This paper extends the analysis of insurance contracts design to the case of "low probability events", when there is a probability mass on the event "no accident-zero loss". The optimality of the deductible clause is discussed both at the theoretical and empirical levels.

Parties engaged in a litigation generally enter the discovery process with different informations regarding their case and/or an unequal endowment in terms of skill and ability to produce evidence and predict the outcome of a trial. Hence, they have to bear different legal costs to assess the...

There is evidence that asymmetric information does exist between litigants: not in a way supporting Bebchuk (1984)’s assumption that defendants’ degree of fault is private information, but more likely as a result of parties’ predictive capacity about the outcome at trial (Osborne, 1999)....

This paper studies the influence of bankruptcy law (depending on whether the law is pro-lenders or pro-borrowers) on the borrowers propensity to demand the renegotiation of their debt, when there exist an asymmetrical information between lenders and borrowers. In the tradition of Law &...

Many accidents result in losses that cannot be perfectly compensated by a monetary payment. Moreover, often injurers control the magnitude rather than the probability of accidents. We study the characteristics of optimal levels of care and distribution of risk under these circumstances and show...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the optimal enforcement of the penal code when criminals invest in a specific class of avoidance activities termed dissembling activities (i.e. self-protection efforts undertaken by criminals to hedge their illegal gains in case of detection and...

This paper revisits the issue of law enforcement and the design of monetary sanctions when the public law enforcer's incentives depart from those of a benevolent authority, which is the most frequent assumption made in the literature on crime deterrence. We first consider the case an elected...

In this paper, we modelize a criminal organization as an agency where the Principal and the Agent have different sensibilities towards the risk of arrestation and punishment, and at the same time have different skills with respect to general organization tasks, crime realization or detection...

In rent-seeking contests, players are seldom identical to one another. In this chapter, we examine the rent-seeking literature that explores the effects of specific forms of asymmetry between contestants. We consider Tullock’s rent-seeking contests involving two players who differ in strength...

In this paper, we explore the mechanisms employed by the French judges while discharging personal debts in exchange for liquidation of debtors' assets. Our empirical results highlight the determinants of judicial selection between debtors whose debts are wiped out and those who have to reimburse...