IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/amlawe/v21y2019i1p110-149..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Informational Negligence Law

Author

Listed:
  • Alon Cohen
  • Avraham Tabbach

Abstract

This article offers an analysis of negligence law in an environment with asymmetric information and costly signaling. We consider three possible variations of the negligence doctrine, based on its two elements—the standard of care and damages. We find that accounting for signaling costs affects the social desirability of the negligence rule. In a nontrivial number of cases, the social costs are lowest under the variation of the negligence regime in which the standard of care is the same for all types of victims but damages vary according to the victim’s type. This analysis provides an efficiency-based justification for the use of negligence doctrine in bodily injuries and wrongful death cases, a practice that has been considered one of the greatest “misalignment puzzles” in negligence law.

Suggested Citation

  • Alon Cohen & Avraham Tabbach, 2019. "Informational Negligence Law," American Law and Economics Review, American Law and Economics Association, vol. 21(1), pages 110-149.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:amlawe:v:21:y:2019:i:1:p:110-149.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/aler/ahz002
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:amlawe:v:21:y:2019:i:1:p:110-149.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/aler .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.