In rent-seeking contests, players are seldom identical to one another. In this chapter, we examine the rent-seeking literature that explores the effects of specific forms of asymmetry between contestants. We consider Tullock’s rent-seeking contests involving two players who differ in strength...

Many industrial accidents result in losses (material damages or bodily injury) that cannot be perfectly compensated by a monetary payment, nor be perfectly insured. Moreover, often injurers control ex ante the magnitude rather than the probability of accidents. We study the characteristics of...

The present paper proposes to interpret the differences in legal systems between common-law and civil- law nations as arising from the importance given to adjudication in comparison with statute laws. It focuses on the relative costs of legal change by adjudication (case law development) when...

In this paper, we study the dynamics of legal convergence and the comparison between the different instruments of legal convergence based on cooperative strategies (i.e., harmonization and unification) or not. To study these questions we use a model with two nation-states which is inspired in...

This paper elaborates on a basic model of mass tort litigation, highlighting the existence of positive informational externalities a¤orded 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...

For contemporary legal theory, law is essentially an interpretative and hermeneutics practice (Ackerman (1991), Horwitz (1992)). A straightforward consequence is that legal disputes between parties are motivated by their divergent interpretations regarding what the law says on their case. This...