The present paper provides an economic analysis of vicarious liability that takes information rents and monitoring costs to be borne by the principal explicitly into account. In the presence of information rents or if the principal is wealth constrained herself, vicarious liability need not...

To explore damage rules’ deterrent effect, we use a public good experiment to tailor allowable punishment to rules used in actual civil litigation. The experimental treatments are analogous to: (1) damages limited to harm to an individual litigant, (2) damages limited to harm to a group...

This paper assesses the widely held belief that damages for pain and suffering are random or arbitrary. We empirically analyze the differential impact of a plaintiff's personal characteristics, pain-specific circumstances and a lawsuit's procedural features on such payments. Relying on a dataset...

This article assesses predictors of payouts and non-economic damages in medical malpractice cases decided by the Spanish Supreme Court from 2006 until 2010. Medical malpractice cases can be judged in administrative or civil courts, and this distinction heavily relies on the type of hospital...

Limited liability may result in inefficient accident prevention, because a relevant portion of the expected harm is externalized on victims. This paper shows that under some restrictive conditions further limiting liability by means of a liability cap can improve caretaking.

Should loss of earnings be compensated? The established law and economics wisdom considers pure economic loss as a transfer of wealth from the victim to a third party, whose earnings increase as a consequence of the accident. Such transfers do not amount to a social loss and, hence, should not...

Diese Arbeit beinhaltet eine Untersuchung der Effekte einer einheitlichen Anwendung der Gefährdungshaftung als Grundprinzip der Produkthaftung bei länderübergreifendem Handel. Der Schwerpunkt der Analyse basiert auf einem Rahmen unvollkommenen Wettbewerbs bei heterogenen Konsumenten und...

Attorneys elected to the US House of Representatives and to US state legislatures are systematically less likely to vote in favor of tort reforms that restrict tort litigation, but more likely to support bills that extend tort law. This finding is based on the analysis of 54 votes at the federal...

We analyze the pricing of pain and suffering and, in particular, whether the corresponding compensations are affected by a court’s approach to value such damages. For this purpose, we use data on pain and suffering verdicts in Austria, where courts are generally free to choose between a per...

The German Environmental Liability Law (ELL) of 1991 has introduced far-reaching civil liability for environmental damages with the aim to increase firms? efforts to prevent accidents. Previous studies find poor evidence that this goal has actually been achieved. One and a half decades after the...