil litigation. The current paper seeks to provide the first empirical evaluation of LASPO Part 2. We begin by...

The paper analyzes the effects of different litigation cost allocation rules, detection skill of judges (judicial errors), and the mode of enforcement of foreign judgments on the home bias in trade and sheds a new light on the so-called border-effect puzzle. In our model the border effect or...

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...

Mutually beneficial agreements might fail if the parties fear contractual opportunism. Litigation is supposed to be a remedy, but gives scope for another kind of opportunistic behavior which we call litigational opportunism: Even knowing that the opponent has fulfilled his obligations, a party...

The prosecution of criminals is costly, and subject to errors. In contrast to adversarial court procedures, the prosecutor is regarded as an impartial investigator and aide to the judge in inquisitorial justice systems. We show in a sequential prosecution game of a Bayesian court that a...