We develop a model of individual prosecutors (and teams of prosecutors) and show how, in equilibrium, team-formation can lead to increased incentives to suppress evidence (relative to those faced by a lone prosecutor). Our model assumes that each individual prosecutor is characterized by a...

This chapter provides a survey of much of the recent theoretical analysis of products liability. We start by describing an idealized model and providing the specific economic assumptions which underpin it. Later sections examine the effects of relaxing these assumptions, which has been the focus...

We provide a simple incomplete-information model wherein an initially uninformed plaintiff makes a menu of settlement demands (one of which involves confidentiality) of the informed defendant. The defendant is informed about both his culpability in the harm suffered by the current plaintiff and...

We consider the formation and legal protection of secret agreements by analyzing a negotiated settlement between a harmed plaintiff and a culpable defendant that seeks to disenfranchise a second harmed plaintiff by keeping the existence (and details) of the instant settlement secret. This is...

This paper uses axiomatic and Bayesian methods to model information and decisions in a hierarchical judicial system. We use a set of axioms to summarize decision-making at the trial level, where the axioms represent the desirable properties of judicial decisions that rules of evidence,...

We develop and explore a new model of the economics of privacy. Previous work has focused on privacy of type, wherein an agent privately knows an immutable characteristic. We consider privacy of action, wherein privacy means that an agent's choice of action is unobservable to others. To show how...