Risky products cause two types of costs for society; the accident costs and the insurance costs. Liability rules allocate these costs between the parties involved. The expansion in the scope of product liability over the past thirty years has increased the cost of third-party liability insurance. However, the economic analysis of product liability rules has, generally, focused on only the accident costs. Some recent works have suggested that there is a strict trade-off involved when it comes to minimizing the accident costs and the insurance costs. In this paper, we have extended the economic analysis by considering both types of costs. An efficiency characterization of product liability rules has been provided by assuming that consumers lack in the knowledge about the risk. We have shown that even when consumers misperceive the product risk, it possible to achieve efficiency with respect to the insurance costs as well as the care levels.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Centre for Development Economics, Delhi School of Economics in its series Working papers with number
164.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Did you know? Each page is provided with a technical contact, in case something is not right with the supplied information. See under "publisher info".