When firms collude and charge supra-competitive prices, consumers can bring antitrust lawsuits against the firms. When the litigation cost is low, firms accept the cost as just another cost of doing business, whereas when the cost is high, the firms lower the price to deter litigation. Class...

We formally analyze the effects of legal presumptions in patent litigation. We set up a novel contest model to study litigation outcomes, judgement errors, and resource dissipation under three alternative presumption criteria: a presumption that the patent is valid; a presumption that the patent...

This article translates and extends Becker (1968) from public law enforcement to private litigation by examining optimal legal system design in a model with private suits, signals of case strength, court error, and two types of primary behavior: harmful acts that may be deterred and benign acts...

The conduct of adjudication is often influenced by motions--requests made by litigants to modify the course of adjudication. The question studied in this article is why adjudication is designed so as to permit the use of motions. The answer developed is that litigants will naturally know a great...