This is a survey of legal liability for accidents. Three general aspects of accident liability are addressed. The first is the effect of liability on incentives, both whether to engage in activities (for instance, whether to drive) and how much care to exercise (at what speed to travel) to...

We contrast alternative liability rules for social control of product risks when heterogeneous consumers considering purchasing a durable good due to cognitive errors and biases mispredict future product benefits and, thus, the extent of future product usage. Since the expected consumer harm...

In this paper, we examine the link between innovative activity on the part of firms, the competitive pressure to introduce innovations and optimal damages awards. While innovative activity brings forth valuable new products for consumers, competitive pressure in the ensuing innovation race...

This paper establishes that tort damages multipliers higher than one can be an instrument to induce imperfectly competitive producers to invest in product safety at socially optimal levels. In their selection of product safety levels, producers seek to maximize profits, neglecting the fact that...

This paper investigates cases in which harms are statistically correlated. When parties are risk averse, correlation plays an important role in the choice between liability rules. Specifically, positively correlated harms favor a liability rule that spreads the risk over a multitude of parties,...

Successor products liability - cases where an injured plaintiff sues a successor business for a defective product sold by a predecessor business - is a doctrine still under development in the courts, and the doctrine's unsettled nature seems destined to continue over the next several years....

Twenty-five years have passed since courts first adopted market share liability, a theory under which a plaintiff unable to identify the manufacturer of the product that caused his injury can recover on a proportional basis from each manufacturer that might have made the product. Courts have...