Parties often exchange promises of future performance with one another. Legal systems frame and regulate contracts involving the exchange of bilateral promises of future performance differently from one another. Two conceptual and practical questions often arise in these bilateral situations....

In this paper, we illustrate how different behavioral problems can be incorporated into the standard economic model of tort law. Through this exercise, we develop a modeling language that can be utilized by law and economic scholars when considering the effect of behavioral biases and cognitive...

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...

The analysis of tort law is one of the most well-developed applications of economic methodology in the study of law. In this essay, we provide an overview of the economic approach to tort law, analyzing the effects of liability rules on care incentives. We catalogue a variety of possible tort...