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 paper explores the impact of product liability on vertical product differentiation when product safety is perfectly observable. In a two-stage competition, duopolistic firms are subject to strict liability and segment the market such that a low-safety product is marketed at a low price to...

This paper explores the impact of product liability on vertical product differentiation when product safety is perfectly observable. In a two-stage competition, duopolistic firms are subject to strict liability and segment the market such that a low-safety product is marketed at a low price to...

This is a survey of legal liability for accidents. Three general aspects of accident liability are addressed. The first is the effect of liability on incentives, both whether to engage in activities (for instance, whether to drive) and how much care to exercise (at what speed to travel) to...

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...