We conduct an experiment to analyze the conditions under which individuals' propensity to engage in bribery and tolerance towards corrupt actors differ across gender. We manipulate the key bribery dimensions — the benefits to corrupt actors and the negative externality caused to other people....

Technological advances have changed our ability to acquire and save information, with far-reaching implications in legal discovery and evidence. In this paper, we analyze the interrelated effect of legal presumptions and discovery rules in incentivizing the voluntary adoption of private evidence...

This paper is about the incentive effects of legal presumptions. We analyze three interrelated effects of legal presumptions in a tort setting: (1) incentives to invest in evidence technology; (2) incentives to invest in care-type precautions; and (3) incentives to mitigate excessive activity...

Economic models of tort law evaluate the efficiency of liability rules in terms of care and activity levels. A liability regime is optimal when it creates incentives to maximize the value of risky activities at the net of accident and precaution costs. The allocation of primary and residual...

In negligence regimes, tort plaintiffs traditionally bear the burden of proving the negligence of their defendants. Several European legal systems adopted rules that have reversed this traditional evidentiary rule in certain categories of torts, creating a rebuttable presumption of negligence...

In litigation models, the parties' probability to succeed in a lawsuit hinge upon the merits of the parties' claims and their litigation efforts. In this paper we extend this framework to consider an important procedural aspect of the legal system: the standard of proof. We recast the...

Italy is among the countries with the highest litigation rate and those with the highest duration of trials. This paper shows that judge turnover contributes negatively to delays in Italian courts and outlines possible policies for improvement. In Italy, judges can voluntarily move from one...

Conventional theories of competition classify contests as being either ‘‘productive,' when the competitive efforts generate a surplus for society, or ‘‘unproductive,' when competition generates no social surplus and merely distributes already existing resources. These two discrete...

Tort models predict a symmetry in the behavior of tortfeasors and victims when respectively faced by strict liability and no liability. Tort scholars have widely relied upon this prediction. Yet, the prediction is based on a theoretical economic model that has not yet been empirically tested....