An experiment with two-way offers into court: restoring the balance in pre-trial negotiation

Brian G Main () and Andrew Park
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Brian G Main: http://homepages.ed.ac.uk/mainbg/

Edinburgh School of Economics Discussion Paper Series from Edinburgh School of Economics, University of Edinburgh

Abstract: Defendant offers into court is common procedural device aimed at increasing the probability that pre-trial negotiations will lead to out of court settlement. Both in the UK following the Woolf Report (1996) and the Cullen Report (1995) and in the USA, the idea of extending the arrangement to plaintiff offers into court has been suggested. This paper presents an extension of the theoretical work by Chung (1996) on defendant offers into court under the American rule to cover the English rule and to extend to two-way offers into court. It also reports on experiments conducted to measure the effect of moving to two-way offers into court. The results suggest no impact on the propensity to settle and a statistically significant but empirically modest movement of settlement in favour of the plaintiff.

JEL-codes: C70 K40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24
Date: 1998-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-law
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