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Trial and settlement negotiations between asymmetrically skilled parties

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Author Info
Chopard, Bertrand
Cortade, Thomas
Langlais, Eric

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Abstract

Parties engaged in a litigation generally enter the discovery process with different informations regarding their case and/or an unequal endowment in terms of skill and ability to produce evidence and predict the outcome of a trial. Hence, they have to bear different legal costs to assess the (equilibrium) plaintiff's win rate. The paper analyses pretrial negotiations and revisits the selection hypothesis in the case where these legal expenditures are private information. This assumption is consistent with empirical evidence (Osborne, 1999). Two alternative situations are investigated, depending on whether there exists a unilateral or a bilateral informational asymmetry.\ Our general result is that efficient pretrial negotiations select cases with the smallest legal expenditures as those going to trial, while cases with largest costs prefer to settle. Under the one-sided asymmetric information assumption, we find that the American rule yields more trials and higher aggregate legal expenditures than the French and British rules. The two-sided case leads to a higher rate of trials, but in contrast provides less clear-cut predictions regarding the influence of fee-shifting.

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File URL: http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/8995/
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Paper provided by University Library of Munich, Germany in its series MPRA Paper with number 8995.

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Date of creation: 06 Jun 2008
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Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:8995

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Related research
Keywords: litigation unilateral and bilateral asymmetric information legal expenditures

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
D0 - Microeconomics - - General
K0 - Law and Economics - - General
D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information
K41 - Law and Economics - - Legal Procedure, the Legal System, and Illegal Behavior - - - Litigation Process

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  20. Jennifer F. Reinganum & Louise L. Wilde, 1986. "Settlement, Litigation, and the Allocation of Litigation Costs," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 17(4), pages 557-566, Winter. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  24. Waldfogel, Joel, 1995. "The Selection Hypothesis and the Relationship between Trial and Plaintiff Victory," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 103(2), pages 229-60, April. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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