When accidents result in noncompensable losses, a monetary payment is not enough to compensate the victim. We study the characteristics of optimal levels of care and distribution of risk under these circumstances and show that care depends on the aggregate wealth of society but does not depend...

The paper surveys the main criticisms against the economics of crime à la Becker (JPE, 1968). Some of them (external criticisms) are more focused on methological issues, and are mainly addressed by lawyers. Others (internal criticisms) aim at challenging the central result, according to which...

This note focuses on the design of prevention programmes and the role of tort law regarding the control of risky activities, associated with unknown or imperfectly known risks, such as innovation or (long term) environmental damages. Together with the existence of perception bias on the side of...

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 predict the outcome at trial. This results in different legal costs to assess the plaintiff's win rate. The paper...

This paper elaborates on a basic model of mass tort litigation, highlighting the existence of positive informational externalities afforded by the discovery process (as a general technology of production of evidences) in order to study when a class action is formed, or when a sequence of...

In this paper, we deal with the basic two-period consumption saving problem where the first and second period consumption utility, respectively v is assumed to be concave as usually. Considering the usual assumption of identify of u and v, we show that prudence is fully characterized by the...

For psychologists, bounded rationality reflects the presence of cognitive dissonance and/or inconsistency, revealing that people use heuristics (Tversky, and Kahneman 1974) rather than sophisticated processes for the assessment of their beliefs. Recent research analyzing litigations and pretrial...

In this paper, the unilateral divorce law is modelled through the combination of exclusive rights on the marriage dissolution and alternative compensation rules benefiting to the parent having custody of the children. Their influence are studied both in the short run (probability and efficiency...

We study the characteristics of optimal levels of care and distribution of risk in a extended unilateral accident model, where 1/ parties are Rank Dependant Expected Utility maximizers, which allows us to capture two important behavioral characteristics in risk, both pessimism (probability...