Despite the advances in New Institutional Economics about the economic consequences of institutions and legal rules, up to now we have only limited knowledge about the mechanisms of the evolution of law. By combining the main ideas of Evolutionary Economics and New Institutional Economics this...

For joint liability problems concerning tort law, a legal compensation scheme may be based on lower and upper bounds of compensation for injury and on case-system consistency. Introducing several properties inspired from this observation, we analyze compensation schemes axiomatically under the...

German Abstract: Dieser Beitrag zeigt, wie Gerichte und Anwälte mittels "Event Study"-Gutachten im Kontext des Kapitalmarkts die Kausalität zwischen einer Pflichtverletzung und einer Schädigung wesentlich zuverlässiger feststellen können, als dies in der bisherigen Rechtspraxis der Fall...

We compare the performance of liability rules for managing environmental disasters when third parties are harmed and cannot always be compensated. A firm can invest in safety to reduce the likelihood of accidents. The firm's investment is unobservable to authorities. Externality and asymmetric...

Limited liability may result in inefficient accident prevention, because a relevant portion of the expected harm is externalized on victims. This paper shows that under some restrictive conditions further limiting liability by means of a liability cap can improve caretaking.

Should loss of earnings be compensated? The established law and economics wisdom considers pure economic loss as a transfer of wealth from the victim to a third party, whose earnings increase as a consequence of the accident. Such transfers do not amount to a social loss and, hence, should not...

We contrast alternative liability rules for social control of product risks when heterogeneous consumers considering purchasing a durable good due to cognitive errors and biases mispredict future product benefits and, thus, the extent of future product usage. Since the expected consumer harm...

This paper addresses the role of product liability for the emergence and development of smart products such as autonomous vehicles (AVs). We analyze how the liability regime affects innovative activities, as well as the timing of market introduction and market penetration of such smart products....

This paper develops an original mean-variance model able to capture the disposition of the parties towards both standard risk and ambiguity. Ambiguity arises when the causal link between conduct and harm is not univocal, as is frequently the case with toxic torts. Risk aversion and ambiguity...

This paper investigates cases in which harms are statistically correlated. When parties are risk averse, correlation plays an important role in the choice between liability rules. Specifically, positively correlated harms favor a liability rule that spreads the risk over a multitude of parties,...