In an economic perspective, punitive damages and class actions can be viewed as sharing a common economic function – creating optimal deterrence. Building on Parisi and Cenini (2010), we study the effect of alternative procedural regimes on the effectiveness of punitive damages and class...

Litigation aims at resolving conflicts. In this chapter we survey the law and economics literature on litigation to illustrate the scope of application of rent-seeking models and their analytical power in the study of law and procedural issues of litigation, including applications in adversarial...

In litigation models, the parties' probability to succeed in a lawsuit hinge upon the merits of the parties' claims and their litigation efforts. In this paper we extend this framework to consider an important procedural aspect of the legal system: the standard of proof. We recast the...

In this paper we build upon existing literature on the evolution of the common law. We consider a model of legal evolution in which judges have varying ideologies and propensities to extend the domain of legal remedies and causes of action. Parties have symmetric stakes and are rational....

In the past couple of decades, scholars have predominantly employed rent-seeking models to analyze litigation problems. In this paper, we build on the existing literature to show how alternative fee-shifting arrangements (i.e., the American rule and modified English rule) affect parties'...