While it is typically taken for granted that settlement of lawsuits increases social welfare, this paper shows that settlement can lower welfare. If the defendant has private information about the harm from his action both at the time of the action and the time of settlement bargaining, then...

Previous papers by Eric B. Rasmusen, J. Mark Ramseyer, and John S. Wiley, Jr. (1991) and Ilya R. Segal and Michael D. Whinston (2000) argue that exclusive contracts can inefficiently deter entry in the presence of scale economies and multiple buyers. We first show that these results no longer...