Libel Bullies, Defamation Victims and Litigation Incentives

David J. Acheson and Ansgar Wohlschlegel
Additional contact information
David J. Acheson: University of Kent

No 2018-01, Working Papers in Economics & Finance from University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth Business School, Economics and Finance Subject Group

Abstract: We analyse the relationship between a public figure's incentives to sue for defamation, and her incentives to do wrong in the first place and the media's incentives to expose this wrongdoing. If evidence on wrongdoing is noisy, a journalist's decision of whether to publish a story based on this evidence is largely driven by his anticipation of the public figure's litigation decision, rather than by the question of whether the evidence is actually correct. In a repeated setting, this induces a public figure to bring negative-value defamation suits in order to appear litigious to journalists in the future. As a consequence, the public figure's incentives to sue for defamation will not only depend on her own direct costs and benefits of doing so, but also on journalists' costs and benefits from litigation and publications. This result makes the case for also taking these latter factors into account in the debate on potential legal reform aiming at litigation incentives.

Keywords: Defamation Law; Litigation Costs; Signalling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: K19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34
Date: 2018-03-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://repec.port.ac.uk/EconFinance/PBSEconFin_2018_01.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Libel Bullies, Defamation Victims, and Litigation Incentives (2021)
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:pbs:ecofin:2018-01

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers in Economics & Finance from University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth Business School, Economics and Finance Subject Group Portsmouth Business School Richmond Building Portland Street Portsmouth PO1 3DE United Kingdom. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Shuonan Zhang ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).