Delay and Settlement in Litigation

Paul Fenn and Neil Rickman

Economic Journal, 1999, vol. 109, issue 457, pages 476-91

Abstract: Delay in litigation is a policy concern in many jurisdictions. Little evidence is available on the causes of such delay, however. The authors present a version of K. Spier's (1992) bargaining model of litigation and derive directly a functional form for the conditional probability of case settlement. They then estimate this and test predictions about the effects of legal costs and uncertainty over damages and liability on the conditional probability of settlement using data from negligence claims against several NHS Trusts. The authors' results provide a direct test of the model and shed light on the causes of settlement delay in England.

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