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...

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...

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...

As Alicke and Govorun (2005, p. 85) observed, “most people are average, but few people believe it.” Optimism and other forms of inflated perception of the self lead parties to exercise suboptimal precautions when undertaking risky activities and often undermine the incentive effects of tort...

In this paper, we illustrate how different behavioral problems can be incorporated into the standard economic model of tort law. Through this exercise, we develop a modeling language that can be utilized by law and economic scholars when considering the effect of behavioral biases and cognitive...