We describe how product liability interacts with regulatory product approval in influencing a firm's incentives to acquire information about product risk, using a very parsimonious model. The firm may have insufficient information acquisition incentives when it is not fully liable for the harm...

This is a survey of economic analysis of law, that is, of the emerging field under which the standard tools of microeconomics are employed to identify the effects of legal rules and their social desirability. Five basic subject areas are covered. The first is legal liability for harm. Here we...

The central hypothesis of this article is that liability regulation can foster firms' incentives to study the (potential) dangers of their products. We discuss alternative views and develop a formal model to analyze a firm's incentive structure under the application of hindsight liability. We...