Legal Contests with Unilateral Delegation

Sung-Hoon Park () and Sanghack Lee

Asian Journal of Law and Economics, 2020, vol. 11, issue 1, 9

Abstract: We examine a legal contest in which only one litigant hires a delegate who expends his effort on behalf of the litigant. The delegation contract between the litigant and the delegate is either observable or unobservable. Comparing the equilibrium outcomes of the two legal contests, we derive the effect of the observability of the contract. We find that the favorite litigant and his delegate prefer the observable contract to the unobservable one. If the litigant is the underdog, however, there is conflict of interest between the litigant and his delegate as the litigant prefers the observable contract to the unobservable one while his delegate prefers the unobservable contract. We also show that the legal contest with the observable contract incurs more total expenditure than the legal contest with the unobservable contract if the litigant hiring the delegate is the favorite, and vice versa.

Keywords: contingent compensation; legal contest; observable contract; unilateral delegation; unobservable contract (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/ajle-2019-0031 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
Journal Article: Legal Contests with Unilateral Delegation (2020)
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:bpj:ajlecn:v:11:y:2020:i:1:p:9:n:1

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/ajle/html

DOI: 10.1515/ajle-2019-0031

Access Statistics for this article

Asian Journal of Law and Economics is currently edited by Noriyuki Yanagawa

More articles in Asian Journal of Law and Economics from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().