This paper is about the incentive effects of legal presumptions. We analyze three interrelated effects of legal presumptions in a tort setting: (1) incentives to invest in evidence technology; (2) incentives to invest in care-type precautions; and (3) incentives to mitigate excessive activity...

Economic models of tort law evaluate the efficiency of liability rules in terms of care and activity levels. A liability regime is optimal when it creates incentives to maximize the value of risky activities at the net of accident and precaution costs. The allocation of primary and residual...

In negligence regimes, tort plaintiffs traditionally bear the burden of proving the negligence of their defendants. Several European legal systems adopted rules that have reversed this traditional evidentiary rule in certain categories of torts, creating a rebuttable presumption of negligence...

This is the second of two companion papers that discuss accidents caused by robots. In the first paper (Guerra et al., 2021), we presented the novel problems posed by robot accidents, and assessed the related legal approaches and institutional opportunities. In this paper, we build on the...

In robot torts, robots carry out activities that are partially controlled by a human operator. Several legal and economic scholars across the world have argued for the need to rethink legal remedies as we apply them to robot torts. Yet to date, there exists no general formulation of liability in...

This paper analyzes deterrence, settlement, and litigation spending under two alternative procedural regimes, i.e., the adversarial versus inquisitorial systems. We present a general litigation model with three sequential stages---care, settlement, and litigation stages---and we test the...

In litigation models, the parties' probability to succeed in a lawsuit hinge upon the merits of the parties' claims and their litigation efforts. In this paper we extend this framework to consider an important procedural aspect of the legal system: the standard of proof. We recast the...