The paper shows that Legal Cost Insurance (LCI) is a device to enhance potential litigants? bargaining position rather than to re-allocate risk. Being insured decreases the cost an insured party has to bear if settlement negotiations fail and the case goes to trial. This shifts the threat...

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the determinants of patent litigation in Germany, based on information from suits filed during the period from 1993 to 1995 at two of the three most important district courts. A control group was formed by selecting a random sample from the population...

The paper provides a comprehensive survey of the economics behind the fight against hard core cartels. Differentiating between four subsequent stages - characterisation, welfare effects, enforcement and evaluation - the paper pays particular attention to cartel detection methods, the derivation...

A simple auction-theoretic framework is used to examine symmetric litigation environments where the legal ownership of a disputed asset is unknown to the court. The court observes only the quality of the case presented by each party, and awards the asset to the party presenting the best case....

Legal institutions play an important role in affecting delay in settlement. But little research has investigated the institutional causes of delay. The empirical literature is ambiguous regarding the impact of trial-court delay on settlement delay. I analyze the timing of bargaining and the...

Litigation seems to be a Pareto-ineffcient outcome of pretrial bargaining; however, this paper shows that litigation can be the outcome of rational behavior by a litigant and her attorney. If the attorney has more information than his client concerning the characteristics of the lawsuit, the...

There have long been claims that compensations for noneconomic damages are random because tort law does not provide clear guidance regarding these compensations. I investigate, in both settled and tried medical malpractice cases, whether noneconomic damage payments are arbitrary and what...

Post-grant validity challenges at patent offices rely on the private initiative of third parties to correct mistakes made by patent offices. We hypothesize that incentives to bring post-grant validity challenges are reduced when many firms benefit from revocation of a patent and when firms are...

The information that is created and disseminated through the litigation process can have social value. When economic agents learn about risks, they can fine-tune their future behaviors to mitigate these risks. Specifically, suppose that an injured plaintiff sues a defendant for damages sustained...

This paper examines the strategic effects of case preparation in litigation. Specifically, it shows how the pretrial efforts incurred by one party may alter its adversary's incentives to settle. We build a sequential game with one-sided asymmetric information where the informed party first...