We examine settings - such as litigation, labor relations, or arming and war - in which players first make non-contractible up-front investments to improve their bargaining position and gain advantage for possible future conflict. Bargaining is efficient ex post, but we show that a player may...

We exploit a controlled frameless laboratory experiment to study settlement negotiations and the plaintiff's decision to raise a lawsuit in case of an impasse. We find that greater variance in court outcomes increases the litigation rate and lowers the settlement rate. This latter finding goes...

The paper analyzes the effects of different litigation cost allocation rules, detection skill of judges (judicial errors), and the mode of enforcement of foreign judgments on the home bias in trade and sheds a new light on the so-called border-effect puzzle. In our model the border effect or...

Over a century ago, Oliver Wendell Holmes invited scholars to look at law through the lens of probability theory: ‘The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law'. But Holmes himself, and few others, have taken up this intriguing...

This article explores the selection of disputes for litigation in a setting with two-sided incomplete information and correlated signals. The models analyzed here suggest that Priest and Klein's conclusion that close cases are more likely to go to trial than extreme cases remains largely valid...

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 model litigation as a series of strategic contests. Specifically, building on the work of others, we model pre-trial litigation as a Colonel Blotto game, i.e. a game of allocative strategic mismatch in which the parties must allocate scarce time resources to a finite number of...

This paper studies experimentally the impact of the split-award statute, where the state takes a share of the plaintiff's punitive damage award, on litigation outcomes. Our findings indicate that dispute rates are significantly lower when bargaining is performed under the split-award...

This paper develops a new theory of possibly frivolous litigation by focusing on a plaintiff's options to unilaterally abandon a lawsuit. Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 41(a)(1)(i) and its various state law counterparts permit, under certain circumstances, a plaintiff to voluntarily dismiss her...

We consider models of pretrial negotiations where both costly voluntary disclosure and costly mandatory discovery are possible. When the uninformed party makes the final offer (the screening game), mandatory discovery will be utilized, if it is not very costly, but voluntary disclosure will not...