In an influential paper, Polinsky and Che propose that litigation can be made a more cost-effective tool for setting primary activity incentives (such as for product safety or promissory performance) by reducing plaintiffs’ recovery while simultaneously raising defendants’ damages....

The question of which party should bear the burden of proof on a given factual issue remains one of the most important and problematic in evidence and procedure. This paper approaches the question from a relatively unstudied perspective, viewing litigation as a device for influencing...

In a 1991 paper, Polinsky and Che argue that lowering plaintiffs’ recovery and raising defendants’ damages can deliver the same level of deterrence with fewer filed suits. A subsequent paper by Kahan and Tuckman provisionally corroborates Polinsky and Che’s analysis in an extended model...

Most law and economic analysis evaluates legal rules solely on basis of the efficiency criterion, the justification being that distributive goals are best accomplished through the tax code. Within the same framework used to formalize this justification, this paper shows that (1) even in the...