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...

We consider a model of crime with rational Bayesian Jurors. We find that if jurors are not perfectly informed, even when there is no limit to the size of the punishment that can be imposed, it is not possible to deter all crime. There is a finite lower bound on the crime rate which results from...

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...

When the government bargains with a private firm, the firm cares about only its own profits, but the firm's profits may also enter into the government's utility function. As a result, the government will not bargain as aggressively for a low price. This can lead the government to "over pay" for...

Polinsky and Rubinfeld (2003) propose a novel system for eliminating the conflict of interest between lawyers and clients over how hard the lawyer should work on a given case. In their analysis of the system, however, Polinsky and Rubinfeld implicitly assume that the lawyer's marginal cost of...

We introduce discovery into a model of settlement and negative expected value (NEV) suits under asymmetric information. The option to conduct discovery has several important effects. First, because discovery is cheaper than litigation, it reduces the defendant's incentive to settle under...

The Fifth Amendment guarantees criminal defendants the right to silence, blocking the court from drawing adverse inferences from the defendant's silence. This article investigates the conditions under which extending such protection to civil defendants might increase (or decrease) social...

In this article, we ask the basic question: Is it necessarily the case that allowing or promoting settlement of lawsuits enhances social welfare? Our answer is not necessarily; there are circumstances where actually prohibiting settlement generates more social welfare than allowing it....

Admati and Perry (1987) derive the equilibrium in a bargaining game between a seller and buyer when the buyer's valuation is private information. They show that, for some parameter values, trade occurs at the Rubinstein (1982) prices given the buyer's true valuation (pl if the buyer has a low...