Playing It Safe with Low Conditional Fees versus Being Insured by High Contingent Fees

Winand Emons ()

Diskussionsschriften from Universitaet Bern, Departement Volkswirtschaft

Abstract: Under contingent fees the attorney gets a share of the judgment; under conditional fees he gets an upscale premium if the case is won which is, however, unrelated to the adjudicated amount. We compare conditional and contingent fees in a framework where lawyers choose between a safe and a risky litigation strategy. Under conditional fees lawyers prefer the safe strategy, under contingent fess the risky one. Risk-averse plaintiffs prefer conditional fees over contingent fees when lawyering costs are low and vice versa for high lawyering costs

Keywords: contingent fees; conditional fees; risk aversion; insurance; incentives (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D82 K1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law
Date: 2004-12
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.vwl.unibe.ch/papers/dp/dp0419.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Playing it Safe with Low Conditional Fees versus Being Insured by High Contingent Fees (2005)
Journal Article: Playing It Safe with Low Conditional Fees versus Being Insured by High Contingent Fees (2006)
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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ube:dpvwib:dp0419

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Diskussionsschriften from Universitaet Bern, Departement Volkswirtschaft
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Silvia Glusstein-Gerber ().