EFFICIENCY OF EQUILIBRIA UNDER COMPARATIVE CAUSATION

Francesco Parisi and Ram Singh ()

No 179, Working papers from Centre for Development Economics, Delhi School of Economics

Abstract: For past three decades or so, the negligence liability has been a major preoccupation of the economic analysis of liability rules. However, recently it has invited severe criticisms on several counts. Several leading legal scholars have championed a comparative causation based allocation of liability. According to these scholars, comparative causation based liability is more equitable than negligence liability. Moreover, some studies show that courts and juries are inclined toward comparative apportioning of liability. Nonetheless, implications of comparative causation based liability especially its eciency properties have remained under-explored. In this paper, we have studied the implications of comparative causation. We have shown that a mix of negligence and comparative causation liabilities can induce vigilant and equitable equitable equilibria, in which parties choose to be vigilant and accident loss is shared between them. However, comparative causation achieves equity at the cost of economic effciency.

Pages: 18 pages
Date: 2009-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ino and nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cdedse.org/pdf/work179.pdf
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
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:cde:cdewps:179

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.cdedse.org/

The price is free.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working papers from Centre for Development Economics, Delhi School of Economics Delhi 110 007. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sanjeev Sharma ().