Laws and Norms: Experimental Evidence with Liability Rules

Bruno Deffains (), Romain Espinosa and Claude Fluet
Additional contact information
Bruno Deffains: CRED - Centre de Recherche en Economie et Droit - UP2 - Université Panthéon-Assas

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: We conduct an experiment where participants choose between actions that provide private benefits but may also impose losses on others. Three legal environments are compared: no law, strict liability for harm caused to third parties, and an efficiently designed negligence rule where damages are paid only when the harmful action generates a net social loss. Legal obligations are either perfectly enforced (Severe Law) or only weakly so (Mild Law), i.e., expected sanctions are then nondeterrent. We find that behavior can be rationalized in terms of individuals trading-off private benefits, net of legal liability, against the net uncompensated losses caused to others. The weight associated with non-incentivized efficiency concerns is increased by the introduction of a liability rule, whether deterrent or not, and there is evidence that the effect is stronger under strict liability than under the negligence rule.

Keywords: social preferences; legal norms; social norms; liability rules; Behavioral law and economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp and nep-soc
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-02276435v1
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Published in International Review of Law and Economics, 2019, 60, ⟨10.1016/j.irle.2019.105858⟩

Downloads: (external link)
https://shs.hal.science/halshs-02276435v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Laws and norms: Experimental evidence with liability rules (2019)
Working Paper: Laws and Norms: Experimental Evidence with Liability Rules (2017)
Working Paper: Laws and Norms: Experimental Evidence with Liability Rules (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-02276435

DOI: 10.1016/j.irle.2019.105858

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().