Concerned about evidence distortion arising from litigants' strong incentive to misrepresent information to fact-finders, legal scholars and commentators have long suggested that the court appoint its own advisor for a neutral piece of information about the dispute. This paper studies the...

Following its landmark decisions in Bell Atlantic v. Twombly and Ashcroft v. Iqbal, the Supreme Court allows federal judges to dismiss cases when the plaintiff's allegations are conclusory or implausible, thereby increasing the judges' discretionary power in pleading stages of litigation. Using...

The last few decades have seen a dramatic shift in the admissibility of expert testimony in American courtrooms from a laissez-faire approach to a strict standard for admissibility, often called the Daubert test. The implicit rationale behind such a stringent standard for admissibility is the...

In tort litigation, delayed settlement or impasse imposes high costs on the parties and society. Litigation institutions might influence social welfare by affecting the likelihood of out-of-court settlement and the potential injurers' investment in product safety. An appropriate design of...

This paper theoretically compares the British and American fee-shifting rules in their influences on the behavior of the litigants and the outcomes of litigation. We build up a comprehensive litigation model with asymmetric information and agency costs, and solve for the equilibria under both...

This paper theoretically compares the British and American fee-shifting rules in their influences on the behavior of the litigants and the outcomes of litigation. We build up a comprehensive litigation model with asymmetric information and agency costs, and solve for the equilibria under both...

We study the effect of alternative fee shifting rules on the probability of settlement when the defendant's liability is under dispute. Using a mechanism design approach we demonstrate that the probability of settlement is maximized by a particular Pleadings mechanism: Both parties are given the...

We develop a model of pretrial bargaining under asymmetric information where both the plaintiff and the defendant’s cost of proceeding to trial is an increasing function of the judgment at trial. This contrasts with the standard assumption that costs at trial are a constant. As a result of...

A new explanation for the failure of plea bargaining is provided. It is shown that a retention agent (i.e. median voter) can use convictions at trial as a signal of the quality of a prosecutor. This encourages a public prosecutor to take cases to trial even when both social welfare and her...

We consider a model of litigation in which some defendants have insufficient assets to pay a judgment at trial. Because the defendant's assets are not observable, this serves as a source of asymmetric information which leads to trials in the equilibrium of the model. Unlike many other types of...