In this paper, we analyze the impact of past accident experiences on individual care choices. By relying on standard economic theory, we posit three hypotheses: (1) individual choice of efficient care; (2) no accident-history effect; (3) no role-reversal effects. We test these three hypotheses...

This paper is about the incentive effects of legal presumptions. We analyze three interrelated effects of legal presumptions in a tort setting: (1) incentives to invest in evidence technology; (2) incentives to invest in care-type precautions; and (3) incentives to mitigate excessive activity...

Economic models of tort law evaluate the efficiency of liability rules in terms of care and activity levels. A liability regime is optimal when it creates incentives to maximize the value of risky activities at the net of accident and precaution costs. The allocation of primary and residual...

In negligence regimes, tort plaintiffs traditionally bear the burden of proving the negligence of their defendants. Several European legal systems adopted rules that have reversed this traditional evidentiary rule in certain categories of torts, creating a rebuttable presumption of negligence...

This is the second of two companion papers that discuss accidents caused by robots. In the first paper (Guerra et al., 2021), we presented the novel problems posed by robot accidents, and assessed the related legal approaches and institutional opportunities. In this paper, we build on the...

In robot torts, robots carry out activities that are partially controlled by a human operator. Several legal and economic scholars across the world have argued for the need to rethink legal remedies as we apply them to robot torts. Yet to date, there exists no general formulation of liability in...

Conventional theories of competition classify contests as being either ‘‘productive,' when the competitive efforts generate a surplus for society, or ‘‘unproductive,' when competition generates no social surplus and merely distributes already existing resources. These two discrete...

Juries are a fundamental element of the criminal justice system. In this article, we model jury decision making as a function of two institutional variables: jury size and voting requirement. We expose the critical interdependence of these two elements in minimizing the probabilities of wrongful...