IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ucp/jlstud/doi10.1086-698883.html

Tailoring Negligence Standards to Accident Records

Author

Listed:
  • Alice Guerra
  • Tobias M. Hlobil

Abstract

The standard 1-period, unilateral care accident model assumes identical injurers and perfect information of an individual's risk type. However, these assumptions are unlikely to hold in real-world accident scenarios. This paper considers a 2-period, unilateral care accident model in which injurers differ by probabilities of accident (their risk types) and have incomplete information about their risk types. We find that courts should optimally examine an individual's accident history to accurately infer the risk type and adjust the due level of care accordingly. We show that tailoring due levels of care in the second period affects the definition of the due level of care in the first period. When judges have access to accident records but the risk type is hidden, they should relax the due level of care for first-time offenders to generate more information about an individual's risk type, which helps to establish more efficient differentiated standards in the subsequent period.

Suggested Citation

  • Alice Guerra & Tobias M. Hlobil, 2018. "Tailoring Negligence Standards to Accident Records," The Journal of Legal Studies, University of Chicago Press, vol. 47(2), pages 325-348.
    • Handle: RePEc:ucp:jlstud:doi:10.1086/698883
    DOI: 10.1086/698883
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/698883
    Download Restriction: Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.
    File URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/698883
    Download Restriction: Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1086/698883?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or

    for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Guerra Alice & Parisi Francesco, 2024. "Are Individual Care Investments Affected by Past Accident Experiences?," Review of Law & Economics, De Gruyter, vol. 20(2), pages 225-266.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • K10 - Law and Economics - - Basic Areas of Law - - - General (Constitutional Law)
    • K13 - Law and Economics - - Basic Areas of Law - - - Tort Law and Product Liability; Forensic Economics

    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:ucp:jlstud:doi:10.1086/698883. 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: Journals Division (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/JLS .

    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.