In this Article, we focus on an important problem involving mass-accident cases that was highlighted by the Deepwater Horizon litigation: overuse of courts to enforce contribution claims. These claims seek to shift incurred or expected liability and damages between the business and governmental...

This entry for the forthcoming The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics (Second Edition) surveys the economic analysis of five primary fields of law: property law; liability for accidents; contract law; litigation; and public enforcement and criminal law. It also briefly considers some...

This chapter presents a strategic model of incentives for care and litigation under asymmetric information and self-serving bias, and studies the effects of damage caps. Our main findings are as follows. First, our results suggest that the defendant's bias decreases his expenditures on accident...

Exemplary damages are damages awarded in a court case which go beyond compensation to the victim. Not all nations allow courts to award exemplary damages and those nations which do not, generally will not uphold rulings of this nature. Exemplary damages are explicitly intended as punishment to...

This article translates and extends Becker (1968) from public law enforcement to private litigation by examining optimal legal system design in a model with private suits, signals of case strength, court error, and two types of primary behavior: harmful acts that may be deterred and benign acts...

This article reports the results of a study that uses social network analysis to compare the persuasiveness of legal precedents in the diffusion of the strict liability rule for manufacturing defects. This new study tests which legal precedents were most influential and also whether certain...

This is a survey of legal liability for accidents. Three general aspects of accident liability are addressed. The first is the effect of liability on incentives, both whether to engage in activities (for instance, whether to drive) and how much care to exercise (at what speed to travel) to...