This paper elaborates on a basic model of mass tort litigation, highlighting the existence of positive informational externalities afforded by the discovery process (as a general technology of production of evidences) in order to study when a class action is formed, or when a sequence of...

Most international jurisdictions have sought to broaden their definition of a trade mark following the Qualitex v Jacobson Products (Qualitex Case)2. In Australia, the Trade Marks Act (Cth) 1995 was introduced to recognise that colors, scents, shapes and sounds could be registered as a trade...

This paper examines the positions of Coase and Pigou in regard to the problem of external effects (externalities). Assessing their two most important works, it appears that Coase has a more relevant preference for an evaluation of total efficiency, while Pigou, with some exceptions, is convinced...

The present paper provides an economic analysis of vicarious liability that takes information rents and monitoring costs to be borne by the principal explicitly into account. In the presence of information rents or if the principal is wealth constrained herself, vicarious liability need not...

In this paper, we modelize a criminal organization as an agency where the Principal and the Agent have different sensibilities towards the risk of arrestation and punishment, and at the same time have different skills with respect to general organization tasks, crime realization or detection...

When several plaintiffs file individually a lawsuit against the same tortfeasor, the resolution of the various cases through repeated trials produces positive informational externalities, which benefit to the later plaintiffs (since there exist precedents, jurisprudence...). Thus, the first...

Car owners are liable for property damage inflicted on other motorists. In most countries such liability must be insured by law. That law may favor expensive or heavy vehicles, prone to suffer or inflict large losses. This paper explores links between liability rules and vehicle choice. It...

For psychologists, bounded rationality reflects the presence of cognitive dissonance and/or inconsistency, revealing that people use heuristics (Tversky and Kahneman (1974)) rather than sophisticated processes for the assessment of their beliefs. Recent research analyzing litigations and...

This paper deals with legal damages if losses of chances are at stake. In response to disparate ad hoc rules that have emerged from legal practice in Europe, the present paper proposes a unifying principle to handle such cases. Quite generally, the purpose of a damages award is to compensate the...

The legal notion of damages requires to compare the actual value of the creditor’s assets with the hypothetical value that would have prevailed if the debtor had met his obligation. Moreover, values and causation may be uncertain. If nature’s contribution is modelled as a random...