Mass harm situations caused by corporate misbehaviour (e.g. anticompetitive practices, misleading market information), defective products, harmful pharmaceuticals, accidents or environmental disasters nowadays tend to multiply and create new challenges not only for legal actors, but also for...

In our previous work (Guerra-Pujol, 2011), we presented a general Bayesian model of the litigation process and concluded that "regardless of the operative rules of procedure and substantive legal doctrine, litigation outcomes [are] a highly reliable indicator of a defendant's [actual] guilt." By...

This paper examines the law and economics of third-party financed litigation. I explore the conditions under which a system of third-party financiers and litigators can enhance social welfare, and the conditions under which it is likely to reduce social welfare. Among the applications I consider...

This chapter deals with the enforceability of U.S. opt-out class actions in continental Europe, with special attention to Italy, France and Spain. The study sets out by a thorough analysis of U.S. precedents concerning the availability of extra-compensatory damages in complex litigation (among...

We propose a model of patent litigation where a potential competitor - the Entrant - can challenge a patent with and without entering the market before a final court decision. We study the settings (the Financing Space) where market entrance is used to finance patent litigation, i.e. where the...

The distribution of blockbuster punitive damages awards has fat tails similar to the distributions of losses from natural disasters. Extremely large awards occur more often and are more difficult to predict than if blockbuster awards were distributed normally. The size and predictability of...