Mutually beneficial agreements might fail if the parties fear contractual opportunism. Litigation is supposed to be a remedy, but gives scope for another kind of opportunistic behavior which we call litigational opportunism: Even knowing that the opponent has fulfilled his obligations, a party...

Mutually beneficial agreements might fail if the parties fear contractual opportunism. Litigation is supposed to prevent this, but still leaves room for litigational opportunism: Even knowing that the opponent has fulfilled his obligations, a party might bring suit. We show that with positive...

The decision making of judges is prone to error and misapprehension. Consequently, the prevailing literature ties the economic function of courts to dispute resolution and minimization of rule making costs. In contrast to previous research, this analysis applies a contract theoretic perspective...

Court delays are a frequent concern, yet what explains court case duration remains incompletely understood. We study the time to court case resolution by drawing on a detailed case-level dataset of civil suits filed at a major Belgian court. We utilize the competing risks regression framework to...

The decision to request a preliminary injunction—a court order that bans a party from certain actions until their lawfulness are ascertained in a final court ruling at trial—is an important litigation instrument in many areas of the law including antitrust, copyright, patents, trademarks,...

The well-known subprime mortgage crisis, which began to manifest in early 2007, since when the effects of the speculative bubble begin to become evident from the increase in default rates in residential mortgages, has triggered a global crisis that has pushed various legislations over time to...

Judges become ambitious decision makers when they face appellate review. This paper applies a contract theoretic perspective to the behavior of self-interested trial judges in a twolevel court system and analyzes the consequences for contracting in 'the shadow of' the court. Confronted with the...

This paper discusses the literature on the enforcement of incomplete contracts. It compares legal enforcement to enforcement via relationships and reputations. A number of mechanisms, such as the repeat purchase mechanism (Klein and Leffler (1981)) and efficiency wages (Shapiro and Stiglitz...